The San Francisco Giants have been absolutely dreadful this year. With 24 games left to play, they need to win 6 to avoid 100 losses. That would seem relatively easy for most teams, but for this Giants squad it represents more of an obstacle. As the Giants approach this humiliating milestone, I got to thinking about the last, and only, time the Giants lost 100 games.

To understand how dreadful those 1985 Giants, who finished with a record of 62 wins and 100 losses, were, consider this. During the period from 1972-1986 when the Giants did not appear in a single post-season game, there were a few years where the best moment of the year was a big Giants home run that hurt the Dodgers somehow. In 1978, it was a pinch-hit grand slam in a late May game by Mike Ivie that kept the Giants in first place. However, the Dodgers still ended up winning the division that year. In 1982, the most memorable moment was home run Joe Morgan smashed on the last day of the season that prevented the Dodgers from going to the playoffs.

In 1985 it was a three-run home run by Jack Clark in the final game of the NLCS to catapult the Cardinals, Clark’s new team, to the World Series and dash the Dodgers hopes. In other words, the highlight of the season was a home run by a former Giant. Clark had been a great Giant for several years but had been traded in the 1984-1985 off-season for a bunch of prospects that never made it and Jose Uribe, who was a solid if unspectacular shortstop for the Giants for several years.

I went to many games in 1985, mostly because I was under-employed that summer and because tickets were, naturally, very cheap, so got a pretty good feel for that pretty bad team. One of those games was Opening Day when the Giants, behind solid pitching by an aging Vida Blue and a walk-off (before we used that term) single by Chris Brown in the bottom of the ninth, beat the reigning National League Champion San Diego Padres 4-3.

The Giants season was pretty much all downhill from there. By the time they had played ten games, losing seven, the Giants had settled into last place in the National League West and would stay there the rest of the year. By June 10^th, when the season was exactly one-third over, the Giant had already lost 34 games and were 12.5 games behind the division-leading Padres. They ended the season fully 33 games behind the division-winning Dodgers.

There were some, albeit very few, bright spots on that team. A few young players including outfielder Chili Davis, pitcher Mark Davis, first baseman Rob Deer pitcher Scot Garrelts and catcher Matt Nokes had good to excellent careers ahead of them, albeit mostly not with the Giants. Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper, who have constituted the best broadcasting team in the game for several decades, both played on that team. Kruk posted an 8-11 record but with a 3.38 ERA over 194.2 innings, good enough to lead the team with 3.5 WAR. Kuip played in nine games but apparently had seen enough and retired as a player at the end of June.

There were also a handful of other players including Jeffrey Leonard, Bob Brenly and pitchers Vida Blue, Bill Laskey and Atlee Hammaker who would have, or already had, decent careers with the Giants, but other than Davis were not standouts in 1985.

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When I think back on that team, two groups of players come to mind. The first are veteran journeymen who were never that good to begin with and found themselves on the Giants late in their career. Among those were first baseman Dan Driessen who had a .232/.297/.326 slash line in 202 at bats and Manny Trillo who was even worse with the bat at .224/.287/.288 while seeming to have lost almost all his range at second base. Johnnie LeMaster had spent his entire career with the Giants and was even more hapless than usual in 1985, but was traded to Cleveland after going hitless with only one walk in his first 17 plate appearances.

That team also featured a bevy of young players who we were told at the time were prospects, but were really more like organizational filler. Players like David Green, Dave Lapoint who had both come over in the Clark trade, Brad Wellman, Mike Jeffcoat, Jim Gott or Mike Woodard were 25 or younger and on their way to subpar big league careers.

The best things that happened to the Giants during that season occurred off the field. With the second overall pick in the June draft, they chose Will Clark who went on to have some great seasons and huge clutch hits for the Giants. A few months later, in September, the Giants fired general manager Tom Haller and manager Jim Davenport, replacing them with Al Rosen and Roger Craig. Rosen and Craig would, by the end of the decade lead the Giants to two NL West crowns and one trip to the World Series.

Like that 1985 version of the team, the 2026 Giants have some bright spots. Bryce Eldridge’s rookie season suggests that he may be a good player for a long time. After an abysmal start, Rafael Devers has had an excellent year. Drew Gilbert, Jung-Hoo Lee and Casey Schmitt demonstrated they can be useful players. Most significantly, the Giants have put together one of the top farm systems in the game.

In the late 1980s, the Giants made it from 100 losses to the World Series in four years. To equal that, the Giants need to convert their elite minor league talent into a big league team that can make it the World Series by 2030. Player development is not easy even with top prospects. Whether or not the Giants can do that well in the next few years will be the true test of the Buster Posey-Tony Vitello leadership.

I don’t know much about how jewelry is made, but apparently amber is created when tree resin gets buried for thousands of years and becomes somewhat fossilized. When advocates for unlimited growth, deregulation and unfettered police power accuse their opponents of being frozen in amber, they are suggesting that anybody who opposes them is stopping progress and wants to freeze the city where it is-or perhaps where it was a few decades ago.

The notion that San Francisco is frozen in amber should strikes anybody who has been here more than ten years, or even less time than that, as absurd. Those of us who remember an even earlier San Francisco going back to the last third of the twentieth century find that assertion even more laughable. Entire neighborhoods have sprung up in areas that were once largely empty warehouses. The city’s downtown skyline is almost unrecognizable compared to forty or so years ago. Efforts to beautify Golden Gate Park and the new Presidio Tunnel Tops park have created some of the most stunningly beautiful and whimsical outdoor spaces in any American city.

The city is more crowded than at any time before 2015 or so while the demographics of the city continue to change as they have since gold was found in the hills east of here. It is also true that some parts of the city, particularly in the western neighborhoods such as the Sunset and the Richmond, San Francisco look more like it did a few years or even decades ago.

