On My Desk Now January 2026: Either Way, You Choose A Side

1

Like you, I imagine, I’m having a hard time keeping up with current events, much less making sense of everything that’s been happening. Actually, let me put that a little differently, because it’s less that I have a hard time making sense of what’s going on than that I would rather not arrive at the conclusions the sense I’m making leads me to. The list is long: Iran (not only the ongoing civil unrest, but also the question of whether Trump, or for that matter Israel, will actually make good on their threats to bomb the country again), Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine, Gaza, the immigration crackdown (which, after the recent ICE shooting in Minnesota, is now unmistakably a euphemism), tariffs, the economy, the attacks on reproductive autonomy, trans rights, and higher education (an umbrella issue that encompasses other issues as well), not to mention basic science, health care and health research. I could go on. What makes this list so troubling, however, is not just its length. It’s the way it maps only some of the pressure points in a well-planned, carefully coordinated campaign to dismantle just about every move we have made over at least the past sixty years, as a society and even to some degree as a world community, towards greater equity and egalitarianism.

It would be naïve, of course, to call those moves anything other than imperfect or to pretend they were motivated entirely by the desire for social justice, but there is a huge difference between what it might have meant for our government to try to revise them in good faith—assuming we could ever elect such an administration—and the Trump administration’s clear intent to ride roughshod over the idea that equity and egalitarianism, not to mention diversity and inclusion, matter at all.

If you were paying attention, you could feel the first rumblings of this onslaught well before now. The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, a successful broadside against public sector unions and a precursor of President Trump’s attacks on federal workers, is a good example. Moreover, if you dug into the genealogy of that decision, as Mary Bottari did for In These Times, you would both uncover the network of highly organized, disciplined, and very well-funded organizations that the right has been using to establish the intellectual, legal, and political credentials for its causes and discover the degree to which they have sought to shield that network and its funding sources from public scrutiny.

When I was secretary of my faculty union I wrote a blog post and gave a presentation for our members about that network, since the outcome of Janus would have a direct impact on our local. I was surprised and not a little frustrated that those in attendance were moved neither to any visible anger nor to some form of mobilization by what I told them. I eventually came to understand, though, that this lack of response had less to do with the inertia of indifference than with how powerless the membership felt, individually and collectively, confronted with that network’s vast and apparently indomitable presence.

That kind of paralysis is perfectly understandable in a rank and file, whether we’re talking about union members or people on the street. It seems inexcusable to me, however, in those who have been charged with leading the opposition to what the Trump administration and the forces behind it are trying to accomplish. Even though the Democratic leadership should have known perfectly well from Trump’s behavior during his first administration, for example, that appealing to politics-as-usual was unlikely to work as a deterrent—especially since he no longer had around him the advisors and other staff members to whom such an appeal would matter—they initially chose to respond as if that playbook was still the best way to counter Trump. Or, to put that another way, as if they did not have resources, platforms, and institutional power of their own that they could have used to respond to him on his own terms.

Since then, there have been some bright spots: Supreme Court cases that have not gone Trump’s way; the fact that some Republicans have begun, even if only tentatively, to push back against some of his excesses; the fact that his approval ratings, despite small fluctuations, have remained consistently so low; the “No Kings” protests; grassroots organizing to counter the administration’s anti-immigrant offensive; and California’s redistricting success in response to efforts by Republicans to use that strategy in other states to help them gain seats in Congress.

Perhaps the most prominent bright spots, however—though it may be hard to keep them front of mind given how overwhelming the twenty-four hour news cycle can be—were the elections of Democratic governors in New Jersey and Virginia, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger respectively, and the against-all-odds election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York.

2

I have been saddened, but not surprised by the continuing attempts, both Republican and Democratic, to discredit Mamdani, not by arguing seriously against his positions and proposals, but by smearing him for being Muslim, and a proud one at that, for having the temerity to think for himself on the question of Israel and Palestine and to put his money where his mouth is on that question, and for running unapologetically as a Democratic Socialist who stands first and foremost with working people.

