This will always be a strange time of year for me. On the last day of August, three years ago, my father died. I had, for many months, been steeling myself for the possibility—years, really, if you consider what it means when your father is a half century older than you—but there is no serious way to prepare for death. There is no guidance that is worthwhile, no advice, no means to ready yourself for what it is for a person to never speak to you again. By that point, in the haze of August, the air and the days thick, my father could not speak to me anymore. A tracheostomy tube had been inserted into his neck to save his life; it was a decision my mother and I made several months prior, entirely defensible, and it’s one I wonder about now. He was about to die and the tracheostomy tube kept him with us. But it left him speechless, and this was a cruel fate for someone who loved to talk so much. He would go on, from May to June to July to August, like this, vacillating between hope—he was mentally sharp, and could jot notes to us in a wobbly script—and plain despair. I do not know what the answer is—or was. You try to prolong a life and you hope, somehow, it will work out.

The hardest part of death, the most obvious part, is that you can’t pick up the phone and talk to the person again. In my more disoriented moments, I’ve hoped for a loophole, a way to commune for a minute or an hour, one simple check-in, a bargain with God. I suppose that’s what séances are for, but I don’t believe in them, if I do believe in God. For a few months after my father died, I had vivid dreams about him, of a nature and charge that I have not known since. If I had visitation dreams, these were them. I’m convinced they ended in 2023, though I’ve dreamed about my father since. Those later dreams, I think, are a projection of my subconscious. In one, I told him about how I read a book where Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills were mentioned, and I can’t recall what he said in reply. In all of these dreams, there is the sense that my father is back from a long trip.

What do the dead make of us? How they outnumber the living. My father was a rationalist, an atheist, so it is difficult for me to imagine meeting him in an afterlife, though I’d prefer a world where believers and non-believers can mingle anyway. In the interim, I have my memories. He was a loving, complicated man, possessed of many secrets. If I had resentments, they’ve melted away. He was a great friend to me, which is a curious thing to say about a father who was much older than you, but it was true. We talked about baseball, politics, and history just about every day, two motormouths, and I enjoyed rising in the world because it meant he could take pride in me. Why do we try to succeed? What do we yearn for? I never cared much for money. I wanted, certainly, to impress other people. Success, I suppose, mattered because it could make my parents happy. They did not demand it for me. They did not withhold love. What I wanted, rather, was to run home and show them what I had done. An eternal boy, waving around his arts and crafts. Both my parents read almost everything I wrote—my mother is very much with us, and still does—and it is strange, still, to know my father is not poring over an essay like this one. We spoke about the silliness of funerals, how the dead should be honored when they’re alive, and I wish I wrote about my father more when he could read the words. This now seems wasteful. Pay tribute, sure, but what of it? The man is somewhere else. He’s not coming back.

I had no intention of writing the first piece about my father’s death. I actively avoided it. On August 31st, 2023, I made no social media post, no public mention. It seemed gauche to me, dishonorable somehow. Death is a private affair. Friends and family knew, and that was enough. In September, his birthday approached, what would have been his eighty-fourth. I was at a Yankee game and thinking again of what I wanted to tell him—an anecdote about a ballplayer—and tears began trickling down my face. I knew, then, I would have to write. I waited for September 21st, his birthday. Another birthday approaches, one empty of the celebrant, and I don’t quite know what to do. I silently note it and move on. Three years. At what point is someone no longer recently departed? I think of all the events piling up without him, the ballgames and the gossip and the politics, and I sigh. There are moments when I am glad he is not around to witness what has befallen the world. At the same time, I know he would have reveled in Zohran Mamdani’s ascent, since he spent hours volunteering in my campaign office, Zohran at his side. I can hear him, were he still here, exclaim in wonder over Mayor Mamdani. I hear his voice often still, softly in my head.

I was thirty-three when my father died. This is young to lose a parent, though not that young. I was grateful he did not die when I was a teen or in my early twenties. One speaks of “handling” death and if there is a way to do this—to curl up, to clench your fists, to wait—I was better at it at thirty-three than twenty-three or thirteen. I was surer of who I was; I was not so afraid. I was lucky, too, to have my partner at the time with me, who saw me through the grief. She was a wonder. As a child, I would have crumbled. I would have reached adulthood broken. Plenty of people stronger than me lose parents when they’re very young; I was not someone who could have strode forward, into the world. I needed my father to watch me graduate high school, watch me graduate college, and read his batch of newspapers in his armchair as the television hissed and I talked loudly about some trivia of the day. I needed all of it. I needed to smell the scent of his pipe tobacco and hear WFAN playing through his car radio. I needed him to read my early fiction, and I needed to feel a shyness creep in me as he made sense of it. I needed him in his beach chair at my softball games, lounging next to my mother. I thank God it was three years ago he died and not thirteen. I thank God he did not die on September 11th as he very well could have, if he chose to take a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World.

My perception of time, as I’ve aged, has come closer to that found among the aliens of Slaughterhouse-Five, who perceive existence in four dimensions and can see, simultaneously, all points of the space-time continuum. This does not mean I am fatalistic like the Tralfamadorians, muttering “so it goes” each time a terrible event takes place. Rather, I’ve started to weigh events on the spectrum more evenly, assigning them the same amount of significance. If my father had a terrible end to his life, it was no more relevant than a wonderful moment he had with me. Now that he’s dead, his life’s arc finished, his last year, 2023, can be considered as relevant as 1998 or 2004 or 2011. The memories, the images, they are all contained within me, and I can brush against them whenever I’d like. The latest version of him, dying in a seaside rehabilitation facility, matters no more than when he was a baby or twelve or fifty-eight. This bare fact is comforting. I regret the times I rushed him off the phone, rushed through the apartment, rushed headlong through life as if there would always be more of him for me. I do think, though, I gave it my all as a son in the way he gave it his all as a father. He was not a perfect father—who is?—and I was not a perfect son. There’s a quote from the famed boxer Joe Louis, one my father was fond of, that goes: “I did the best I could with what I had.” My father did. And he taught me, as I raced onward, to do the same. Through trials, through setbacks, through the harshest moments, through failure—you do your absolute best. You keep trying.

A memory summoned: I am five, walking the sidewalks of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with my father. I want to see inside a fire hydrant. I am a cherubic, curly-headed little boy, and it matters a great deal to know what waits inside of them. My father, fifty-five, stoops down and begins unscrewing one of the caps. It comes loose. I can peer into the darkness and find what I am looking for, even if I do not know what it is. When I wanted to watch a streetlight change—to see red on one side, green on the other—he stood with me, and walked with me across the street so I could try to understand a traffic signal. It all must have amused him. To me, it was vital, a duty, and I never forgot. That was one manifestation of love: his indulgence of me. I hope I loved him as much, gave him as much, made him feel like he had done well as a father. I only wish we were more direct with each other. We said “I love you” but we were not the men who shared feelings with each other, who became vulnerable, who allowed either of us to see the other cry. Once I was an adult, I would never cry in front of my father. My emotions were belted up against me. With him, I’d rather talk about the Mets or the midterms or another drama that had nothing to do with how I felt that day.

I did not expect him to die. He was ill. I did not believe, really, he could die. I spoke for the final time to him about the Mets and a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. event I was going to cover in Brooklyn. He was supposed to live longer, to get the trach out, to head to another facility or maybe, someday, come home. I did not like ever saying goodbye to him. The conversations would unspool, an endless thread, one topic to the next. I do not, as a rule, like saying goodbye to anyone. I didn’t believe in goodbyes, and I still don’t.

The call came from my mother in the early morning, after the facility had called her. He had died overnight, alone, as he probably preferred; he did not like to be seen the way he was, and as I’ve aged, I’ve understood this more fully. He was a prideful man. This was not him, decrepit, shriveling, bound to a bed. He was a vibrant, vigorous, and handsome man, a dynamo despite his type one diabetes. Not him. We are not merely the latest versions of ourselves. I suppose I wish I could have made a speech, to remind him that I loved him. Did I waste our last moments? I don’t know—our final time together was true to us, who we were, me gesturing to a New Yorker article and saying something inane about the Mets-Rangers series. I’ve been someone, over the years, too obsessed with the epaulets of a professional life. Books, publications, awards, glittering gold stars that marked me in the firmament. My father urged me towards these things. But, to his credit, he taught me the importance of friends and family, people who will be there for you, who will ensure you do not lead an empty life. I’ve rarely felt alone. I don’t think he did, either. He was a great friend to many people. I’ve tried to be, and failed at it plenty, I’m sure. I’ve been a rougher version of myself at times, too curt, too nasty, too arrogant, too preening. My father was not this way.

What would I talk about with him today? If he strode through my front door? Books, politics, society. Gossip. We’d catch up. I’d tell him about Ohtani to the Dodgers, the chaos in Iran, and the unprecedented mayor of New York. I’d hope, too, that talk would die down. We’d move on. I’d tell him how much he’s missed, how much he mattered, how voids do not get filled, only worked around. We’d say goodbye and promise to catch up again. I might let him see me cry.

What to do about artificial intelligence? I’ve established I am bear over a bull when it comes to the technology. I am not convinced the financial model will ever work and I am not lured, so far, by its revolutionary potential. I also worry about what it will do to human beings. Outsource enough critical thinking to a machine and critical thinking itself melts away. I’ve eschewed AI usage—the most I’ve ever done is use it for interview transcripts which I doublecheck against the audio anyway—and I plan to keep it that way. Others, of course, feel very differently. And I’m not someone who believes one can wish AI away. I certainly want to reckon with its implications, whatever they might be.

Broadly, I see three scenarios. The first is a triumph of humanity and the second is the relative defeat of humanity. The third is a blend of the two. By defeat, I do not mean extinction. Until genuine climate catastrophe, a nuclear war, or a new ice age, there will be people on planet Earth. There will be functioning societies. No Matrix-style dystopia awaits. The machines won’t enslave us. To some extent, we’ll always have autonomy.