Some people may want more new big buildings chock full of expensive condominiums along San Francisco’s ample coastline, others may want to yell “enough” and still more people may look for some kind of compromise, but the notion that the city is unchanged, or unchanging, is not one that can, or should, be taken seriously.

Ironically, if we look beyond the buildings and the physical city, there are some aspects of San Francisco that seem somewhat frozen in amber-and the same people who accuse their critics of that jewelry related chill seem fine with that.

For much of its early history, beginning in the years and decades immediately following the Gold Rush, San Francisco was governed by powerful financial interests. These wealthy individuals and families whose fortunes derived from mining, banking, manufacturing and other sectors sought to create a city government that ensured their ability to make money and centered their interests over those of working and lower income people.

In those years the foundations of the city government were created. This included a relatively conservative city charter, nonpartisan elections, for many years an at-large legislature which gave a big advancage to wealthy candidates a pro-business climate and limited spending on social services.

During what might be called San Francisco’s progressive breakthrough moment that lasted from roughly 1965-1995 as well as in the twenty or so years after that, neighborhood activists and progressive local politicians and organizations sought to change those institutions and policies, and shift the power away from the wealthiest San Franciscans. Some of the successes of that period, including things like district elections, relatively strong rent regulations and smart campaign finance laws are still valuable components of governance in San Francisco.

While some might consider what has occurred in recent years in San Francisco a shift rightward it might be better understood as the city reverting to its norm-or trying to refreeze it in amber.

Mayor Daniel Lurie-a scion of a family fortune that goes back to the earliest days of San Francisco and the Gold Rush-is almost a caricature of this. Lurie has consistently sought the advice and guidance and enjoyed the support of moneyed San Francisco and the businesses that are creating extraordinary wealth for some. Lurie’s signature policy thus far, his Family Zoning Plan, which seeks to deregulate the housing sector and take power away from neighborhoods, is a clear a descendant of the freeway plans supported by wealthy business interests during the 1950s-1970s.

The idea that San Francisco should be run by its wealthiest citizens and that the interests of the business elite should trump those of everybody, which are core to the governing philosophy of the Mayor and many of his supporters, has deep roots in San Francisco. It is how things were done for decades in this city.

The people trying to change that, whether by demanding affordable housing be built, chafing at elections being so easily bought by the wealthiest San Franciscans, insisting that the wealthy and powerful pay their fair share of taxes, suggesting that police should be held accountable or calling for a city budget that reflects the needs of poor and working people, are not the ones trying to freeze the city in amber. On the contrary, they are the ones calling for meaningful change in San Francisco.

Similarly, if anybody wants to freeze San Francisco in the amber, albeit an amber that predates the late twentieth century brief progressive ascendancy, it is the organizations and people seeking to keep power in the hands of old and new San Francisco money, who have rallied behind the conservative agenda of a mayor whose family wealth goes back to the earliest days of the city’s history and resist real change-at least with regards to economic power-in how, and by whom, the city is governed.

This photo might fall into the category of the parlor game “The Onion or the New York Times,” but it was not a joke. As I’ve noted in previous articles the DSA’s recent successes rely on three components: redistributive economic policies, ending US ties to Israel and anger at the relative complacency of the leadership of the Democratic Party in the face of MAGA fascism. The first two components appeal to an ideological left that is sizeable, but perhaps not yet a majority in the Democratic Party. However, the third resonates with Democrats who might have more centrist views on the economy and a more nuanced view of the Middle East.

Democratic voters generally understand that the Trump administration is not just an ordinary Republican administration but has an agenda that is much more dangerous, and is in process of dismantling American democracy. For some reason, Jeffries the presumptive next Speaker of the House, seems to not understand this.

At this historical moment any leader of the Democratic Party who seeks more cooperation with the administration is not only being politically tone deaf, but is undermining the fight against fascism and is morally appalling. While it was true for a long time that cooperation across party lines and between the executive and legislative branch was central to American democracy and governance, that era, at least for now, is over.

I am certain that Jeffries, as he did in the article, can find a way to rationalize this meeting, but I am not buying it. I would prefer the presumptive Speaker explore ideas of transitional justice, oversight hearings and other means of holding the regime accountable rather than, as he seems to suggest, pursue some kind of fantastical belief that Trump will support a Democratic agenda.

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Additionally, Kushner is not just any Trump official. He is a close family member who has been enriching himself through his ties to the President since Trump’s first term. Kushner has proven to be a relatively inept negotiator, but more pertinently, he is one of the architects of the US role in an ethnic cleansing project in Gaza. Meeting with Kushner despite this amounts to something like a tacit endorsement of that ethnic cleansing While Jeffries is not aligned with the more radical anti-Israel factions within the Democratic Party, he should be able to craft a position that calls for real peace, rather than what Kushner is doing.

Jeffries is undoubtedly aware that meeting with Kushner was a politically foolish thing to do. That is why the meeting was private, planned by mutual contacts and off-the-record. It also helps explain why Jeffries did not comment about the meeting when the Times inquired about it. Democratic leaders meeting privately with senior figures in the Trump regime to discuss who-knows-what is exactly the kind of thing that drives Democratic voters to more radical DSA or DSA adjacent candidates. It is almost unfathomable that Jeffries does not know that, but that did not stop him from having the meeting.

Many Democratic voters understand that that the Trump administration is not interested in crafting policy, particularly policy aimed at either helping the material conditions or making life more affordable for less wealthy Americans. Any Democratic elected official who does not understand that has disqualified themselves from leadership. Neither Kushner nor anybody in the Trump White House is going to work with Jeffries, now or after the midterms, to pass progressive legislation. To believe otherwise, or to think that a private conversation with Kushner can change that is to choose to live in a fantasy that is grounded in halcyon visions of what politics used to be.

