Abolish Everything, Replace It With What?
Zohran Mamdani's allies want to abolish the police, prisons, borders, and capitalism. None of them have said what comes next.
Imagine a city where racism doesn’t exist. There is no social hierarchy. It is a utopia of equality and diversity—the kind of place that exists once the old order has finally been swept away. This is the premise of N.K. Jemisin’s short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” The narrator dares the reader to believe such a place could exist.
In the city named Um-Helat those who have encountered race, hierarchy, domination, inequality, resentment are considered dangerous, as they are familiar with the time before utopia. Such a city might exist only in fantasy. But there are people who believe it can be built in the real world. And these people comprise an ascendant wing of American politics.
Zohran Mamdani’s ascent has already changed New York politics. His victory has given the city’s activist left a solid political footing for gaining electoral power. Last week’s Democratic Congressional primaries showed this in action. Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Avila Chevalier each defeated establishment or incumbent-backed Democrats. Some will surely see this as a socialist breakthrough—the fruit of many years of attempts by figures like Bernie Sanders to introduce Americans to the concept of socialism. This label captures part of the story. But the deeper story is the rise of a politics of dismantling.
As I wrote about earlier this month, the wokeist movement that burgeoned in the 2010s and crescendoed during 2020 has mutated:
The new radical mood is different. It has little interest in designing a replacement order—its instinct is punitive and obstructive. The danger now is what I would call destructivism: the belief that the most necessary form of political action is to destroy the systems one regards as oppressive.
This new radicalism operates across a spectrum. At the softer end is the familiar progressive claim that existing institutions are structurally unjust and must be reimagined and reformed. Further along are a series of more explicit demands that go beyond reformism: abolish ICE, abolish the police, abolish prisons, abolish borders, abolish Israel, abolish capitalism (whatever that really means).