Each scenario is worth pondering. Since I’m an optimist, I’ll begin with the tale of triumph. It’s one I hope for. I do not know if it will come to pass. What I do think is that there’s a possibility, given the political dynamics. AI evangelists should be worried about the American electorate. Technocracy hasn’t yet won out. Voters and their opinions, often inconvenient for wealthy elites, still do matter. How long they’ll matter, of course, is anyone’s guess. I tend to have a cockeyed belief in the American republic, but what do I know? We’ll find out soon enough if I’m right.

Let’s get into the three scenarios. There’s plenty of promise—and peril—ahead.

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The news of Joe Biden’s ill health is a reminder of the absurd premise of his 2024 campaign—that he could be president today and serve through 2028. Biden’s disastrous decision to attempt a second term is legacy-defining. He is forever the president sandwiched between Donald Trump. When he dies, he will not be treated to the gauzy, warm-hearted retrospectives of a Jimmy Carter or even George H.W. Bush, two recent one-term presidents. Some of this will have to do with the fact that Biden, at eighty-three, is probably not going to enjoy a very long post-presidency. Both Carter and Bush got decades to rehabilitate their legacies. In different ways, both men were real failures as president, but the struggles of the twentieth century were, naturally, not as well-remembered in the twenty-first. Over time, partisan rancor fades, as do the feelings attached to particular policies. A good leftist knows Carter was, arguably, our first neoliberal president, helping to break the New Deal consensus and empower corporate America at the expense of the working-class. He had decades, though, to live as a humanitarian after he left the White House. His time out of office was of great significance.

With Biden, we all have fresh memories of 2021-2024. There was the inflation of the pandemic years, the chaos at the border, and the worst televised debate performance in American history. There was an old man, plainly senile, attempting to seek another term while freezing out a generation of younger and more capable Democrats. There was that bizarre brat summer, Biden dropping out and his vice president dropping in, and Trump’s return to power. Beyond the U.S., there were at least two major wars—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s immiseration of Gaza following the Oct. 7 attacks—that Biden failed to unwind, despite his half century of foreign policy experience.

That’s one capsule description of the Biden era. None of it is untrue.

Allow me, though, to offer a more generous assessment of the policy legacy—the domestic achievements in particular. Biden will eventually be remembered as the first Democratic president to break decisively from the Carter and Reagan neoliberalism—the once prevailing view, from the 1970s to the 2010s, that markets were wiser than governments, and that there should be less regulation, not more. Biden himself, as a young senator, had been a champion of this neoliberalism, which believed wholeheartedly in free trade, a shrunken welfare state and a diminished reliance on labor unions.

If Trump is the president who furiously opposed the core tenets of neoliberalism—his tariff regime and intimidation of the Fed alone are anathema to free-traders and market fundamentalists—it was Biden who brought, through his own administration, a far more withering view of corporate power. Trump talked up America First, but it was Biden who attempted, through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, to make that worldview a tangible reality. Trump grew popular in the Rust Belt railing against the North American Free Trade Agreement and promising a revival of domestic manufacturing. Yet in both Trump terms, there’s been no serious swerve toward a durable American industrial project. He’s cared far more about tax cuts and handouts to the wealthy. The Biden administration understood that tariffs alone weren’t enough: a federal government must invest billions in, for example, semiconductor chip factories to both employ Americans and reduce our reliance on Taiwan. So far, Trump, unlike his attacks on the green energy sector, has not been able to dismantle the semiconductor investments. The same is mostly true for the bipartisan infrastructure bill now pumping billions into neglected roadways, bridges and tunnels.

The shadow of his old boss, Barack Obama, naturally hung over Biden’s presidency. It had been Obama, in the waning days of his second term, who made it clear he preferred Hillary Clinton, not his vice president, to be his successor. But even as the two men remained personally close, President Biden, through his powerful chief of staff Ron Klain, sought to take a very different tack when it came to how the federal government approached corporate consolidations. Obama’s Federal Trade Commission approved numerous mergers between corporate behemoths and his top staffers would depart for high-level work at Uber, Amazon and Airbnb. Big Tech thrived under Obama, and monopolies proliferated. His administration didn’t bat an eye when Facebook scooped up Instagram and WhatsApp, and Google became the purveyor of the world’s most dominant search engine. While Biden, as a Delaware senator, was known as a corporate-friendly Democrat, he unleashed, as president, the most ambitious antitrust regime of the modern era. His Federal Trade Commission, led by Lina Khan, and his Justice Department’s antitrust division, overseen by Jonathan Kanter, sued Google, Amazon and Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment.

Against Google, the Biden administration was remarkably successful, winning a judgment that the tech behemoth held a monopoly in search and ads. This not the kind of work Trump can easily undo, even if he fully repudiates antitrust. Dotdash, the major publisher, sued Google for antitrust violations over its ad tech business, becoming the third major publisher to do so and the first since the Justice Department decision. With state attorneys general and private plaintiffs still bringing antitrust lawsuits, a precedent has been set, one that Trump, for all his braggadocio, has accepted. If corporate consolidation will inevitably continue, antitrust itself is back in vogue, with both political parties growing skeptical of Big Tech. Biden deserves full credit for this.

Where the Biden administration failed, relative to Obama’s eight years, was its inability to create a single memorable federal program that Americans, no matter their political persuasion, could embrace. The Affordable Care Act may be deeply flawed—the marketplace of private insurers never brought down health care costs as much as promised, especially since a public option was never introduced—but it was the first major expansion of health care in decades. Most states expanded their Medicaid rolls, and insurers could no longer discriminate against customers who had preexisting medical conditions. Once an electoral millstone around the neck of the Democratic Party, Obamacare survived furious attempts by Trump and the Republican congressional leadership to repeal it altogether. Democrats have won many elections defending its provisions. Like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—all derided, at one time, as socialist intrusions on a capitalist economy—Obamacare endured.

Biden spent trillions of dollars and made many significant long-term investments, but it was always difficult to explain to American voters that the money spent today would pay dividends ten or twenty years from now. Green industrial policy didn’t exactly stir the blood. Biden and congressional Democrats also made the crucial mistake of allowing a generous pandemic era childcare tax credit expire at the end of 2021. The tax credit had been expanded from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for children below the age of 6 and to $3,000 for children under age eighteen. Child poverty was measurably decreasing. It was the kind of triumph that could have been, had it been maintained, a centerpiece of Biden’s policy legacy. Now Biden, forever mashed between Trump terms, may be swallowed into the maw of history. It will take many years to properly understand where he sits in the slipstream of American time; legacies are never so fixed. Yet Biden may be remembered for being more than the nation’s oldest president, or the man who turned in one of the very worst debate performances in American history. He drove a stake through the heart of the neoliberal era.

On a recent episode of Daniel Oppenheimer’s excellent Eminent Americans podcast, an assistant computer scientist at Stony Brook University, Tuhin Chakrabarty, discussed his research on creativity and AI. Chakrabarty’s AI model can produce writing that is very close to a human author’s, and it can be difficult to tell what is what. This is, for many writers, a source of genuine anxiety. “To be clear, Tuhin isn’t claiming that AI, except under the very specific, rather contrived circumstances of his experiments, can already match the best human writers,” Oppenheimer writes. “And he doesn’t know if they ever will be able to match or surpass us. I don’t know how much consolation that affords, though; what he has done is threatening enough.”

I would consider myself an AI skeptic. I do not think the business model of the industry makes a great deal of sense and it worries me that so much of the American economy is now tethered to what might be a financial bubble. The data centers required to power the supposed AI revolution are deeply disruptive to local communities, tax the energy supply, and can pollute waterways. I worry about the effects of AI on children, the loss of critical thinking, and the slop that’s now proliferating online. I am not a doomer about AI in the sense that I am doubtful there’s any great civilizational crisis that will arise from its growth. The graver threats remain climate change, nuclear war, and the conventional warfare we see in the Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine.

But I will concede the AI evangelists at least one point. The technology will improve, and there will come a point where an AI like Claude can write a passable novel—maybe, even, a very good one. Fed enough data, a machine will always get better at mimicry. Perhaps, over the years, it will grow more creative, too. If AI will never fully supplant the journalist, a human talking to other humans, or the columnist, who is paid to offer commentary that fundamentally derives from their own human perspective, creative endeavors can be properly replicated. Poems, novels, paintings, film—the machines, or AI, can do them. They might, one day, graduate from the slop phase. This has, understandably, caused a good deal of anxiousness among artists. There are writers terrified of the day when AI can write as well as them—for some mediocrities, Claude and ChatGPT are already there—and make them redundant. I do believe AI will improve to the point where it can produce, on its own, literature, or something resembling literature. The models will learn, more data will be absorbed, and the sentences will look nice, and the stories will make sense.

Am I, as a writer who shuns AI, feeling anxious about this? The answer, as I’ll explain, is unequivocal.

No.

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Any discussion of woke is bound to frustrate because the two ideological camps, right and left, can barely agree on what it is, how long it’s existed, or how dominant it remains. Like pornography, most seem to know woke when they see it. After that, there’s a good deal of dissembling, and an honest account of the last decade is rarely possible. But it’s a topic worth dissecting, even now. Is woke dead? Yes, mostly. More importantly, what is it? Was it? Loosely, I’ve defined it as social justice politics: the primacy of identity over class. Standpoint ideology is triumphant. I am X, therefore I am right. Woke is, understandably, conceived of as a phenomenon of the left. A liberal who wants to rectify the problem of racism will propose “woke” solutions—adjust language or procedure to achieve a desired outcome. Anti-woke is the reaction to this, the rejection of such language or procedure. The struggle dates back decades, to fights over “political correctness” in the 1980s and 1990s. For our purposes here, that era will be left alone.