I am also aware that writing that Democratic leaders should not seek to compromise with the Trump administration is the kind of thing that seems too radical for much of the center-left political class. After all, they will claim, Democrats should try to work with the administration if it helps the American people. Unfortunately, those kinds of assertions are abject nonsense-beyond that they are dangerous abject nonsense.

There is nothing we have seen since January of 2025 to suggest this regime wants to either work with Democrats or make life more affordable for hard-working Americans. Instead we have seen a relentless attack on American democracy, the American people and, to a substantial extent, the American state. Recognizing that reality is essential for any leader of the Democratic Party.

The more centrist wing of the Democratic Party, led by people like Jeffries has convinced itself that the DSA/left wing of the Party is damaging to Democratic chances in November and beyond. That is probably wrong, but if they want to staunch the DSA/left momentum the first thing they need to is get their own house in order. As long as the choice is between secret meetings with facilitators of ethnic cleansing and fascism or redistributive economic policies that may go a little too far for some, most Democratic voters will choose the latter-and they will be making the right decision.

In the pre-Trump era, if a term-limited president had such low approval ratings, the opposition party would be eyeing the White House with growing confidence while presidential aspirants from the President’s own party would be seeking to distance themselves from the President. We are no longer in that era, but find ourselves in a new one where the unpopular president still commands a cult-like following within his party, makes jokes about seeking a third term in violation of the Constitution and where there is little reason to believe that president’s party will allow free and fair elections or facilitate a peaceful transfer of power if they lose those elections.

Despite, or perhaps, because of all that, those approval numbers are still important, because as the US careens towards 2028, it remains imperative to understand the challenge facing anti-fascists and supporters of democracy as only in part electoral. Defeating Trump or his MAGA proxies at the polls will be necessary, but additional work must be done through the courts, mass mobilizations and other means, to ensure the defeat of Trump’s American fascism. That project will become much easier if as the election approaches, the people around Trump begin to realize that the big majority of the American people oppose them.

A key to bringing down authoritarian regimes is to encourage defectors from within the regime. In the American case, these defections began early with the never Trump movement in the Republican Party that dates back to the President’s initial campaign in 2016. However, despite some high profile defections then, there were too few to make an impact. On the contrary, over the last decade one of the most important and damaging developments in American politics has been the relative ease with which a fascist movement has captured the Republican Party.

By 2028, more than a dozen years into the MAGA ascendancy, it is foolish to hope that anybody around the President abandons him for reasons or ideology or principle. It is more than apparent that there is no bridge too far for the sycophantic, fascistic mediocrities with whom the President has surrounded himself. However, many of these people still may be concerned about self-preservation.

It has long been true that Trump’s post-presidential life, presidential immunity notwithstanding, will almost certainly be defined by legal troubles, but some in the administration are becoming aware that is true for them as well. Many of these people probably believe, not without reason, that Trump will issue than blanket pardons, but even that will not spare them the consequences of having been handmaidens of a fascist movement once the regime change, which will follow a Democratic victory, occurs.

That reality becomes even more stark for Trump’s enablers as the President’s poor poll numbers and the Republican Party’s dismal electoral process sink in. Each of these people will be faced with the choice to either recommit, no matter what it takes, to the MAGA fascist effort or to abandon ship while there is still time. Most will opt for the former, but some will not.

The question that may determine America’s future in 2028 and the early days of 2029 is how many Trump loyalists will move to the latter position. These defectors will be acting purely out of self-interest or self-preservation. If they believe that MAGA has no future and that staying with Trump to the bitter end guarantees a life of criminal prosecution, expensive legal fees and reputations that can never be restored, some will realize that it is time to break with the regime. Every one of these defections, particularly if they come from high level people, will further weaken the regime. If there are enough of these defections, the regime will no longer be able to function.

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Trump himself will stop at nothing to stay in power, keep his enormous and ill-gotten wealth and remain free of criminal prosecution. It is easy to imagine an embattled Trump doing something like calling troops in to suppress demonstrations or help steal elections, but if the people around him refuse to follow those orders-again not out of any moral or political awakening, but out of self-interest-the regime will be more likely to collapse.

These potential defectors raise a paradox because anybody who has stuck with Trump this long is a true believer who supports the cruel, bigoted and destructive MAGA agenda. Therefore, it is tough for the opposition to welcome these people. Nonetheless, it is important that we incentivize defections because if the people around Trump believe they will face the same legal consequences, ostracism and place in history regardless of whether they defect or stay with the President, then they will stay with Trump.

Trump’s declining popularity is good news for democracy, but those who see this only through the lens of how it helps Democrats in 2026 and 2028 once again misread the gravity of the crisis. We are not in a situation, as we have been in previous eras, where the more conservative party has won a few elections and we are simply seeking to change that. Rather, the regime change has already happened and the task we face needs to be understood as one of (re)building democracy. That requires a broader more comprehensive approach of which finding the right electoral strategy is only part.

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State Senator Scott Wiener has been running, or at least eyeing, the congressional seat that Nancy Pelosi will be vacating next year-California’s 11^th district-for nearly a decade. Given that, it is striking how, fundraising aside, he seems so poorly prepared for this race. One possible reason is this is not the exact race or the opponent Wiener wanted.

For much of the time Wiener was preparing to run he likely assumed his major challenger would be either Pelosi’s daughter Christine or a fringe progressive challenger. Wiener would have easily dispatched the latter and could have presented himself as younger and more experienced alternative to Christine Pelosi. Even in the early days of this election, Wiener almost certainly would have preferred Saikat Chakrabarti to be his runoff opponent. Chakrabarti is a smart progressive with extremely deep pockets, but lacks a natural base of support outside of the left and has few deep ties to the district.

