The doubts raised after Mamdani's victory were legitimate. As Eric Blanc writes , “ history is full of examples of movements demobilizing and subordinating themselves to their friends in power. It would be a tragedy if that happened in New York City…” But, Blanc suggests, “a more useful and important debate is how to organize enough New Yorkers to win Zohran’s agenda — and to counteract the inevitable pressures on him from capital and the political establishment… Effective Left strategy always should combine an openness to criticism of electeds with a rigorous power analysis . More specifically, the intensity of our criticism of Left politicians on a given issue should correlate with our degree of power.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51