Instead, we will focus on Woke 1.0 and what the cultural critic Mo Diggs has called Red Woke, or right-wing woke—the backlash to 1.0, the new identity politics conservative and MAGA forces have embraced. Right now, we live in something like a culture cold war, where neither side, absent the machinery of the government that conservatives now control, can dominate the other. Woke cancellation attempts, the sort that reached their apogee in the late 2010s and 2020, are no more. Woke 1.0 was withering by the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2023 and 2024 and died, definitively, when he won. He did not need to win for Woke 1.0 to die—the excesses of the George Floyd/pandemic summer and the collapse of old Twitter, along with the natural passage of time, had weakened woke—but it became obvious, come 2025, the last vestiges of woke would not survive the assault from the federal government, whether it was the swift dismantling of DEI, the bullying of college administrations, or mass layoffs triggered by DOGE. Rather than foster a culture of free speech and free expression, conservatives simply embraced Red Woke, taking all the pathologies of the regime they hated and applying it to their own causes. They became the language cops, with even larger truncheons. Red Woke’s apotheosis is the defense of Israel. Like the old woke power players, conservatives and Zionist centrists like Bari Weiss decry the language of protest chants, stifle speech on college campuses, and treat the pro-Israel Jew like a precious, exalted minority who cannot be exposed to any adverse phraseology or criticism. Despite their efforts, the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel movement is larger than ever. If a right-wing counterculture existed in the Biden years, embodied by the MAGA-curious Dimes Square subversives, the counterculture has returned to the left, since Trump is in power and hated by large swaths of the country. Trump’s relentless defense of Israel has made pro-Palestine politics decidedly cool among the young, the way, in 1969 or so, you were on the youth vanguard if you were against the Vietnam War. The Trump administration can continue to strangle speech on college campuses, but this is a war they will not win, in the same way the Larry Ellison TikTok takeover can’t just convince a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds to start loving Israel. 1984 was a fine novel but it didn’t really understand the future. Our era may have an Orwellian flavor, but the discourse is too free and messy for any one government to dictate reality, as hard as it might try.

What does this all mean? What’s in store for the culture in 2027 and beyond? Are we about to, finally, get off the woke/anti-woke carousel?

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We live in a strange political era. It has been that way for some time, since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator more than a decade ago, and it will be up to future historians to classify and contextualize this stretch of time. Are we witnessing the collapse of liberal democracy? The growth of a new kind of democracy? The resurgence of the hard left or the long march of the far right? In the present day, none of these questions are truly answerable, though we can try to conceive of where we are headed. I am fairly certain, for example, a Democrat will be president in 2029, but I can’t tell you who that will be. I also can’t rule out any other scenario: a Republican victory in 2028 (J.D. Vance or someone else) or Trump’s illegal attempt at a third term. All of it can come to pass. What I can do, at least, is gaze backward and consider how we got to where we are. Though Trump is obviously still president, he increasingly embodies a time that has already come and gone. MAGA cannot be said, anymore, to be on the ascent, and Trump himself is deeply unpopular. He has lost his grip on the culture. More prosaically, his party will lose the House and could, with enough luck for the Democrats, fumble away the Senate too. Trump is eighty now, sinking deeper into that second and (very likely) last term. If he is going to install his fascist dictatorship, he is simply running out of time.

That is why so much focus has been on the Democrats and why, despite all their failures, the energy resides with them. The 2028 Democratic presidential primary will be the widest open since at least 1992. There is no actual frontrunner. There are no party elites who can steer the primary in one direction or another. Barack Obama played a strong hand in the 2016 and 2020 primaries, and he helped to persuade Joe Biden to finally step aside in 2024. In 2028, he will be a relic, along with the Clintons, who loomed for so long over the party. Plenty of debate will erupt over the Democratic National Committee’s calendar for the primary, but the truth is it won’t matter all that much. This will be a long, protracted primary. There are no powers at the DNC who can do anything, really, to favor one candidate over another. We’ve come a long way from Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s 2016 DNC and the fight over superdelegates. We’ve come a longer way from a time when party leaders were trusted by the voters.

This fall, the Democrats are going to win many races. This doesn’t mean, however, voters are overly fond of the Democratic Party. We have yet to escape the era of negative polarization. Voters might like individuals, but they recoil from party brands. The Republican and Democratic parties are both widely disliked. This doesn’t mean they’ll crumble; we don’t exist in a parliamentary system. It’s two parties, red vs. blue, first past the post. This means voter frustration—and volatility—comes in the primaries. Republicans learned this in the 2010s when the Tea Party and then Trump himself toppled the establishment and wrenched the GOP in a new, radical direction. Trump remade the party in his own image. The Democratic establishment was able to stop Bernie Sanders twice and this, into the 2020s, gave them a false sense of security. A Trump-style insurgency wouldn’t overtake their party. Then came Zohran Mamdani and the democratic socialist uprising of 2026.

As sympathetic as I might be to the DSA upsurge—I am an old friend of Mamdani and even once belonged to DSA—I am not going to tell you that many millions of Americans suddenly decided they loved socialism. They’ve certainly grown discontented under capitalism and no longer fear the “S” label now that it’s been more than thirty years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The economic policies DSA supports are all welcomed by wide swaths of voters. It’s not as if the American healthcare system, as it currently stands, is popular. And DSA’s strong political organizing will ensure they stay competitive for a long time. One major part of DSA’s success, beyond the socialist branding, is how they’ve been able to tap into the anti-establishment mood coursing through American politics. DSA’s critique of the Democratic Party, resented by so many high-ranking politicians and liberal pundits (an assemblage that includes the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Matt Yglesias), is resonating with a growing share of the electorate. They like that the DSA Democrats aren’t all that fond of the Democrats. When someone like Darializa Avila Chevalier has an old deleted tweet that says “fuck Kamala Harris,” she doesn’t pay a political price. When Mamdani himself is found to have never proudly endorsed Harris in 2024—he was a strong supporter of the Uncommitted movement—the voters shrug, even as the Democratic apparatchiks fume.

Why? Why are these elites so resented? Why can’t they discipline these democratic socialists? One answer lies in 2016, the single most important year for American elections in the twenty-first century. The other, in 2024. In these two years the crises of the elites emerged, crises they have never lived down. The result of their failures has been a democratic socialist and progressive uprising, a collapse of an old order, a reimagining of who can hold power. It’s a reality that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris never welcomed and tried hard to head off. But it was their decision-making that helped make it so. Whether they know it or not, they’ve reaped what they sowed.

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DSA, once more, is in the news. Walk around New York City today and you’ll find, on the front page of the New York Post, a giddy story about a prominent Black politician accusing the democratic socialists of “white supremacy.” The spat originated on Twitter/X, and the Post was glad to amplify. There is little the right-wing tabloid enjoys more than Democratic infighting. The politician, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, was responding to criticism another Black politician, Assemblywoman Phara Souffrant Forrest, had leveled at a recent New York Times story about Black and Latino anxiety over gains DSA have made in New York City. After the assemblywoman had criticized the Times reporter, Jeff Mays, for failing to note she had represented a largely Black and working-class area for the last six years, a TV host and commentator sometimes critical of DSA, Errol Louis, responded, claiming the Times had acknowledged her point. It was then, quote-tweeting Louis, that Richards posted “White supremacy comes in all forms.”

The squabble highlighted what has become the primary attack line against Mayor Zohran Mamdani and DSA as they continue to win seats in New York City and across America: they are interlopers, mostly white and wealthy, and they’ve invaded working-class communities with their alien politics, installing leaders who don’t listen to longtime residents. This was the subtext, certainly, of the Times story, and now that DSA is on a hot streak, its criticism coming from both Democrats and Republicans. Establishment Democrats, in New York, view themselves as the embodiment of the “true” city, the tribunes of the working-class standing up to a whiter, wealthier invasion. Long-serving Black Democrats, in particular, have been very hostile to DSA. Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklynite in line to be the next speaker of the House, has clashed repeatedly with DSA candidates, and his colleague in Queens, Gregory Meeks—the boss of the Queens Democratic Party—has warred with the democratic socialists as well. These anti-DSA Black Democrats are usually pro-Israel, supportive of privately-run and publicly funded charter schools, and happy to accept donations from real estate developers and corporate interests. Some, like Jeffries, were once themselves products of insurgencies, but they view themselves as defenders of an old guard that is fast losing ground.

The real question, though, is whether these criticisms of DSA have merit. Is DSA racist? Do members embody white supremacy? Are they not attuned enough to race?

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Every year, there is more handwringing about New York’s Specialized High School Admissions Test. The SHSAT, as it’s known, is the sole means for determining whether a New York City eighth grader can enter one of nine specialized public high schools. Three of them are very well-known to New Yorkers: Stuyvesant, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. All of them boast a dazzling roster of alumni, including Nobel Prize winners. Plenty of future politicians have passed through their halls, including Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor. When I was an adolescent, the SHSAT schools had no real political valence. You either took the test or you didn’t. I never did because my bar mitzvah fell on the test day and my parents were sending me to the local private school anyway. I had many friends and acquaintances who went to SHSAT schools—Brooklyn Tech in particular—and plenty who attended other public schools. No one much cared, either way.

In the 2010s, that began to shift. It was becoming obvious SHSAT schools were not demographically representative of the city. The number of Black and Latino students admitted into Stuyvesant, Tech, and the others continued to shrink. Bill de Blasio, the progressive Democratic mayor, fretted over this status quo, and announced his intentions to abolish the test and introduce new criteria. This sparked intense backlash among Asian American parents, who prized the schools, and they began to leave the Democratic Party. De Blasio never did scrap the SHSAT or add new criteria, like GPA or extracurriculars, to decide who entered the specialized schools. His successor, Eric Adams, left the SHSAT alone, and despite his own opposition to the test, Mamdani has also not taken any action. His progressive allies, though, are restless. After it was announced just three Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School’s incoming class of 777, a city councilman close to Mamdani, Lincoln Restler, declared that “we urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process.” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, who is Black, said there “needs to be a real, independent investigation into the admissions process for NYC specialized high schools.”

Every headline about the new SHSAT numbers focused on the dearth of Black and Latino students (just 21 heading to Stuyvesant) admitted, and the fact that, in a city where they make up about half of all residents, this is wholly unrepresentative. But does that make it racist? What progressive critics always miss about the SHSAT is that it is hardly creating a swell of white students in the specialized high schools. At best, they’ll match the demographics of the city in a given year, but even that number is deceptive. Anyone who lives in New York knows the “white” Census category is incredibly broad. These are not fifth or sixth generation WASPs, or the children of wealthy lawyers. They’re not kids sprung from a John Hughes film. A white student in a SHSAT school might be the child of Ukrainian immigrants or even Middle Eastern.