Many, probably including in Wiener’s camp, underestimated Connie Chan, who is now in almost a dead heat with Wiener. Her early fundraising struggles and lackluster poll numbers in the first few months of this year undoubtedly contributed to that, but Chan’s campaign has been gaining momentum, and has had a very different vibe since Nancy Pelosi endorsed her in May.

Wiener is now in a tougher race than expected, but we also should not underestimate Wiener. He is, after all, an accomplished and tireless campaigner who will have as much financial support as he needs. He is also a pro-business liberal in a city where a mayor with a similar profile was elected just two years ago and where many voters share that orientation. Nonetheless, Wiener has struggled to hit his campaign stride in recent months.

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One reason for this is that the main argument Wiener is making does not add up. This begins with Wiener asserting that housing in San Francisco is increasingly unaffordable. He is obviously right about that, but Wiener also asserts that his work in Sacramento, in practice mostly making it easier for developers and speculators to make money, has addressed this crisis. The problem is that all Wiener’s work has not solved the problem-and voters are increasingly aware of this. Wiener’s response is that Chan represents an obstructionist position that has foiled Wiener’s brilliant plans to make San Francisco affordable.

That argument is, prima facie silly, but it is worse than that. It makes Wiener seem weak and kvetchy. If a powerful State Senator cannot get things done because of a San Francsico Supervisor, then why would voters think he can get anything done in Congress? That is the question implied by Wiener’s argument; and he has yet to provide a clear answer.

Wiener has also often seemed sad, almost dejected, on the campaign trail-slinking away from confrontations, appearing hapless when confronted with tough questions and the like. That is never a good way for a candidate to position himself. I recently saw Wiener at the Embarcadero BART station pacing and speaking on the phone. His body language was that of somebody having an argument with a spouse or family member. Maybe Wiener was involved in a personal crisis or perhaps it was campaign related. Either way, it was not a great way for a candidate for office to be presenting in public.

One of the biggest, and more revealing, missteps of the Wiener campaign began a week or so ago when the campaign decided that a good way to damage Chan was to create an AI chatbot of sorts that would answer questions about Chan’s record, as if it were Chan herself. This was a terrible, sexist and racist idea in part because it mocked Chan’s accent. Nancy Pelosi rightly explained that the AI chatbot “reflects a disturbing willingness to erase women’s agency.” However, it is also worth considering the sheer stupidity behind Wiener’s decision to create the site.

At a moment where, even in San Francisco, the backlash to AI is galvanizing voters, Wiener decided that a shoddy AI parody site was a smart move for his campaign. There are some Wiener supporters who may have enjoyed goofing around on the site, but it is hard to imagine it swayed a single voter. However, Wiener’s use of this AI site made it clear that he is both beholden to and enthralled by his wealthy tech donors and supporters. Wiener already has those votes but needs to distance himself a bit from wealthy tech interests to pick up the votes he needs to win the election.

When his campaign took the site down Wiener commented “many others were offended (by the site), and I apologize for causing that offense. Innovation means trying new things, and it also means being honest when something doesn’t land the way you intended.” This is a standard political non-apology. Wiener did not recognize that he had done anything wrong or that putting words into the mouth of a woman was a sleazy thing to do. Instead, he apologized for “causing offense,” which is something very different.

This entire episode demonstrates that Wiener has lost the thread of the campaign and will need to reboot his efforts in the remaining twelve weeks before the election.

Wiener’s efforts to portray Chan as a stand-in for the progressive bogeymen that are, in the conventional wisdom of the right in San Francisco, responsible for all the city’s problems, no longer gets much traction. This is in part because San Francisco’s popular center-right mayor has been telling the world how great San Francisco is now-and much of the world agrees. Moreover, Wiener’s main attack against Chan is that she says no to a lot of things. That is also a tough message to sell, especially when local media is reporting that Chan just played a major role in modifying the city budget to ensure that critical programs would still be funded.

The contradiction implicit in Wiener’s claim that housing affordability is a major crisis and that he has offered the most solutions is made more stark every day as rents and housing costs continue to San Francisco. Wiener is too experienced and well-financed to be counted out, especially in a district that does not lean as far left as many outside San Francisco would like to think. Nonetheless, over the last few months we have seen a Wiener campaign that is struggling to get its footing against a different and stronger opponent than he likely anticipated.

Throughout the primary the question of electability loomed in the media and presumably among many Michigan voters. It is important not to fall into the trap, one for which there is little empirical evidence, that boring centrists are the only people who can win in purple districts or states. On the contrary, the only thing we know for sure about electability is that we don’t know anything for sure about electability. It is also the case that whoever won this Democratic primary was going to have a strong chance of winning in November against an uninspiring MAGA aligned Republican in what will be a good Democratic year.

There is no guarantee that El-Sayed will win in November, but the odds are pretty good. Moreover, many of the Democrats who opposed him in the primary, beginning with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are already rallying behind El-Sayed. El-Sayed will have to pick up support from African Americans who voted with Stevens in the primary as well as older white Democrats. He will do very well with the former group, and while he won’t get all of the latter, he will likely do well enough.

El-Sayed’s victory, although by a much narrower margin that was expected, is also a reminder of how much the Democratic Party has changed in a relatively short time. Most apparently, the party has moved leftward on many economic issues and has become much more anti-Israel than in the past. These changes have obviously helped candidates like El-Sayed.

The coalition that constitutes the Democratic Party has also changed just during this decade. As recently as 2022, if you were told that a candidate in a Democratic primary for statewide office in Michigan or citywide office in New York would lose both the African American and the Jewish vote by substantial margins, you would assume that candidate had no chance to win. However, both El-Sayed in Michigan and Zohran Mamdani lost those once two key constituencies and won their primary-in Mamdani’s case by a healthy margin.

