Zohran Mamdani’s campaign represented a struggle for basic dignity and an affirmation of democratic potential. It was ceaselessly denounced by political and media elites from across the spectrum as something sinister, violent, and dangerous.

The phrase “socialism or barbarism,” popularized by the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, is by this point a cliché on parts of the political left. To plenty of liberals, the sentiment is liable to scan as reductive or worse. Politics, they tell us, is in fact defined by endless shades of grey — not some Manichaean struggle between good and bad, left and right, worker and capitalist. There are certainly instances when some version of this is true. People and institutions alike, needless to say, will always be complicated. But there are also formati

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