Among the many virtues of Mamdani’s campaign, which he crystalized in his inaugural address, was its intellectual rigor. If you listened carefully, you could hear the vibrations not just of Marxist, but also post-colonial analysis—all of it synthesized and made accessible through story and concrete, verifiable examples that surfaced the concerns not only of those who voted for him, but also those who didn’t. One might be forgiven, in fact, for thinking that it was and is his opponents’ unwillingness to take on this intellectual rigor that led them to default to their ultimately unsuccessful smear campaigns; and we should take it as a truly hopeful sign that a majority of New Yorkers seem to have understood this and voted for the candidate who gave them credit for being intelligent enough to do so.

In a way, Mamdani’s victory is an inverse mirror image of Trump’s. Trump, too, wove a narrative that convinced the people who voted for him that he cared about their concerns and would put them first once he was in office. Despite his narrative’s easy falsifiability, however, no convincing counterstory has emerged to capture voters’ imaginations at the national level. One reason for this is that the people behind Trump have not only spent decades building an intellectual infrastructure to give the story he tells credibility—it’s part of the network of organizations that Mary Bottari uncovered for In These Times—they have also devoted their energies during that same period to undermining public trust in the infrastructure that provides scaffolding for stories like the one Mamdani has told: higher education.

3

If you trace the genealogy of Project 2025, the current iteration of the right’s playbook, you’ll find it leads back to a document from the 1970s called the Powell Memorandum, which was written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. for the Education Committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce. In that document, Powell outlined a strategy for combatting what he characterized as a “broad attack” from the left on “the American economic system.”

Powell recognized that higher ed had become a bastion of the left from which it could launch this attack with relative impunity, and he proposed a two-pronged strategy in response. First, he argued for setting up an opposing network of think tanks outside the academy to provide an intellectual pedigree on which the popularizers of the right’s positions could rely. Second, he advocated the corporatization of higher education as a way of undermining the left’s hold on those institutions. If colleges were run like businesses, the subtext of his argument ran, if higher ed administrations were given no choice but to prioritize the bottom line in fulfilling their missions, the idea that the purpose of higher education was first and foremost to further the public good in a civic sense would collapse on itself, essentially neutering the intellectual pedigree on which the left had been depending.

Broadly speaking, Powell’s strategy boiled down to two main tactics: stack university boards of trustees with business leaders who would bring a bottom-line, productivity-oriented, profit and loss sensibility to how an institution defined and fulfilled its mission and be unapologetic in using funding as leverage to shape an institution’s curricular and programmatic offerings. It’s not hard to find evidence that Powell’s strategy worked. I would hate to have been, for example, in the position of the administrators at NYU Langone who had to make the devil’s choice between pausing gender affirming care for those under the age of nineteen and facing the prospect of losing funding that other patients’ lives might have depended on. I am also glad not to have been in the administration of any of the universities that capitulated to Trump when he went after them for their handling of both pro-Palestinian demonstrations and antisemitism, whether real or imagined, on campus.

It’s easy to call those decisions cowardly, though I think it would be dishonest to claim that cowardice played no role in how they were made. It would be similarly dishonest, however, to pretend that those institutions were not caught between a financial rock and a hard place, just as Powell intended. I may disagree in the strongest terms with the decisions those institutions ultimately made, but I am also reluctant to Monday morning quarterback the people who had to make them. I wasn’t in the room and therefore cannot weigh all the factors they had to take into consideration when deciding whether to defy Trump and hurt one group of people or to capitulate and hurt another. What I know for sure is that no one with real political power made the case that universities should not be defined by the corporate values that held, collectively, billions of dollars of both public and private funding over the heads of those administrations and that higher education should instead be protected as a civic institution the goal of which is to advance the public good.