The progressive coalition that has propelled people like Mamdani, El-Sayed, Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York to victory is different than the progressive coalitions of African Americans, LGBT people, Latinos in some places and liberal Jews that helped elect progressives the four or so decades before this one.

These changes within the Democratic Party also reflect changing American demographics. Today’s left coalition includes Muslims, younger educated white voters, younger African Americans, a not insignificant number of radical Jews and a more dispersed segment of the electorate that wants a more aggressive approach to fighting fascism from the Democratic Party. That is a coalition that did not exist a decade ago, and probably would not have been enough to win many primaries, but it is powerful now.

One of the major issues in this race was the role played by AIPAC the pro-Israel lobbying group that has increasingly cast its lot with right-wing forces in both Israel and the US. AIPAC spent about $20 million trying to help Haley Stevens. In the end they had nothing to show for that money other than a strong second place finish for Stevens. In other words, they accomplished nothing with their money.

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Twenty million dollars is a huge amount of money even in a reasonably large state such as Michigan. However, it is likely that AIPAC has destroyed its reputation so badly that the only thing worse than AIPAC spending millions against your campaign is having them spend millions to support your campaign. Smart Democrats now are realizing that AIPAC support, regardless of how much money is spent, is unhelpful and perhaps fatal to their campaign.

As November approaches, the most likely outcome in Michigan is that El-Sayed wins and becomes a smart and progressive US Senator. His views will continue to anger some, but this also the nature of politics. There is one other thing that must be said about El-Sayed and the coming general election. El-Sayed will be an exponentially better senator than Mike Rogers.

It will be difficult for the Democrats to win back the Senate this fall, but it is also essential for the future of American democracy that they do that. It is hard to imagine the Democrats succeeding in that endeavor if they lose what is already a Democratic seat in Michigan. Therefore, any Democrat who does not get behind El-Sayed now or who endorses Rogers is not acting in good faith and will make themselves complicit in MAGA fasiscm.

At first glance Mayors Lurie and Mamdani may not seem to have a lot in common. Lurie calls himself a moderate Democrat but is better understood as a Rockefeller Republican. Mamdani calls himself a Democratic Socialist but is better understood as a New Deal Democrat.

Lurie is Jewish; Mamdani is Muslim. Moreover, Lurie is the son of a prominent liberal Zionist rabbi and thinker while Mamdani is the son of a prominent anti-colonial and anti-Zionist scholar and thinker. Not surprisingly, given all that, Lurie has been a consistently outspoken on issues of antisemitism, while Mamdani’s record is much more mixed on that topic. On the other hand, Mamdani has made his opposition to ICE, Trump’s new Gestapo, clear, while Lurie has been considerably more equivocal regarding ICE.

Mamdani campaigned for mayor on issues like affordability and criminal justice reform. Lurie’s campaign focused more on tough talk on crime. Mamdani funded his campaign in substantial part through small contributions from individual donors. Lurie’s extremely wealthy mother was the major donor to the effort to elect him. Lurie is about a decade older than Mamdani.

New York’s mayor has an innate charisma and charm that even his opponents recognize, whereas few Lurie loyalists would defend him on the grounds that he is charismatic. The wealthiest New Yorkers have, in general, loathed Mamdani since his candidacy began to gain momentum in early 2025. On the other hand, Lurie is a product of old moneyed San Francisco and is very well-liked by the wealthiest people in that city.

Despite these differences, there are also some similarities between the two mayors. Both have deep roots in the cities they now govern. Mamdani, like so many others, is an immigrant who has grown to be a true New Yorker. Lurie was born, raised and went to school in San Francisco and has lived most of his life there. Both had little (Mamdani) or no (Lurie) experience in elected office before becoming mayor. Both are the sons of privilege, although Lurie’s family wealth far exceeds that of the Mamdanis.

Perhaps the greatest similarity between the two mayors is that they are both masters of social media. Mamdani broke through a crowded Democratic primary field beginning in late 2024 in part because his social media game was so much better than that of his opponents. He raised important issues in ways that were accessible, catchy, frequently funny and sometimes hard hitting on platforms that galvanized his youthful base.

Lurie’s social media has shone more since he became mayor. Unburdened by the charisma of Mamdani, Lurie has had to rely more on consultants, but the effect is still the same. Both mayors are seen as engaged with their city, bringing an element of joy back to governance, cheerleading for the city they lead and constantly communicating to their constituents.

Lurie and Mamdani both understand that a major part of the mayor’s job is communicating. Social media, vibes and the like may be discounted or mocked by some, but it is a big mistake to think they are not important. Lurie has succeeded, despite passing almost no major legislation or reforms, in convincing much of the national media that San Francisco has recovered in large part through his use of social media. It is reasonable, and important, to ask questions like recovery from what or recovery for whom, but nonetheless Lurie has both improved the business climate in San Francisco and staunched the torrent of relentlessly negative and disingenuous stories about San Francisco.

Mamdani’s social media presence has helped reposition New York as not just a global capital of finance, design, real estate and the like, but a city with millions of hard working people who want more from government. In doing that, he has also begun to dispel the idea that progressives are not capable of governance. Despite the doomsayers, New York is doing fine under Mamdani. By showing that to the world so effectively and engagingly New York’s Mayor is making an important and powerful political point.

Mamdani and Lurie are both popular in their cities. Mamdani enjoys a 58% approval rating while Lurie’s is an even higher 74%. They have both helped improve the vibe around their cities. The new upbeat feeling in much of San Francisco and the Mamdani-Knicks feel good New York summer may be triumphs of social media over legislative accomplishment, but they are still real.

