Commentary: The unfolding democratic insurgency

The Democratic Party stands at the precipice of a profound internal reckoning. For decades, it has balanced precariously between populist aspiration and corporate capture, a tension that has now reached its breaking point.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City has shattered the illusion of establishment inevitability. What once seemed impossible — a socialist, anti-corporate, anti-war, anti-Zionist candidate winning the largest city in America — has become real. The moral center of the party is shifting; it is now clear beyond debate, and those in power, from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, appear increasingly tone-deaf to the political and generational currents transforming their base.

Even as Mamdani’s campaign surged, Schumer refused to endorse him, a deafening silence that spoke volumes. Schumer, once the architect of Democratic majorities, now finds himself out of step with the energy defining his own backyard. As the New York Times reported, while Mamdani declared to cheering supporters that “the future is in our hands,” Schumer watched from Washington, appearing distant and hesitant — a leader from an earlier era. His decision not to back Mamdani, despite their past collaboration helping indebted taxi drivers, has been widely read as a sign of generational and ideological disconnect.

Meanwhile, Jeffries, under intense internal pressure, offered a last-minute, written endorsement of Mamdani only days before early voting began. His hesitance, as the Times noted, was not just tactical — it reflected his deep ambivalence toward the Democratic Socialists who now threaten to challenge his own leadership in Brooklyn. When Jeffries finally yielded, he did so with caveats, acknowledging “areas of principled disagreement” and praising Mamdani’s softened rhetoric on policing and Israel. It was less an embrace than a reluctant acknowledgment of political reality.

By contrast, Andrew Cuomo, running as a third-party candidate, tried to exploit the fractures — backed by Eric Adams, who warned that Mamdani’s ideology threatened “the city’s security.” But those tactics failed. The voters no longer feared populism; they feared stagnation. Cuomo’s humiliation on election night symbolized the end of the old Democratic playbook — triangulation, fearmongering, and donor-class appeasement.

Lessons from Trump’s rise

The first lesson comes, ironically, from Donald Trump. His 2016 victory demonstrated that when a political system is perceived as unresponsive, the electorate will reward the candidate who channels their anger — even if he embodies the very cynicism they despise. Trump’s ascent was less a triumph of ideology than of affect: he performed rebellion against an ossified elite. He understood that contempt for the establishment could override all other political considerations.

Democrats misread this. They treated Trump as an anomaly, rather than a warning. What he revealed was a vast reservoir of alienation that transcended party lines — a sense that both political machines had become self-referential and insulated from the suffering of ordinary people. That same disillusionment has now migrated into the Democratic base, and Mamdani’s victory is its most coherent political expression.

The Wounds of 2016 and 2020

The Democratic National Committee’s treatment of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 remains an open wound. In both cycles, institutional Democrats intervened — overtly and covertly — to block the insurgent who most authentically expressed the frustrations of younger and working-class voters. The manipulation of debate schedules, the alignment of superdelegates, and the orchestration of centrist consolidation before Super Tuesday in 2020 all signaled that the DNC viewed its own electorate as a problem to be managed, not a force to be represented.

Those betrayals radicalized a generation. Mamdani’s campaign learned the lesson: build your own infrastructure, mobilize outside the donor class, and never trust the party machinery. His campaign was no fluke: It was the accumulated memory of every betrayal, now turned into strategy.

The betrayal of the Obama era

The sense of betrayal reaches back further — to Barack Obama’s presidency. Obama entered office as a transformative figure, carrying the moral capital of hope and change. Yet, in retrospect, his administration’s deference to Wall Street, its reluctance to prosecute financial crimes, and its continuation of neoliberal economic orthodoxy hollowed out the middle class while entrenching elite power. Obama’s cool technocracy masked a continuity of policy: the transfer of wealth upward, the militarization of foreign policy, and the pacification of grassroots energy through rhetoric rather than reform.

By absorbing and neutralizing popular movements instead of empowering them, Obama inadvertently prepared the ground for both Trump’s nationalist revolt and the current left-populist resurgence. Hope became nostalgia; idealism curdled into cynicism. Mamdani’s win represents the first major reversal of that trajectory — the moment when hope reclaimed substance.

Occupy Wall Street and the suppression of dissent

Occupy Wall Street was another crucible of generational transformation. Its destruction — through coordinated policing and the absence of institutional allies — taught activists a brutal lesson: economic protest without political machinery is vulnerable. The Democratic establishment treated Occupy not as a moral wake-up call but as an inconvenience. The consequence was to radicalize a cohort that no longer believes reform can come from within polite channels.

Today’s insurgents — the ones who powered Mamdani’s rise — have learned from that defeat. They combine movement politics with electoral strategy, ideology with organization. They are unwilling to be co-opted into “advisory” roles or rhetorical gestures. They seek to seize power, not to plead for it.

Biden and the exhaustion of the old order

Former President Joe Biden’s tenure, his insistence on running for a second term, and the DNC’s complicity in beating back any challenges deepened the crisis of faith. His administration’s inability to deliver on key promises — from student debt relief to climate justice and healthcare expansion — reinforced the perception that the party’s moral imagination had expired.

Worse still, the DNC’s determination to shield Biden from primary challenges in 2024 exposed its fear of internal democracy. By prioritizing “electability” over vitality, the party ended up with political entropy.

That wager has now clearly backfired. Mamdani’s election proved that energy suppressed in one arena will erupt in another. The more the establishment clings to control, the more it invites revolt. Biden’s decline and then spectacular collapse have come to symbolize not merely an aging leader but an exhausted political paradigm.

The Mamdani moment and the demise of establishment authority

The election of Mamdani is more than a local upset: It is a foundational break. His campaign fused class politics with moral clarity on foreign policy, particularly on Gaza, at a time when silence equaled complicity. His victory demonstrates that the new generation of progressives no longer fears being called “radical.” They understand that “moderation,” in the face of injustice, is itself an extremism of cowardice.

The symbolism of Jeffries’s begrudged, last-minute endorsement and Schumer’s refusal to endorse Mamdani at all will linger. It exposed the establishment’s paralysis: trapped between a restive base demanding courage and a donor class demanding obedience. As The Times observed, Schumer’s silence “itself became a strong statement” of detachment and fear. Even as Mamdani won 76 percent of the vote in Schumer’s own Brooklyn precinct, the Senate leader stayed on the sidelines, clinging to an outdated calculus of donor comfort over democratic energy.

The shape of the coming wave

If history rhymes, the 2026 midterms could mirror the Tea Party revolution of 2010, but from the left. The old guard of the Democratic Party, now visibly brittle, will face a wave of challengers who will draw both inspiration and legitimacy from Mamdani’s victory.

Jeffries, whose district is already seething with progressive energy, is likely to face a stiff primary challenge. And Ritchie Torres, long criticized for his staunch pro-Israel stance and AIPAC-aligned donations, now faces a formidable opponent in Michael Blake, a former DNC vice chair launching a challenge focused squarely on Torres’s loyalty to foreign interests over local needs. Others, such as Dan Goldman, Yvette Clarke, and Greg Meeks, should brace for the same reckoning.

Mamdani’s triumph has turned the improbable into the inevitable. The insurgency is no longer theoretical or a wish: It has won its first capital. From New York outward, a new populism is rising: disciplined, morally anchored, informed by the fresh wounds and scars of its battles over the last decade, and utterly unwilling to ask permission from those who long ago forfeited their right to lead.

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Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.

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