Every few years, America succumbs to a collective fantasy: that the next political messiah will rewrite the rules. The American empire is not a machine that can be humanely reformed. And yet, this pattern is familiar. Every few years, a new social democrat emerges to prove how persistent these illusions remain. The lesson goes unlearned. From Obama to Sanders to AOC to Zohran Mamdani, the cycle repeats. These figures do not arise spontaneously; they are cultivated by the American Empire to perform a specific function: to absorb anger, demobilize resistance, and redirect revolutionary energy into safe, systemic channels. They are more effective than police batons because they disarm the masses ideologically.
They call it hope. They call it change. Some even call it a “socialist victory.” But this is the oldest trick of empire: dressing a loyal servant of the death-machine in the garments of a rebel.
Recently Mamdani , who is the mayor of New York City actually instructed people under threat from ICE to “not resist arrest if approached by ICE.” . This is a profound act of political and moral capitulation that reveals the limits of social-democratic politics when confronted with the violent machinery of the state. Such instructions were entirely predictable from someone operating within the machinery of the U.S. empire. This accepts the fundamental premise that ICE’s authority is legitimate and its processes are just. It treats an encounter with ICE as a routine administrative procedure, rather than what it is - a potentially life-altering confrontation with a paramilitary deportation force whose very existence is rooted in racist and imperialist logic. And someone like Mamdani is asking for non-resistance , which is to implicitly endorse the system’s right to detain, cage, and expel people. It counsels compliance with a system designed to break families and enforce imperialism. But was this shocking coming from a social democrat ?
This is the brutal, unspoken core of American “social democracy”: It is not, and has never been, a project of liberation. It is a project of domestic redistribution financed by imperial plunder. Its historic mission has been to secure a larger slice of the imperial super-profits for a “labor aristocracy” within the metropole, while the global South pays the price in blood, resource theft, and destabilization.
Mamdani’s politics, as evidenced by his ICE statement and foreign policy alignments, are fundamentally managerial rather than revolutionary. He operates within the accepted liberal framework of diversity and representation. In this framework, oppression is primarily understood as a problem of prejudice and underrepresentation, solvable by having more people of color, Muslims, or socialists in positions of power within the existing state structure. He talks about islamophobia , a token which he uses to establish his moral standing and authentic identity, while his political actions (compliance with ICE, saying ‘ Israel has a right to exist’ , attacking nations under seige) reinforce the very systemic machinery that produces Islamophobia as an ideological tool of empire. Islamophobia is manufactured and deployed by the U.S. empire to justify its wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, its support for Israel, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its militarized policing.
Mamdani will never critique the imperial system that necessitates the persecution of muslims . Instead he tokenizes himself. He becomes the acceptable face of dissent ; he is upset about the bigot that he have to face at home but he doesn’t challenge the US empire that creates the conditions for it. This makes him useful to the Empire. He can channel the legitimate anger of Muslim and left-wing communities into the safer politics of representation (”Look, we have a Muslim socialist mayor!”) instead of initiating a movement against the empire that requires Islamophobia to function.
His views on Venezuelan and cuban governments resisting US aggression — at the precise moment they are being suffocated by sanctions, sabotage shows that his politics are not a challenge to empire .
This readiness to sacrifice the oppressed abroad for crumbs at home is not a contradiction within Western social democracy. It is the social democracy in its purest and most honest form. The social democrats do nothing but confirm, again and again, the accuracy of Stalin’s warnings about their class nature.
Mamdani is more insidious than a right-winger like Trump . Trump and the open fascists are the “bad cop.” Their brutality is overt, their intentions nakedly hostile, and thus they mobilize a clear, unified opposition. They clarify the enemy.
Mamdani, and the social-democratic class he represents, is what we call the “good cop.” He deploys the language of justice, solidarity, and even socialism. This convinces a segment of the left, desperate for representation and tangible wins, that he is them. This creates a fatal paralysis. Energy that should be directed toward building independent, revolutionary power is now funneled into campaigning for, defending, and making excuses for a manager of the imperial state. He is neutralizing opposition from within by becoming its most credible symbol. The system does not fear mamdanis What it truly fears is a left that rejects both cops entirely. Mamdani exists to prevent that from coalescing. Mamdani and Trump have the same position on Venezuela. When Mamdani parrots State Department talking points ,criticizing Maduro’s “authoritarianism” while ignoring or endorsing the illegal, suffocating sanctions designed to starve the population into submission he is not giving some “nuanced critique.” He is providing left cover for a regime-change operation.
Even with Palestine , his views are same . In order to be “pro-Palestinian” in any meaningful sense is to support the right of the colonized to resist their colonizer by any means necessary . Mamdani’s consistent denunciations of all resistance groups exposes him for what he is . By condemning the resistance while talking about “human rights,” he adopts the exact posture of the liberal imperialist: he mourns Palestinian suffering while systematically invalidating every instrument of power Palestinians have to end that suffering.
Western social democracy is a specific historical product of imperialism, and its domestic program is structurally dependent on the ongoing exploitation of the periphery. He fights for a more “equitable” redistribution of the imperial pie within New York City—better housing, expanded social services, marginal reforms. This consolidates his local base and helps launder his image as a “socialist.” At the same time, he condemns anti-imperialist states and, in the case of Palestine, denounces the very resistance that threatens Israel and America. In doing so, he reassures the American empire of his reliability and preserves his legitimacy within its political limits.
The so-called “American left” does not constitute a left in any serious historical, material, or anti-imperialist sense. It is not a movement oriented toward rupture or transformation, but a political formation rooted in privilege at the core of empire, concerned primarily with negotiating a more favorable arrangement within it.
Its politics are not defined by opposition to capitalism or imperialism as systems, but by an effort to manage their domestic consequences just to soften inequalities at home while leaving untouched the global structures of exploitation that make such reforms possible in the first place. Therefore, a popular “American left” is almost a logical impossibility. Its popularity is contingent on abandoning its foundational principles, on making peace with the genocide-fund, on accepting the “American” frame. Mamdani’s popularity is proof of this. “American” as a political identity is inextricably bound to the project of settler-colonialism and global hegemony. To be “American” is to inherit, benefit from, or be complicit in a political structure built on indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, and imperial expansion. A politics that is principled in its anti-imperialism , that supports Land Back, the right of all nations to self-determination free from U.S. coercion is, by definition, anti-American .
The choice, then, is not between better or worse managers of the empire. It between a politics that seeks recognition from American Empire and one that seeks its destruction. No amount of representation can redeem a system built on dispossession. No symbolic victory can compensate for a politics that demands obedience to ICE, denounces the resistance of the colonized, and parrots the language of the American State Department . These are not errors to be corrected. Is there any point in having diverse executioners? The American Empire cannot be reformed . It will only be confronted, resisted, and ultimately defeated.