The key difference between these mayors can be seen in their governance and vision for their respective cities and therefore urban America more generally. Mamdani has struggled with some of the big promises from his campaign. We don’t have free buses or city-run grocery stores yet, although he kept his promise about freezing the rent on rent-controlled apartments. However, that misses much of the story of Mamdani’s mayoralty.

In his first months in office Mamdani has also focused on less visible, but nonetheless impactful, efforts to make the city more affordable. Mamdani succeeded in making DoorDash and other delivery services change their apps so that tips would go directly to the drivers. He paid people $30 an hour to shovel snow during the winter blizzards. Similarly, he has held some of the city’s most predatory landlords accountable. These may seem like small things, but they are all good steps, and there have been others, towards both a more affordable New York and one that focuses more on the needs or working people.

Lurie has moved San Francisco in a different direction. He has eschewed building homeless shelters or creating affordable housing, preferring to follow the abundance/YIMBY playbook by changing zoning laws to make it possible to build more luxury housing. Similarly, he has sought to pass budget that would cut services to some of San Francisco’s neediest. Some of that money has been clawed back due to the work of the Board of Supervisors, notably Connie Chan who served as the chair of the legislature’s Budget Committee.

Most notably, Lurie has yet to offer a clear agenda-or for that matter any concrete policies-aimed at the affordability crisis in San Francisco that will likely get much worse in the coming months and years.

To some extent, although Lurie and Mamdani are never going to run against each other, we see the competition between the two wings of the party they represent played out in races between Democrats such Dan Goldman against Brad Lander in Manhattan, Abdul El-Sayed against Haley Stevens in Michigan and even Scott Wiener against Connie Chan in Lurie’s San Francisco. They may lead cities on different sides of the country, but in the bigger picture, the story of these two mayors raises the question of what direction will define urban America, and to some extent the Democratic Party, over the next few years.

The Russia-Ukraine War, which began in earnest when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than four years ago, and the war between Iran and its proxies on one side and the US and Israel on the other, which has been going on in one form or another since October 7, 2023, have together defined much of international relations for the last few years. Through their strike on the Iranian ship, Ukraine has further linked the two wars.

The attack itself raises several questions: how exactly are the two conflicts connected, what is the US role that connection and are we seeing something like a slow moving much larger conflict?

There are several clear connections between the two wars. First, Iran has long been helping Russia develop its drone capacity. Drones have been an essential part of this war. Ukraine, in particular, has pioneered the use of drones in warfare and has demonstrated how drones can help a smaller country defend itself, and perhaps defeat, a much larger and, in some respects more powerful, adversary.

Second, China has been an essential ally to Russia during this war with Ukraine. Without China’s support, Russia would have lost this war long ago. China has also has likely been supporting Iran its war against the US and Israel. Additionally, in the months following the Hamas attack of October 7th, primarily through the social media platform TikTok which was owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance until early this year, China played an imortant role in pushing anti-Israel messaging out, particularly to young people, in many countries including the US.

It is clear that China has been backing both Iran and Russia in one form another in their wars against Israel and the US and against Ukraine respectively. Another way to understand that is that China and the US have been involved in a two-front proxy war for several years now.

This brings us to our second question regarding the US role in these conflicts. During the Biden administration, this was simpler to understand because the US was unambiguously supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression and had a similarly clear position supporting Israel in its war against the Iranian proxy Hamas. At that time, the US was consistent in its opposition to the China-Iran-Russia grouping who, in one form or another, were opposing the US in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Since 2025 that has changed a bit. First, the war in the Middle East has expanded dramatically with the US and Israel jointly attacking Iran first last summer and then, to a much greater extent, throughout much of spring and summer of 2026. Israel has also expanded its war into Lebanon while Iran, for its part, has attacked several Gulf States and American bases in the region.

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Second, the US has substantially changed its position on the war in Ukraine. At the moment it looks like the Trump administration is tilting back towards Ukraine, but they have done that in the past as well. In the bigger picture, the US has all but switched sides in this conflict and moved much closer to Russia than Biden ever would have considered.

There is an unfortunate logic to the Trump administration’s lean towards Russia. While Ukrainian democracy is deeply imperfect, it is nonetheless the case that to defend Ukraine is to defend the aspiration of democracy in Europe. That war is the key hot front in the global clash between fascism and democracy. The Trump administration, unlike previous American administrations has placed itself on the side of fascism in that struggle, so Russia would be a natural ally.

The complexity here is that Iran and Russia are working together in Ukraine and that China, a country that least in terms of rhetoric is a target of the Trump administration, is also supporting Iran and Russia. This puts the US and this administration in a very unclear position. The best way to push back against Russia, China and Iran is to offer unambiguous support to Ukraine, but that would go against the administration’s broader ideological goals.

This is further complicated by the US-Israel relationship. The days of describing Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East are mercifully passed, and he current Israeli government is very much part of the transnational fascist movement of which Trump, former Hungarian leader Victor Orban and various other leaders around Europe are part. Most of those forces are also supported by Russia.

Thus, Israel is in a similar position to the US. Their adversaries are backed by the same forces with which Israel is in key areas ideologically aligned. However, Israel’s enemies, the Iranian regime and its proxies including Hamas, are brutal authoritarian regimes. The war in the Middle East cannot be understood as a clash between democracy and its opponents as is the case in Ukraine, but within Isreal, the tensions between democratic forces and the increasingly undemocratic regime are intense..