The actual story of what’s happening at the SHSAT schools—the only story, really—is that Asian Americans continue to dominate the admissions test. Any change to the test would adversely impact them. All debate must start there or it’s deeply dishonest.

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If I had to dispense any advice to a young writer or someone who aspires to an intellectual life, I would tell them they have to know their enemy. It is striking, in the current age, how few people do. The left and right are equally guilty, equally ignorant. The right-wing argues against an idea of the left, failing to comprehend the nuances and the gradations, how Bernie Sanders and Hakeem Jeffries might be different people. The left often lumps all conservatives, all Republicans, into a single blob, failing even to understand differences among various Trump supporters. Standpoint epistemology was all the rage in the 2010s—I am X, therefore my views are valid and correct—and this bled into an inability, among practically all factions, to comprehend why someone who thought entirely different from them approaching an issue in a certain manner. This is where, I believe, my fiction career has come in handy. A good novelist is constantly inhabiting the consciousnesses of characters unlike their own. This is imagination. And it’s not all that different in the realm of nonfiction and policy debate—if you’re doing your job well, you’re imagining how another person might perceive an issue since you are, ultimately, trapped in your own body. Imagination works hand-in-hand with analysis. One of the worst things any public thinker can do is simplify the opposition, caricature it. This is intellectual laziness and it’s common enough, especially in the upper echelons of partisan media. Enemies get identified, and they are frozen in amber.

These days, there are few schisms more bitter than those between leftists and centrist, establishment-aligned Democrats. This goes beyond the primaries themselves, which the democratic socialists (and non-socialist progressives) have been winning with greater and greater frequency. It extends into the pundit class and prestige media, which tends to be far more populated with centrist Democrats than proud socialists. To this day, it’s very hard to find an open socialist who is also a working columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, or a talking head at CNN. The journalists themselves, in a bid for objectivity or neutrality, default to the political center. Rather than an explicitly liberal or left bias, American media has a bias to the status quo. A Times columnist or editor can be equally skeptical of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Political “extremes” are suspect. The middle is the only sensible place to be. As voters have shown themselves to be far more open to both democratic socialism and MAGA-style politics than any political mandarin would have predicted—both, certainly, have endured a long time—the media races to catch up, creating some awkward dynamics. Trumpism, at last, is something the establishment media does understand, having reckoned with the man’s two presidential victories, but democratic socialism continues to befuddle. Even non-socialist progressives can be tough to digest. Dana Bash’s recent interview with Brad Lander, the progressive who just unseated Dan Goldman in a contentious New York House race, illustrated this reality. Bash, a CNN veteran, seemed to struggle mightily over the concept that Lander, who is Jewish, might describe himself as a “liberal Zionist” while condemning the Jewish State for its brutal occupation of the West Bank and the immiseration of the Palestinians in Gaza. Bash didn’t sound, in that moment, all that different than an AIPAC press secretary.

The idea that Israel’s war in Gaza could produce a generational cleavage on the level of the Vietnam War—something I’ve perceived to be evident for several years now—is still difficult to understand for many centrists, particularly that shrinking pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party. There are few columnists and pundits who embody this dynamic more than Jonathan Chait, the Atlantic writer who also spent many years at New York Magazine. Chait is a particular kind of liberal that was once dominant in the Democratic Party: pro-Israel, pro-charter school, a proud internationalist, and a general skeptic of economic populism. Throughout his career, he’s been both prescient and foolhardy. He was one of the early pundits to diagnose the woke turn in the 2010s, and once argued, in 2016, that liberals should root for Donald Trump to be the Republican nominee because he “would almost certainly lose” and could, if he won, morph into an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like moderate. For a columnist like Chait, the MAGA right and the socialist left are both to be scorned. In a new Atlantic piece, he argues the Democratic Socialists of America, who have helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor and are set to swell their ranks in Congress, represent an “encroachment of illiberalism.” DSA, for Chait, is a leftist MAGA that wants to swallow the Democratic Party whole or destroy it entirely; it is, in his view, in an “asymmetrical conflict.” “One side is concerned with taking control of the Democratic Party,” he writes, “while the other just wants everybody within it to get along.” DSA is villainous because there are members of the organization who are outright communists and supporters, in various forms, of authoritarian regimes in China, Cuba, and Venezuela. He points, in particular, to DSA’s Red Star caucus, which is openly communist. DSA is not for liberal democracy, he believes, since their members want capitalism overturned and “the proletarian classes” seizing “political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves ‘democratic.’” One of Chait’s main contentions, which is echoed by the disillusioned elderly members of DSA who have either criticized the post-2016 itineration of the group or loudly departed it altogether, is that it is now a rebuke of Michael Harrington’s founding vision. Harrington’s DSA, founded in the early 1980s, was anti-communist and also pro-Israel. “Communist organizers, as Harrington feared, began to reshape the DSA as an ally of any anti-Western force, even the most murderous and oppressive,” Chait writes, pointing to a statement released by DSA after Russia invaded Ukraine that put blame on “expansion of NATO and the aggressive approach of Western nations.”

There aren’t any bare facts in Chait’s Atlantic piece that are wrong. There are proud communists in DSA, there are DSA members who hold very unpopular views, and there are plenty who advocate for the so-called “dirty break” which would amount to DSA running Democratic candidates for a period before breaking away to form a third party when the Democrats are properly enervated. Many in DSA are, indeed, hostile to the Democratic Party. The trouble with Chait’s argument, with its well-marshaled facts, is that it misses the actual context of DSA in 2026. Like many opponents of the American socialist left, Chait fails to really understand them. This is not great sin—most commentators don’t—and Chait should get credit, even in bad faith, for doing some research. As a former DSA member—I joined in 2017 and remained in the group for about a year while running for State Senate and getting to know the future mayor of New York—and someone who has been writing about them, off and on, for more than half a decade, I do think deeply about their present and future. I am both sympathetic and a critic. There are DSA members who read me and like me and those who are suspicious of what I argue. I did not leave the organization for any ideological reasons; I simply departed when I was no longer running for office and returning to journalism. I do vote in Democratic primaries, but otherwise do not participate in politics. I don’t donate to candidates and I don’t knock on doors. Keeping a remove, I do believe, strengthens my analysis.

DSA, today, is booming once more. It is in at least its second phase of hyper-growth following the post-Sanders surge in 2016. After a lull during the Joe Biden/pandemic years, DSA has swollen to around 120,000 members nationally. DSA itself is over forty years-old, but it has only been relevant to electoral politics since 2017. This is the first piece of context that must be understood about them. Any older DSA member who is lamenting what the organization has become is, ultimately, asking for the return to a faculty lounge-style debate club that could not impact Democratic politics in a meaningful way. Yes, there were prominent DSA members in office like David Dinkins, the mayor of New York City, but DSA had a limited volunteer base to push its priorities. Harrington’s great insight was to create an organization that advocated for running in Democratic primaries instead of forming a third party, like the old Socialists of the Eugene Debs era. The Socialist Party of the early 20th century was potent—today’s DSA is still only nearing that pre-Red Scare peak—but doomed because the Republican and Democratic machines would team up to crush them. It hurt, too, that the United States has a first-past-the-post presidential system that disincentivizes third party growth. The Democratic Party can pivot left and absorb the Socialists. This is effectively what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who rendered the Socialists more and more irrelevant as his New Deal adopted their economic program. As radical as today’s DSA might seem to Chait and his allies, it is absolutely fulfilling Harrington’s political vision. DSA members of Congress, a DSA New York mayor, and DSA state legislators would all hearten Harrington, who died in 1989.

Any analysis of DSA is faulty if it doesn’t account for how decentralized and democratic the organization remains. This is both a strength and weakness and it is, in every sense, the central feature of DSA. A candidate doesn’t win a DSA endorsement until braving multiple rounds of voting among organization members. It is not top-down like a labor union or the Working Families Party. There is no DSA leader or boss who can determine the next congressional slate. Local chapters take up the cause of candidates. There are open debates. To win an endorsement in a New York City race, a candidate must clear several votes, from a hyper-local chapter to the citywide affiliate. Nationally, there are real schisms, though it’s an open question how much, in the long run, they will really matter. When centrists like Chait lash DSA or conservatives mock some bit of hyper-woke theater, it typically emanates from the national leadership, which is both weaker and more performatively radical. While NYC DSA adores Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the national DSA leadership has been at odds with her for years, attacking her for being insufficiently socialist and even yanking an endorsement. Right now, there’s another fight brewing between the national leadership committee and local chapters over how to conduct a presidential endorsement in 2028. Centrists who yearn for DSA’s destruction may salivate at this infighting, hoping the socialists eat themselves alive like the leftists of the twentieth century. They might—but it’s also important to understand that DSA’s decentralization means the national leadership could cut New York off entirely and it wouldn’t really matter. Big city chapters make up the bulk of membership, collect sizable dues, and make their own political decisions. If anything, the national “needs” New York much more than the reverse. It’s not all that clear to me, as an outsider, what the national committee can offer to the local chapters.

Critics of DSA have been caught flat-footed because it is such a multifarious organization. There are many caucuses, some of them very hard left, and it’s difficult to know how much it matters that DSA entertains tankies, Marxists, and conventional progressive Democrats. Rather than face any takeover from the far left, DSA is probably more at risk of moderating, over time, and becoming indistinguishable from any other left-leaning NGO. This is Bhaskar Sunkara’s argument, and one that resonates more with me. The socialist mayor of New York City is partnering with a right-leaning billionaire police commissioner. This is an alliance that has, so far, served Mamdani, if I am skeptical of its long-term success. If DSA grows more comfortable with the Jessica Tisches of the world, that will dilute the organization’s identity. It is funny that Chait, who is a proud Zionist and undoubtedly approves of Tisch’s tenure as police commissioner, does not mention her at all. Here is DSA governance in action, and it has nothing to do with “police-abolitionist, Hamas-apologizing candidates.” The triumph of Mamdani and AOC’s own quiet repudiation of the Defund movement shows the police abolitionists, within DSA, have lost. Yes, Darializa Avila Chevalier is heading to Congress as a prison abolitionist, but she won’t have any say over police departments or local jails. Were she in Mamdani’s shoes, she’d probably sound more like him. That’s politics. That’s “sewer” socialism.