The Democrats have been complicit in the corporatizing of higher ed almost from the start. You can see this in the fact that they have, at all levels of government, underfunded public higher education for decades. In 2017, for example, student-paid tuition accounted for nearly half of the total revenue for public institutions of higher education nationwide and for more than half of that revenue in twenty-eight states. There have been some recent attempts to rectify this situation. States like New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Mexico are actively trying to make community college free. Those efforts, however, tend to focus on some form of workforce development, which is entirely in keeping with a corporatizing ethos and is, in fact, strong evidence of the degree to which the Democratic leadership has ceded to the Republicans the argument over what kind of public good higher education is supposed to do.

4

The right’s goal in all this, and they have achieved it to a disheartening degree, is to erode public trust in higher education as a civic infrastructure for the ongoing democratization of culture and society, replacing it instead with a vision of higher ed as a transactional site where students exchange money for a degree that will earn them a job. Consider, for example, how relatively easy it was for Republicans to pave the way for the government-imposed curricular restrictions on teaching so-called race or gender ideology. Without any proactive, sustained, coherent, substantive pushback from the other side of the aisle, they were able to transform critical race theory—a method of structural analysis originating in law schools—into a catchall term for any teaching about racism that named it for what it was; and they turned “woke” into a caricature of identity politics taken to its extreme and then made that caricature stand in the public’s imagination for the left’s politics as a whole.

That Mamdani was able to win by campaigning on a left-wing analysis with unmistakable roots in higher education, turning it into a position that people felt they could trust, that gave them hope, is all the more remarkable for the ways in which it clearly broke a significant number of people out of the kind of paralysis I spoke about above. More to the point, he broke the hold of that paralysis without asking them for the kind of naïve loyalty that most politicians seek to elicit. One way he did this was by unapologetically defining the aspirational component of his campaign as both collective and inclusive, in stark contrast to the individualistic and exclusionary ways that not only Trump, but also Andrew Cuomo campaigned—at least until Cuomo realized that he needed to try to respond to Mamdani on his own terms.

That kind of all-too-common reactive shift within a campaign season is precisely why voters tend to see politicians’ promises as the necessary rhetoric a candidate must put out there and that may or may not bear any resemblance to what they will do if they are elected; and it is, I have no doubt, why many people who did not succumb to the smear campaign against Mamdani still tended to see his proposals—like free bus service, universal child care, and city-funded grocery stores—as pie-in-the-sky, bait-and-switch politics as usual.

Strip those doubts of their (well-earned) cynicism and set aside labels like capitalism and socialism, each of which carries inaccurate ideological baggage in the public imagination, and you’re still left with a fact that voters have to contend with in any election: the policy positions put forward by those running for office, the promises they make about what they are going to do, are by definition never going to be fully realized. To use that fact as an excuse not to take Mamdani’s proposals seriously, however, is to surrender to the paralysis I talked about above, which serves only the needs of those who would prefer that the public remain paralyzed, making it that much easier for them to have their way with both the country and the world, empowering and enriching themselves at our expense.

In the wake of Mamdani’s victory, a reporter asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whether she thought he was the future of the Democratic Party. She responded by pointing out the differences between him and now-Governors Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, suggesting that maybe the future of the party had more to do with figuring out how to use those differences productively when speaking to an electorate as varied as that of the United States, rather than trying to homogenize them into a single party persona. Ocasio-Cortez could only take that position, however, because each of those women ran on the region-appropriate versions of the same kinds of collective and inclusive aspirations that Mamdani ran on.

When I say that it’s important to take Mamdani’s proposals seriously, in other words, I am not saying, simply, “give him a chance,” the way we often say newly elected officials deserve a chance merely because they have been elected. I am suggesting that the choice to take him seriously on his own terms, or not, is actually a choice between two different aspirational visions for the people of New York City, and by extension the nation and the world, and I am suggesting that the choice we make—collective and inclusive or exclusionary and individual—will also make a statement about whose side we are truly on.