Currently there are major hot wars in Ukraine and the broader Middle East with the real possibility of both escalation to even more deadly force and of those conflicts expanding. Major powers like the US and China as well as powerful European countries and tertiary forces such as North Korea and Belarus have also been involved in these conflicts. States such as Jordan, Kuwait and others have been attacked by Iran while on more than one occasion Russian missiles landed in Poland. These wars may not expand further and merge into one larger conflagration, but that possibility cannot be ruled out.

If the wars are expanding or connecting it is occurring slowly. Iran and Ukraine have been on opposite sides of the war in Ukraine for years, but Ukraine only recently struck Iran for the first time. The US and Israel have been at war with Iranian proxies since October 7^th, and in many respects much earlier than that, but only in the last twelve months have the two sides been directly at war. The pace of the expansion of these wars is deceptive, but there is ample evidence to suggest that this is indeed what is happening.

This is all occurring while the growing divisions between fascism and democracy within countries like the US, Israel and throughout much of Europe continue to deepen. The greater war that may be developing will be simultaneously a complex interstate conflict with shifting alliances and relationships as well as numerous intrastate conflicts between fascism and its opponents. The wars are already slowly expanding and the cold civil wars in many countries are being brought to a simmer. This is the world into which Trump and the other buffoonish fascists around him have led us.

Seven months into his term, Mamdani has been a pretty good mayor. He has been much less beholden to the wealthiest New Yorkers then his predecessor and has pushed back against conservative tropes about how New York City must be governed, while demonstrating that he is a better manager than his critics thought he would be. Mayor Mamdani has also never taken his eye off the ball with regards to the conflict in Gaza. This was most recently apparent when Mamdani renewed his campaign promise to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he come to New York.

This was always an empty threat and despite Mamdani’s claims that he was consulting with his legal department, it is hard to imagine he ever thought he had the legal right to do this.

The bottom legal line is that Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be arrested in the United States for being found guilty by a court that the United States has not recognized. Moreover, if it was legal to arrest Netanyahu, that would be done by federal officials or federal officials in cooperation with local officials. It is hard to imagine the New York City mayor didn’t know that before he made the threat. When confronted by this, Mamdani revised his position and has urged New Yorkers to protest Netanyahu when he comes to New York.

There is also a paradox here. Many perhaps most New Yorkers, including a substantial number of Jewish New Yorkers would like to see the Israeli Prime Minister arrested and would like to protest his visit. Many of us understand the Israeli Prime Minister to be guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities including possibly genocide.

It is also possible both to oppose what the Israeli regime is doing, believe that Benjamin Netanyahu should be held accountable for his war crimes and at the same time to believe that Mamdani is not threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu because he suddenly has a new legal theory or because he is solely driven by a deep commitment to liberate the people of Gaza.

To understand that we must go back to Mamdani’s promises around affordability. I have lived in New York City for the entire time Mamdani has been mayor. Most New Yorkers I know agree that he is doing a pretty good job. Most of the people I know who voted for him would happily vote for him again either in a democratic primary or a general election. They basically like the guy, think he is working hard, are very happy the Knicks won the NBA championship and believe the mayor is advocating and working for all New Yorkers not just the wealthy.

I agree with all that. However, over the last seven months not a single New Yorker has said to me they believe the city is more affordable.

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It is not fair to blame the mayor for New York City remaining so expensive. The economic factors driving that are beyond the power of any mayor, including this one. Additionally, the components Mamdani’s core program of free buses, free childcare, freezing the rent and publicly supported grocery stores in each borough are very difficult to implement-although he has made some progress here including the promised rent freeze. However, even if successfully implemented, these policies will have a moderate impact and will not effect all New Yorkers. Despite all those caveats, it remains true that Mamdani has struggled to deliver on the key theme of his campaign.

For Mamdani going back to his core political belief, the one that catapulted him from an obscure if charismatic assembly backbencher to being a viable mayoral candidate, is good politics-and threatening to arrest Netanyahu allows him to do that. This is why the critique that this is not what Mamdani was elected to do falls short. Mamdani was elected precisely because he was uncompromisingly critical of Israel. Many, but not all, of his voters want him to continue to focus on Israel. For those voters Mamdani’s comments about Netanyahu are the fulfillment of an implicit promise from the campaign.

The problem, at least for some of us, is that constantly banging the drum about what he believes to be the unique evils of the state of Israel makes Jewish New Yorkers less safe. The protestations by too many on the left that being anti-Israel is essentially a magical shield against being antisemitic does not change that.

We are now at a moment where a substantial proportion of the American left sees anybody who does not view Israel as a uniquely terrible force in the world that has no legitimacy whatsoever, or who suggests that there can be an overlap between anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism, as a genocidaire. That is nonsense, but it is powerful, politically potent and potentially dangerous nonsense. Mamdani’s recent comments about Netanyahu demonstrate this with the deftness, intellect and charisma that even the Mayor’s harshest critics must recognize.

Regardless of Mamdani’s statements about the universality of his views, he has only focused on this one foreign country. It almost goes without saying that the Mayor has been silent about what he would do if, for example, a Russian military leader came to New York.

Simlarly, while Mamdani has rightly giving voice to New Yorkers who survived the Nakba in the late 1940s. I have not heard him do anything to recognize the genocide that occurred in Bangladesh at the hands of what is now Pakistan in the early 1970s, nor have I ever heard him discuss the Rohingya people. Mamdani has also never threatened to arrest Elon Musk for abolishing USAID, a decision that has led to hundreds of thousands, and probably more than a million, deaths primarily from starvation and lack of access to medicine.

I also am aware that if a Jewish writer ever mentions any tragedy or horror other than Gaza or suggests that there is a scintilla of antisemitism on the left, many will see that writer as complicit in genocide in Gaza.