The growth of DSA has been driven by a newfound interest in socialism and the Democratic voter’s growing hatred of the Democratic Party. Pundits like Chait still seem a bit bewildered by the latter reality. Even the normies aren’t terribly fond of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani did win the highest turnout mayoral election since 1969, after all; the days when socialist triumphs could be handwaved away as the product of tiny turnout primaries are long gone. The Democratic Party is much more of a shell organization than its reputation would suggest. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, said recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was an absurd statement—not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor any real “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. This is what American politics is, and will always be. If Chait and Harrison want to defeat DSA, they’ll have to run their own candidates, find the volunteers, raise the money, and do the grubby work of electioneering. They’ll have to convince voters DSA is wrong and they are right. Can they? Who really knows. At the minimum, they’ll have to better understand their enemy. Right now, they’re little different than the 2015 Republicans who were hoping and praying that Donald Trump was a fad, a summer fever dream that would be dead in the fall.

I haven’t talked all that much about the fact that, from last November to this April, I wrote a book about Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power and early days as mayor. I spent several hours interviewing Mamdani and spoke with more than two dozen people, including intimates in his orbit, allies, and foes. I spoke to Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. It was an effort I’m proud of, and one that took many intense days and nights. Now the edits are (almost) done and the book, The Revolutionary, is headed to bookstores this October. Random House is doing the honors, and there will be a few foreign editions. You can buy it anywhere. Please preorder it now. This is the first book from a major publisher about Mamdani and one of the first of its kind anywhere. You’ll want to own it, especially if you’re a person of the left.

Let me, though, make a case for The Revolutionary to my sizable readership that is either Mamdani-skeptical or thinks this will be another boring book that mindlessly cheerleads for its subject.

It would surprise you to know I am not enamored with most modern political books and do not, as a rule, read all that many of them. My favorite political book is probably Gary Wills’ Nixon Agonistes and I do not know how it finds a publisher today. It’s wonderful. Political books about progressive politicians aren’t especially exciting to me, either. I don’t like pablum and propaganda; despite holding obvious political views, I try to retain a degree of independence, and I do think that’s why some conservatives and heterodox readers have been able to tolerate me. Partisan politics can be tiring.

When it comes to The Revolutionary, I am hardly impartial. I count Zohran Mamdani as a friend because I’ve known him since the end of 2017, when he was an anonymous political organizer trying to get me elected to the State Senate. I’ve discussed politics with him numerous times. This book, certainly, is personal. But I did not set out to flatter him or anyone else. I wanted to report out, as much as I could, how Mamdani won this shock mayoral election and how he’s begun to govern. Though I did not speak to Andrew Cuomo—he was not made available for interview—I was able to talk to those who worked for his campaign. I also spoke to anti-Mamdani activists and business leaders. To understand MAGA’s view of Mamdani, I went straight to Bannon. (I called Trump’s cellphone but the president did not pick up. Sometimes, though, he does!) What I am trying to underscore is that I was interested in the fullness of the Mamdani story, understood from as many perspectives as possible. For those who hate him but still want to understand why a 34-year-old Muslim socialist ended up in charge of America’s largest city, The Revolutionary will be worth your time.

And if you like Mamdani—if you are enjoying these first six months—this is a book you’ll devour.

Mamdani can’t be ignored any more than Trump can be ignored. He sits at the vanguard of a new kind of politics. What is it, exactly? My book seeks to answer that question. It takes, seriously, the phenomenon of American socialism, and the pro-Palestine, anti-Israel currents now coursing through the body politic. We live in strange times. This is a book that attempts to reckon with them.

I’ll be saying more about this all in the near future. For now, preorder the book. Preorders matter quite a bit. I’ll share more information on talks, tours, parties, and all that good stuff soon.

Happy 4th!

My new novel Colossus is available wherever books are sold. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis had to say about it: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Buy it in print or get it on audiobook.

There are elections that not only realign politics but change how we understand concrete reality. Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph qualifies; it remains one of the most consequential elections of the last half century. Trump showed what was possible, reshaping a major political party in his image and dramatically altering how ordinary people relate to their leaders. Zohran Mamdani can never be president, so he cannot shift the currents like that. He is the mayor of New York City. He is, as a 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, the most unlikely of mayors, and this lends him national and even international reach. The rest of America is paying a great deal attention to him and his mayoralty, six months into what might be eight years in power. Without the White House, Mamdani cannot impose his will on the Democratic Party like Trump has on the Republicans. The moderate, institutional Democratic faction lucked out; they will not, for now, be driven to extinction. They will not suffer the fate of all the Republican politicians who stood against Trump over the last decade.

Luck, though, comes with caveats. Within the five boroughs—this beating heart of Empire—they are going to have to fight for their life. Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are still a very long way from demolishing their opposition. The centrist Democrats, that old-line establishment, still outnumber the leftists. They’ve got the governor of New York, enough members of the House delegation, and plenty of state legislators. The socialist caucus in Albany next year will number fourteen: ten state assembly members and four state senators. This isn’t yet enough to dominate bodies of 150 and 63 respectively, but they can begin to apply serious pressure on the legislative leaders and the governor, especially when partnered with Mamdani. In Congress, there will at least three DSA members from New York City. One, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was mostly absent during the primary season, while two others, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, were priority races for Mamdani. He expended tremendous political capital and both won significant victories, along with Brad Lander, who annihilated an Israel hawk incumbent, Dan Goldman.

The spin out of New York—and sometimes, there’s only one kind of spin and it’s correct—is that Mamdani, my old campaign manager, had a fantastic night. All of his endorsed candidates won. He is not the first politician to pick winners. But he is one of the few who is interested in adding allies to a greater political project. Mamdani believes in a stronger welfare state; he wants higher taxes to pay for it. To get what he wants, he must elect politicians who think like him. He also, though he speaks less about it these days, cares a great deal about foreign policy. The Palestinian cause has been vital to him since he was a teenager. A pro-Palestine Democratic Party is, unequivocally, a goal of his, though his primary focus remains on managing the municipal government and implementing his version of sewer socialism. Last night was an absolute disaster for the Israel-adoring flank of the Democratic Party, those who believed they could gobble up AIPAC dollars with impunity and sign off on unconditional military aid for Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right, theocratic government. The war in Gaza has shaped a young generation like Vietnam. Israel hawks won’t regain the ground they lost. They will, in time, be a minority faction of the Democrats, and many might end up in the GOP, where AIPAC will be tolerated for a little while longer. For American Jews on the left, this is a fine development. A 5,000-year-old faith must be divorced from a single malevolent nation-state that should have little to do with the future of the United States of America. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent felled by Avila Chevalier, now understands why bowing to such a pernicious donor class wasn’t helpful for his political future.

There is nothing magical about DSA. One doesn’t go to a DSA meeting or watch one of their rallies and walk away with the snappy phrase or TikTok tip that unlocks a hundred new votes. They are a decentralized, dues-paying, membership-based organization that prioritizes political organizing above all else. Their top priority is recruiting and engaging enough volunteers on their chosen political campaigns to ensure victory. If a candidate wins a DSA endorsement, they are guaranteed dozens or even hundreds of people who will show up, usually for free, and knock on doors for them. (DSA runs paid canvasses as well.) This is why, in a given year, DSA will keep its endorsement slate relatively small. A labor union or the Working Families Party might endorse in twenty or thirty different races. DSA, conversely, only hands out endorsements to candidates they can bolster with a volunteer operation. The endorsement process itself is fairly intensive. Candidates must fill out a questionnaire and win votes from the borough and citywide chapters. DSA members vet their candidates extensively. Their goal is to elect politicians who will be loyal to the organization, who will listen, collaborate, and back future campaigns. They want politicians who will support a democratic socialist agenda, whether it’s taxing the wealthy or abolishing ICE, and won’t go back on campaign promises. DSA politicians, in office, must remain accountable to the people who elevated them. I know this well because, in 2017, I joined DSA when I decided to run for State Senate. I attempted to win their endorsement. They only supported one Senate campaign in that cycle and it wasn’t mine. I understood. The other race was the only one they had capacity for and Julia Salazar won anyway. She was much more active in DSA than I was. Once my political career ended, I didn’t renew my dues, and that was that.

DSA has existed since the 1980s, but has only mattered, in a political sense, since 2017, when the followers of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign sought an outlet for their ambitions. Sanders had lost, but why abandon politics altogether? DSA boomed. After membership tailed off in the early 2020s, it ballooned again when Mamdani ran for mayor. They are at a new apogee, or still far away from a peak—we won’t know for a while. As long as they have a mayor who is willing to stump for them, anything is possible. Mamdani, notably, did not endorse the entire DSA slate. To appease Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, he remained neutral in races where DSA insurgents were directly challenging members of the Assembly. It was a move I questioned, but one that ultimately worked to Mamdani’s favor because he got everything he wanted: the insurgents, minus one, won anyway, and he got credit for delivering the victories of Valdez, Chevalier Avila, and Lander. And it’s inarguable that his support was essential for the two women, who were in much tougher fights than Lander and had far less political experience. Espaillat does not get beaten without Mamdani. Valdez, with DSA, might have eked out a victory against Brooklyn Borough President Antontio Reynoso, but it’s hard to imagine she’s obliterating him by twenty points without the full-throated Mamdani endorsement. He cut ads for her, campaigned for her, and ensured every voter of his knew who he wanted for Congress. Mamdani brought her to the mountaintop.