The core conundrum here is that concern about antisemitism does not make it any less neccessary, on the one hand, to recognize the atrocities Israel is committing, demand accountability in accordance with international law for the Israeli leaders who are responsible for the massive numbers of civilian deaths in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing project in both the West Bank and Gaza and insist that the US change its relationship with Israel and no longer continue to fund the Israeli military.

On the other hand, it is also possible and necessary to accept both that other terrible things are occurring, or have occurred in recent history, and that Israel, while led by a messianic, brutal and expansionist regime is an extraordinarily bad actor in the moment, while at the same time recognizing that there are other bad actors in the world, some of which are worse. Failing to accept this is single out Israel, and consistently singling out Israel is a not-too-distant cousin of obsessing over the Jews; and that has long been a core component of antisemitism on the ideological right, left and center.

It is also possible that when a mayor runs on a pledge of focusing on the city rather than posturing on international politics it is okay to hold him to that pledge.

For Mamdani threatening to arrest Netanyahu is a political win. It takes away attention from the difficulties he has confronted with his affordability agenda and offers political red meat for his base. Many Jewish New Yorkers will be upset about this and, whether we want to recognize it or not, it contributes to a climate of growing antisemitism, but there is limited political cost to that, especially for Mamdani.

The most puzzling thing about this is that in the big picture Mamdani’s mayoralty is doing fine. He has delivered on some promises, managed the city well, responded to the crises that have arisen-mostly due to climate change-more than adequately, centered working and poor people in city governance and has been an excellent cheerleader for the city.

While it may be good for Mamdani that we are discussing Netanyahu, it might have been better if we were discussing his decision this week to appoint Lina Khan to head the Economic Development Corporation. That is also the kind of thing that many New Yorkers of all ethnicities, races and faiths wanted to see when we voted for Mamdani.

Iran is different. Before that war began Trump was seen, rightly or wrongly, by many of his supporters as somebody who would not drag the US into more forever wars. Therefore, the war in Iran is a policy disaster that, even if we assume Trump and his supporters do not care about the harm we are doing to civilians in Iran, could lead at least some of his supporters to feel betrayed. It will also lead to, at the very least, a spike in inflation that all Americans will feel. Given all this, one of the most surprising things about this war is how muted the opposition to it has been.

Congress has largely abdicated its Constitutional right to declare war, but that is consistent with a GOP led Congress that since January of 2025 has functioned essentially as staff for an ever more authoritarian president. However, Democrats in Congress have failed to keep this ill-conceived and equally poorly implemented war on the national agenda and on the minds of American voters.

More strikingly, there has been very little public opposition to the war. Since the war began almost four months ago, there have been almost no demonstrations on college campuses or on the streets of our biggest cities focusing specifically on the war. Even on social media, where much of our politics now occur, the war on Iran has not received the kind of attention one might expect a conflict of this nature would generate. Throughout the primaries which have been occurring over the last few months there has been very little discussion of the war in Iran.

To a substantial extent, the war has been absorbed into the greater panoply of the horrors of the Trump regime rather than being singled out by the American people or congress in any significant way. This is additionally surprising because at first glance one might think not only that the war would mobilize the Democrats but that anti-war activity could generate new coalitions linking the longtime Trump critics with one-time supporters upset because Trump has become just another forever war president. That coalition has not emerged, but even on the left, resistance to the war in Iran has remained on the periphery of political discourse.

There are several factors that can explain the relative absence of antiwar sentiment even on the left. The first is that keeping up with the horrors of the Trump administration is an overwhelming task, and for many people all of the ghastly things this regime has said and done almost merge into one, making it harder to focus on any single issue. Second, despite the damage this war has caused in the region, particularly in Lebanon, but also Iran and several Gulf States, the US has not yet deployed troops to Iran. It is true that US troops have been killed by Iranian forces, some within the last week, but there have not been large numbers of American casualties, at least for now.

A third reason that helps explain the tepid outcry in response to the war in Iran is that the war in Gaza continues to dominate our poiltics, particularly on the left. It is therefore likely that any demonstration against the war in Iran would be overwhelmed by demonstrators wishing to express their sentiments on Gaza.

There is, naturally, a lot of overlap between critics of the Iran war and critics of the war in Gaza, not least because a component of the war in Iran is another aggressive and brutal Israeli war-in this case in Lebanon. Israel’s wars and the nascent American forever war in Iran are inextricably and tragically linked, but the Gaza war is bigger, more brutal and has lasted longer than the war in Iran so is always going to get more attention.

There is also another dimension to the relationship between these two conflicts. For many Free Gaza activists, discussing almost any other foreign policy subject is viewed as an effort to minimize the war in Gaza. For some activists anything that shifts the focus, even momentarily, from Gaza, is complicity with Israel’s extremist regime. This approach is unhelpful because it is possible, and probably necessary, to be critical of Putin’s war in Ukraine, Netanyahu’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, the American war in Iran and the US decision to defund USAID that has led to hundreds of thousands or more premature deaths.

While we may feel overwhelmed by the Trump presidency at times, we must have the capacity to see beyond Gaza, while at the same time not losing sight of what is occurring in Gaza and the West Bank. We must also speak out, and organize, against a war that has the potential to be destabilizing and deadly at an enormous scale.

The war in Iran is likely to continue for some time. The ceasefire that Trump so proudly proclaimed a few weeks ago was always a triumph of Trumpian blather over geopolitical reality and was never going to hold. The possibilities of the war leading to increasing death tolls in Iran and around the region, greater instability in the Middle East and possibly a disastrous decision to send US troops into Iran must be taken seriously.

Centering criticisms of the Iran war and calls to end it while explaining to the American people how damaging this extremely unforced error by the administration has been to the American people is essential both for Democratic leaders and the activist class more broadly. Failing to do that is not just bad policy but it leaves political money on the table.

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