A complaint about DSA, lodged from those who resent their presence, is that it’s a club for lonely young gentrifiers—the childless, the drifters, the people who’ve yet to get “serious” about their lives. The youth element, in particular, is often skewered. These people just want to hang out. They don’t know any better. Maybe. But really, it doesn’t matter at all why they do what they do, if they knock on doors for Claire Valdez because they care about passing Medicare for All or they want to meet their next lover. In fact, it was once the political establishment—the so-called machines—that understood this best of all. One of my chief contentions, borne out by the last ten years of politics in New York, is that the political machine as we know it is dead. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slayed Joe Crowley, the Queens Democratic boss, in 2018, an illusion was finally shattered. It had been a decade, maybe more, since the actual Queens Democratic Party organized voters for their chosen candidates. The political clubs had become, by the 2010s, shell organizations, and the establishment stopped doing the difficult work of signing up new voters, passing out palm cards at the subway stations, and trudging up apartment staircases to meet registered Democrats. In the twentieth century, they in fact did all of this work. The machines were real. They could support a candidate and a guarantee a thousand votes. They had, of course, patronage to dole out, and that kept enough voters in line. You backed the party candidate so, maybe, you or your cousin could get on the public payroll and enjoy the sort of job that paid you for full-time labor but only needed you there on a Monday or Thursday. The political clubs—reform and establishment alike—were also packed with human beings, many of them young and excited to volunteer on a campaign. I know this because my own mother, in her twenties, belonged to a political club in Brooklyn. It was how you found friends and dated around. Jobs, too, could be on the offer.

DSA has ended the organizing interregnum in New York City. In the 2000s and 2010s, establishment Democrats abandoned organizing; they lost interest. The best explanation is they got lazy and self-satisfied, and no one was holding them accountable until a bartender who grew up in Westchester decided to wage war against the boss of it all. Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Sanders, kicked off an organizing revolution that has not let up. The old party bosses—the Meade Espositos, the Charles Francis Murphys—knew how to counter that. You get into the streets and find your own people. But who does that anymore? Organized labor, for the most part, is insular, and is only helpful if a district has any union density that is particular to that union. The NGO or Alphabet Left, which has both partnered with DSA and opposed it, has taken all the wrong lessons of the last decade. The Working Families Party, at its foundation, cared greatly about grassroots political organizing. Now it is hard to say, beyond handing out copious endorsements and spending a bit of money, what it truly does. The rule of politics, today and always, is that a group is only worth something to a candidate if they can bring volunteers or cut a check. The WFP does spend money and the left needs a vehicle like that; it is, effectively, a super PAC that is allowed to coordinate with campaigns because it is a political party in New York. But Reynoso v. Valdez should put to rest the fiction that they are able to marshal any kind of volunteer army for a candidate they endorse. Valdez’s DSA contingent overran a borough president who had also spent eight years in the City Council and had the support of the outgoing congresswoman. It was less a primary of people v. money than people v. people-less nonprofits. In that case, one might even wonder why Valdez’s margin wasn’t even larger.

Mamdani should feel less restrained in the next election cycle. Over the last eight months, he helped the political establishment quite a bit; he needed the backing of the governor to ensure significant elements of his political agenda, which require Albany approval, could be implemented, and he kneecapped primary challengers to her and Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year. If Mamdani was right to leave Jeffries alone, he should not be so deferent to the rest of the political class going forward. Most either opposed him or wished him to fail. They are now soldiers without guns, bullies without muscle. They can’t raise more money than him. They can’t hunt up more volunteers than him. They can’t go on television or TikTok and sound a tenth as compelling as him. It’s time they understand there is a political boss in this city, and he lives in Gracie Mansion. They can do business with him; Mamdani is forever amiable. He is not a vindictive person. The next few years needn’t be bitter. But the establishment Democrats who revile Mamdani so much should understand 2028 is going to look like 2026. There will be more races to be run, more incumbents to replace. For a century, since successive Red Scares squelched socialism in this country, the left has been in a defensive crouch. Only now can the socialists hit back. Only now can they escape the margins. They found their generational talent. It’s a fair fight, at last.

And so another high profile election season has passed in New York City without the New York Times editorial board endorsing in any of the major races. Few, truthfully, have noticed. Ever since the Times announced it was no longer endorsing in local races, breaking with a tradition that had lasted many decades, if not longer, politically attuned folk like me have wondered what it all might mean. There was a time, not very long ago, when the Times editorial board might tell you who they thought should win in a City Council race. Now you are lucky if they dispatch a reporter to write on that race at all. The decision to not endorse in local contests—the Times still wants to tell their readers who they like in the next presidential contest—seemed to signal that the Paper of Record was not going to prioritize the local. This is, despite the protestations of the Times itself, mostly true. Ever since they abandoned the standalone Metro section in the newspaper, granular coverage of the city has faded away. This is not a reflection on the talent of the City Hall, political, and local reporters the Times employs. They are top notch. It’s more about choices management has made as the newspaper, unlike almost any in America, grows it profits. You do not open the New York Times to find out, each day, what is happening in New York City. For that, your best bet is the right-wing New York Post, Gothamist, The City Reporter, Hell Gate, and other local outlets trying to fill the gaps.

Does it actually matter that the Times editorial board is not endorsing anyone in the clashes between Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso, Brad Lander and Dan Goldman, and Darializa Avila Chevalier and Adriano Espaillat? Here’s a dull answer: yes it does, and no it doesn’t. Allow me, first, to admit I’ve long believed the idea of a newspaper editorial board backing a candidate with an unsigned editorial is an outdated and befuddling practice. I blame no media organization that refuses to do it. The average reader struggles to distinguish between a conventional column and an editorial. Publishing any writing that’s unsigned dodges accountability. Editorial boards tend to embody a corporatized groupthink. I rarely, if ever, turn to them for any sort of political guidance. And an especially lousy editorial can make life difficult for reporters on staff. I know this firsthand: I quit the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer after they endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary in New York. It’s fine, then, the Times is not telling us who they prefer in any of the aforementioned races or the battle for the 12th District in Manhattan, the most Times-obsessed seat in America. Why should we care, really? For leftists, the end of local endorsements is an underrated boon. There is little chance the Times editorial board, which savaged Zohran Mamdani a year ago, was going to endorse Valdez or Avila Chevalier. In fact, they might have not only backed Reynoso and Espaillat but delivered stinging criticisms of their leftist rivals, who both lack the experience the editorial board prefers. Andrew Cuomo was not technically endorsed last year—it was year one of the no-endorsement policy—but he was effectively greenlit by the board, which was still somewhat enamored with the scandalous years he spent in government.

Still, it’s worth explaining why it’s not a good development for local democracy that the Times is no longer dragging candidates in front of its editorial board. There are several ways, I believe, the voter is losing out.

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Friday! Brooklyn! Come to Unnameable Books on 615 Vanderbilt Avenue and hear me read from Colossus. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis has to say about my new novel: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Buy it wherever books are sold or get it on audiobook.

The present can be a cage. Now is always now, and the future is a great fog. This is especially true when the times feel dire. Can it ever not be this? American politics can feel, for all the volatility, like it’s reached a dark stasis: Donald Trump in power, and always in power. I was talking to a Canadian friend recently and he asked me how I felt, as an American, about Trump as my representative on the world stage. I explained, as best I could, there are two conflicting currents. One, Trump is not America because he has never, even at the apogee of his popularity, won over more than half the country. His 2024 popular vote share was barely 50 percent. His approval ratings haven’t ever edged much higher. At the same time, any liberal who declared—and, to be fair, you hear less of this talk today—this is not who we are is plainly deluded. In three national elections, Trump won many millions of votes. He is a three-time Republican Party nominee. He embodies deeply American traits, and makes honest the venality and savagery that has, along with our ability to inspire hope, characterized these 250 years. He has joined history. There will be no discussion of the first 25 years of the 21st century without Donald J. Trump. In terms of impact on the body politic—his ability to, like a demented sun-king, assert himself over daily life—he is a rival to Reagan, Nixon, and Roosevelt.

A mistake we might make, however, is assuming it will always be so. Just as Trump was once treated as an impossible president, an aberration who might make noise in a primary but never seriously contest the presidency against Hillary Clinton, he must not be assumed to be eternal. It’s not just that he’s 80, and the odds are quite long he finds a way, as a widely hated octogenarian, to seize an illegal third term. Age is but a number; the legacy of Trump is what we must start to care about now. And there are real questions about what MAGA will look like when he’s off the stage. Who can knit the disparate coalitions together? Who has the moxie, the verve, the mania? Not the guy who can barely make it through an interview on “The View.” A better question might be whether another politician can run the Trump playbook and win, or be a reasonable facsimile of the 45th and 47th president. Hasn’t Trump proven the American hunger for an entertainer-in-chief, a born showman who thinks purel in the terms of a 30-second TV hit? Perhaps. No one can argue with that record.

Allow me, though, to hazard a prediction: the next president will not be like Donald Trump. The president after that one might not be like Trump, either. The politics of dull predictability—even, dare I say, technocratic governance—might just return to the American scene. Boring is coming back.

Can I really predict this? After the chaos of the 2010s and 2020s? If I have one theory of modern American politics, it’s that everything boils down to the two p’s: polarization and the pendulum. A two-party, winner-take-all presidential system where the parties are ideologically distinct—liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are mostly extinct—guarantees that polarization is not leaving us. The era of the landslide popular vote victory is dead. No one can break 60% like Nixon in 1972, or Reagan’s 59% in 1984. A Democrat won’t approach the 2008 Obama margin. We simply do not live in that world any longer. Fewer voters are willing to ticket split or cross party lines. The Senate is a good example of this: consider how few senators are left who belong to one party and represent a state that supported the other party’s candidate in the last presidential election. There’s a reason, even with all his scandals, Graham Platner has to be considered a slight favorite to defeat Susan Collins in Maine.

The pendulum is an even simpler concept: in this polarized landscape, American voters get tired of one reality and want another. Trump was once novel and fresh. The jokes landed. Enough voters thought, over three successive elections, he was worth a shot, especially in 2024, when he had been out of power for four years and 2010s nostalgia took hold. It helped, too, that the alternatives offered were Joe Biden (doddering, barely able to speak in public) and Kamala Harris (substandard political talent who dropped out before the 2020 primaries). But Trump’s act, in 2026, is played out. Unless you are one of the shrinking number of MAGA foot soldiers who will follow Trump into the abyss, you understand there is very little to celebrate about this second term. Interest rates are high, gas prices are elevated, and housing costs too much. The Iran War is a disaster. DOGE needlessly eviscerated the federal government. ICE is the most hated federal agency in America. It is all chaos for the sake of chaos, and the underlying conditions of the country are poorer, for working and middle-class people, than they were in 2019. It’s all very tiring. The Republicans will get immolated in the midterms; that’s a foregone conclusion. Democrats will have power again because the Republicans squandered it.

A decade of Trump is a very long time. As the pendulum swings away from him, it might swing towards a politician who promises normalcy. This was, of course, the Biden campaign of 2020, but Biden’s problem was age and poor timing. His mental acuity had devolved too rapidly to attempt another term, and he was barely able to sell himself while in the Oval Office. The timing aspect was Covid: he entered office in 2021, just as the pandemic era inflation was taking hold. This phenomenon, global in scope, unraveled incumbent governments across the world. Biden/Harris crumbling in 2024 didn’t look so different than the Conservatives getting swept out of power in the United Kingdom or Macron’s coalition taking a beating in France. Biden’s anti-Trump messaging, though, wasn’t wrong. Americans were prepared to move on from Trump in 2020. Four years was enough. His handling of the pandemic was shambolic. The quirk of history was that Trump lost and got four years to refresh himself while benefiting from a Democratic president who was lying to the American people about his mental fitness. Trump got to feel new again.

That’s all gone. I won’t predict who the next president will be. What I will argue is that competency and predictability will be values more cherished by the 2028 electorate. This is less about optimism and more about the pendulum. A presidential candidate who promises to fix the mess of DOGE (I will hire Americans!) and keep the U.S. out of idiotic, destructive wars (We won’t invade Iran!) will go far. It would be nice if a presidential candidate promised something more transformative or even delivered on it, but I’m not sure, in the short term, how necessary that will be. Not-Trump could be enough. After that, who knows what will happen. Perhaps, because I’ve made a quick trip to Canada, I’ve been thinking about Mark Carney and his success as prime minister. Carney is a technocrat with some muscle. He promises the management chops of a Keir Starmer but appears far less feckless—and more committed to a concrete policy vision—than the UK Prime Minister who might be chased from office soon. Do Americans want a Carney? Is anyone like that running in 2028? I don’t know. I do think, though, that any candidate who seems like they can run the United States reasonably well is going to be strong. The Democrats do not need a generational political talent like Barack Obama, but they do need to stop nominating gravely flawed politicians. Odds are, after 2016, 2020, and 2024, this will happen. The dynasties are dead and the establishment is too fractured. The Clintons can’t put their fingers on the scale. Neither can Obama. No one wants to hear from Bidenworld ever again. The 2028 primary will be the widest open since 1992. For most Americans, that’s an exciting prospect. We’ll get to enjoy democracy for once.

I’m in Ottawa tomorrow at Octopus Books doing a reading for my novel Colossus. If you’re in the area, come out! And I’ll be at Unnameable Books on Friday, June 19th in Brooklyn, reading from Colossus as well. I’ll be joined by several other excellent writers. The extravaganza kicks off at 7 p.m.

Not everything I write, naturally, ages well. In the summer of 2024, I became briefly bullish about the prospect of Tim Walz on the Democratic ticket. I thought Walz, the governor of Minnesota, would be a tough left-populist in the mold of Paul Wellstone, the liberal conscience of the Senate who died, tragically, in a plane crash. Wellstone was, in addition to being a genuine progressive and successful a political organizer, a jock; he won a wrestling scholarship to the University of North Carolina and went undefeated in the ACC. In an era when Democrats seem to be bleeding the support of working-class men, the Wellstone spirit is one worth recapturing. And Walz, progressive Minnesotan and veteran and former football coach, seemed to offer Kamala Harris a real political weapon in the home stretch against Donald Trump. Instead, he came under fire for exaggerating his military experience and appeared passive, even overwhelmed, in his televised debate against JD Vance. The Coach Walz persona was shtick that never quite landed. The failure of 2024, ultimately, lay with Harris and the senile Joe Biden, but I can admit I was wrong about Walz: he wasn’t much of an asset after all.

With Vance, I’ll stick to my guns. In 2024, I questioned the wisdom of Trump adding him to the ticket. He was a political underperformer in his 2022 Senate race and I was not impressed when I sae him speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention. I even called him a beta, comparing him unfavorably to Trump who remains, for all his catastrophic failures, an alpha to his supporters. Vance, to me, seemed like a squishy, warmed-over keyboard warrior trying far too hard to be a MAGA brawler. Vance sounded and acted like what he was: a formerly liberal pundit who wrote a middling memoir and pivoted rightward as it became obvious he was never going to have a political career in his native Ohio if he ran as a Democrat. The JD Vance of 2002 or even 2012 might have campaigned as a Democrat for Senate, but he understood, by the 2020s, the only path to power was seizing the Republican nomination. To do that, he’d have to grovel to Trump, his family, and the ultra-rich. Donald Jr. and Peter Thiel, together, made the quondam idol of the coastal liberal set—the earnest young man who could explain MAGA to Manhattan and Marin County—the potential successor to Trump himself. Vance, to his credit, played the inside game very well.

But one wonders, in 2026, whether becoming the Republican vice president was really the booby prize. Trump is deeply unpopular, and he’ll never again near the highs of 2024 and early 2025. His power to inflict damage remains; his actual grip on the country, however, loosens by the day. As I wrote, to much backlash, in 2024, the United States is too big for fascism, and if it ever Happens Here in this byzantine federalist republic, it won’t be because we elected an incompetent reality TV star with a child’s attention span. The real fascist will know what he’s doing. In the meantime, Trump will confront a Democratic House next year and maybe, just maybe, a Democratic Senate. At that point, he’ll have nothing left but executive orders, the sort that can be wiped away by the next president. He can always start another war. Trump promises, if nothing else, more chaos in his final years.

Vance is still the favorite to be the Republican nominee in 2028. That doesn’t mean, however, many other Republicans would trade places with him right now. That doesn’t mean the road ahead isn’t imperiled.

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My new novel, Colossus, is out now. Get it in print, get it as an e-book, get it as an audiobook. Buy a novel that has been called a “canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.”

The small city, I’ve always believed, is most conducive to feeling the intensity of a championship run. Take a city with less than one million people, hand them a sizzling team, and watch the resurgence of a monoculture that, these days, can only exist for sports. The charitable view is that a smaller city is more communal, more intimate, neighbors more likely to know neighbors; the sneering New Yorker, like me, might shoot back that the small city just has less going on. I’ve long thought that, for New York, this was always a bit of a problem when it came to professional sports. I’ve been an inveterate Yankee fan from early childhood and I’ve followed basketball and football with varying intensity over the years—less in recent times, if I’m honest—and this has allowed me to make a study of big city fandom. And my observation, from watching the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Rangers, and Islanders go on long playoff runs, is that all of these teams will only matter so much in a city of eight million people, especially since loyalties are divided.

New York, I’d argue, is a baseball town, but neither the Yankees nor Mets can unite the mass of New York baseball fans behind them. Met fans will never cheer on a Yankee playoff run. If the Yankees reach a World Series, as they finally did in 2024, Met fans will hope, desperately, they don’t win. Yankee fans, generally, have been more indifferent to the fate of the Mets, but the Juan Soto signing changed that dynamic, perhaps for good. Yankee fans now delight in the suffering of the Mets. While I’ve personally enjoyed Mets playoff runs—I was supportive, in particular, of the 2015 drive to the World Series, and hoped for a Subway Series in 2024—I can’t imagine ever seriously cheering them on. The dark part of me now hopes they lose in embarrassing fashion. All of this is ultimately ancestral: New York has been a city of baseball divisions dating back to the dawn of the American League, when the Highlanders, the predecessor to the Yankees, were formed in 1903. The National League had two New York baseball teams, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, and when both moved to the West Coast in 1958, the Mets were created to give Yankee-hating National League fans their own replacement franchise. The Yankees could not be the sole baseball team of New York City for very long.

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Not sure whether to buy Colossus, my new novel? Take it from American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Get it in print, e-book, audiobook, whatever you like.

Despite the fact that I identify as a person of the left—the democratic socialist mayor of New York City was once my campaign manager—I’ve always maintained a grudging respect for Rupert Murdoch. It can be argued, genuinely, Murdoch’s Fox News has been venom for American democracy, and his British tabloids are not much better. The moral legacy of Murdoch is quite poor. But like with anything else in life, assessing Murdoch, now ninety-five, is not a straightforward endeavor. This villain had something to offer the world. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who has run the Washington Post into the gutter, Murdoch always understood media. He cared about newspapers, magazines, and television stations. One of the quirks of the twentieth century was that Murdoch, on the balance, was a solid steward of two decidedly left-wing media properties: New York Magazine and the Village Voice. He did, at various points, own both, and they were profitable, strong publications on his watch. He understood he couldn’t fully impose his reactionary politics on either. The same was not true of the New York Post, which he remade as a hard right tabloid after buying it when it was a liberal voice in local affairs. What he did do, however, was invest in the New York Post. He never let it rot. Even today, despite the havoc it might cause, it’s a useful newspaper, and anyone who wants a complete understanding of New York City needs to read it. A more encouraging Murdoch tale is the Wall Street Journal: it remains a robust, respectable, and ethical publication. Compare the health of the Journal in 2026 to the Washington Post; it’s night and day, with the former retaining its subscriber base and reputation.

The long wind-up with Murdoch is intended to put Bari Weiss, a mere forty-two, into perspective. Two realities can be true simultaneously: Weiss is a visionary who built The Free Press into a digital juggernaut and she’s a blatant failure at CBS News, a hapless media mogul who has committed the sort of unforced errors Murdoch always knew to avoid.

Weiss’ politics might be dubious—to me at least—but that isn’t why she’s failing. It all comes down to competence.

And it all begins with “60 Minutes.”

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I had the honor of appearing on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast to discuss my new novel, Colossus. BEE was a fan! You should be too. Order my novel now—in print or audiobook. Make your dream come true.

There are now to two congressional insurgents in New York City who have endorsements from the Democratic Socialists of America and Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The first, Claire Valdez, is a state assemblywoman running against Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough President. I’ve written pretty extensively on this primary and the fundamentals haven’t change all that much. In another era, Reynoso would be the vaunted frontrunner: he has the endorsements of major labor unions, the Working Families Party, and the outgoing popular congresswoman, Nydia Velázquez. He holds a higher office, and he’s been in politics far longer. Unlike Valdez, he grew up in the Brooklyn and Queens district.

Despite all that, he isn’t in the lead because of the rise of Mamdani and DSA: both are extremely potent in the district, which runs through neighborhoods like Bushwick and Ridgewood, and they could be enough to drag Valdez over the finish line.

The consensus, among the political observers I’ve chatted with, is that Reynoso has been the more impressive candidate. It’s not just that Valdez was only elected in 2024 and Reynoso has been active in Brooklyn politics since the 2000s. It’s that Reynoso has emerged as the more energetic campaigner, running like he’s behind, and he was even able to outflank Valdez when ICE showed up at a Bushwick hospital and the community furiously protested. While Reynoso immediately staged a rally and seemed wholly available to the media, Valdez appeared caught between challenging ICE and NYPD coordination and running afoul of her endorser, Mamdani, who controls the NYPD. Reynoso, too, turned in a better performance in their TV debate on NY1. Again, I do not think this will be enough for him to win, and Mamdani and DSA’s combined might will probably get Valdez to Congress. If you want a politician who will automatically join the Squad and be unapologetically pro-Palestine, Valdez is the choice. But this has not been the most sizzling campaign.

The second DSA challenger Mamdani, my old campaign manager, has now endorsed is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a political organizer and doctoral candidate running against Congressman Adriano Espaillat in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Not long ago, I suggested it would be beneficial for Mamdani to back Avila Chevalier because she’s an insurgent worth taking a risk on. Even if she loses, DSA builds power in upper Manhattan, where Mamdani performed very well last year. And I am not sure, anymore, Espaillat is much of a favorite, even as Avila Chevalier’s old controversial tweets resurface. There are a lot of younger, college-educated newcomers and left-leaning Latinos who could break in her direction, especially around the issue of Israel. Espaillat, despite belonging to the Progressive Caucus, has been an Israel hawk, taking many thousands from AIPAC and refusing to stand up for Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine Columbia activist the Trump administration has been trying to deport. Espaillat is four decades older than Avila Chevalier, and the dynamic of the primary is reminiscent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Joe Crowley. Espaillat, at least, is taking the race far more seriously than Crowley, and has a long history of political organizing in the district. He has a Dominican American political machine that will be put to the test on June 23rd.

For Mamdani, much is on the line. There are risks inherent in supporting Valdez and Avila Chevalier. It’s also notable, in his decision to back certain insurgents, Mamdani has passed on supporting DSA challengers to incumbent members of the State Assembly, where he is trying to maintain a strong relationship with the Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie.

Either way, for a variety of reasons, it will be a fascinating summer for the new mayor. What he’s already learned is that it’s impossible to make everyone happy—and that concessions to the establishment forces he ran against only get him so far. This has been evident in the complaints about his decision to go against Espaillat, apparently breaking a promise he had made last year.

Why does this matter?

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If you’re in Ottawa, I’ll be holding a Colossus book event on June 16th at Octopus Books. If you’re not in Ottawa, buy my novel, which has been called a “canny, twisty satire of all-American posturing.” It’s now available on audiobook! Listen in, and get your copy now.

Almost one year ago, I was talking to Brad Lander’s press secretary on the eve of the mayoral primary. Lander, the city comptroller, had worked out a co-endorsement deal with Zohran Mamdani, and they were campaigning together to stop Andrew Cuomo. At this point, the Democratic primary had become a two-horse race between Mamdani and Cuomo; Lander was mired in third, where he’d remain, but he was undoubtedly helpful to the Mamdani campaign. As a veteran pol and stalwart of brownstone Brooklyn, he was able to nudge college-educated, affluent voters away from Cuomo and towards Mamdani. On that sweltering evening right before the primary, though, I had a different idea in mind: Congress. I told Lander’s press secretary that if her boss ever wanted to run against Dan Goldman, he would probably win. I even posted something to that effect shortly after, and never wavered from that prediction. Today, Lander leads Goldman, the sitting congressman in New York’s 10th District, by more than 30 points, according to one recent poll. I don’t highlight these posts to claim I am always right—no one has a perfect track record—but merely to underscore there was an inevitability to all of this. In a few weeks, Lander will probably blow Goldman out and be on his way to Congress, where he’ll be a Jewish progressive willing to challenge the Israeli government.

As inevitable as this all might be, it’s still rather remarkable. Dan Goldman is not a scandal-scarred incumbent. He is not elderly. He is not a weak fundraiser. He is not such a mismatch for his district. It’s rare, really, for politicians like Goldman to lose—and lose badly. Not very long ago, he was probably fantasizing about an eventual run for Senate or at least Attorney General. Maybe, with his Levi Strauss family fortune, he could have underwritten a gubernatorial bid if Kathy Hochul ever stepped aside.

Now his political career appears over. What happened, exactly? Why is Dan Goldman likely headed for the exits after just two terms in Congress?

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My new novel, Colossus, is out now. It’s an American epic (“a challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man”) and you’re going to want to buy it wherever books are sold. Order it today!

I have a great deal of affection for Los Angeles. Maybe it’s because I am such a New Yorker, moored on the East Coast, that the city, like San Francisco, never loses its allure for me. I usually stay in Beverly Hills and rent a car. Last year, I drove up to Laurel Canyon, took Mulholland, and imagined what it might have been like to be young and rich there in 1968. I spent an afternoon baking in the sun at Venice Beach and strolled the Santa Monica Pier. This year, I meandered up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu, then made my way all the way to Echo Park to meet a writer and grab pizza. LA is what people say it is—too sprawling, too dependent on the automobile. But I feel the dreams around me, the sense that this is, or was, the embodiment of a distinctly American ethos, a place to think very big. I still have stardust in my eyes.

The other drive I took this year was to Pacific Palisades. A year and a half later, it remains a site of devastation, like a little city that got bombed out in a war not very long ago. There are beautiful houses that stand, untouched, and just as many empty lots, rubble-strewn fields, scorched edifices, and the clangor of construction crews trying, sporadically, to resurrect it all. Over one lot hangs a large black sign with blocky white lettering: KAREN BASS RESIGN NOW. Karen Bass is the mayor of Los Angeles and she is up for re-election. She was the mayor last year, during the Palisades and Eaton Fires, which were two of the most destructive wildfires in the history of LA. When Pacific Palisades began burning, Bass was in Ghana, breaking a prior pledge to not conduct foreign trips while she was mayor. For her, it was rotten luck, and the cataclysm of the fires has hung over her mayoralty. Many residents, rightly or wrongly, blame her for what happened—the city’s halting response and the sluggish rebuild. Since I do not consider myself an expert on these matters, I’ll refrain from offering any analysis on how the Bass administration responded to the fires. In time, perhaps, I’ll form a stronger opinion.

Rather, I want to explore the political dynamics of this mayoral race, and why Spencer Pratt, a former reality TV star who once deemed an impossible longshot, might have a chance to dethrone Bass, a former congresswoman who has spent decades in politics. Pratt very well might miss the cut on Tuesday—California has top two nonpartisan primaries, and a recent poll shows him narrowly in third, trailing democratic socialist Nithya Raman—but the fact that he has run so competitively is meaningful in its own right. An unease permeates the city, and it’s one he’s prepared to seize upon—or at least exploit.

Here is why I am watching Spencer Pratt closely.

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My new novel, Colossus, has been described by the National Review as one that “primes us to see a distinctly American form of grandeur and squalor, a colossus with feet of clay.” Sounds pretty interesting. Buy it now, wherever books are sold!

The 12th Congressional District of Manhattan, in its current form, has only existed since 2023. The product of a byzantine and deeply confusing redistricting season—an independent mapmaker, rather than the state legislature, brought the district into being—the seat is now open because Jerry Nadler is retiring. There’s been much written about the race already, and there’s a good chance you’ve read that coverage. For many decades, the East and West Sides of Manhattan sat in separate congressional districts. Now they’re united in the densest, richest, and most prestigious seat there is. Gramercy Park, Chelsea, Times Square, Central Park, the Met, MoMA, and the Museum of Natural History all sit within the district, as does the world’s millionaire and billionaire classes. The Democratic primary, set for the end of next month, will determine Nadler’s successor because the district is overwhelmingly Democratic. There are four viable contenders: Micah Lasher, Alex Bores, Jack Schlossberg, and George Conway. The winner might hold the seat for the next thirty years.

And only two Democrats, really, are in the hunt. Schlossberg, the social media influencer who is the grandson of John F. Kennedy, gobbled up much of the oxygen in late 2025 and early 2026. Various internal polls seemed to show him at the top of the heap. I was always a bit skeptical of them because Schlossberg’s roots in the district are shallow and Kennedy nostalgia is fading. A New York Times story would confirm what political observers long suspected: Schlossberg’s campaign is shambolic, and he doesn’t seem to be taking the race all that seriously. Though he’s literal political royalty, he’s positioned himself as something of a populist outsider, if it’s difficult to know how hard he’s thought about this campaign at all. Zohran Mamdani was attacked last year as a dilettante with a thin CV, and though I knew him, in my old political capacity, to be hyper-competent, I could understand why some voters were skeptical of a 33-year-old running for mayor. But Mamdani was a state assemblyman and had spent a decade doing actual political organizing. Schlossberg hasn’t; he is what Mamdani’s critics erroneously said of Mamdani. He’s never had a real job, and he’s a lot less impressive than his forebearers. A recent Emerson College/PIX 11 poll showed him in third, with 11%, and that means, with only a few weeks left, his fate is probably sealed. He will not be a congressman. A highly discerning electorate will look elsewhere.

George Conway, the ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway and liberal hero of the cable TV resistance, sits at 10%. Like Schlossberg, he’s got his ceiling, and he is likely not rising past it.

Two state assemblymen, Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, polled at 22% and 20% respectively. This makes the primary a toss-up. But it also hints at what’s to come: as it was at the start of 2026, it’s Lasher’s race to lose. For a few reasons, he remains the frontrunner, and a Bores victory would still represent an upset.

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