The new year opened with a pair of scenes that illustrated the great divide within the US and the stakes of the ongoing contest over its future. On 1 January, in a star-studded inauguration ceremony of uncommon pomp and optimism, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, was sworn in as the new mayor of New York and delivered a speech that declared the era of small government and centrist inhibition to be over, and a new dawn of ambitious social welfare programs to begin.

The new mayor’s inauguration is the culmination of a decade of growth from the Democratic party’s insurgent left wing, and results from a feat of organizing within the country’s largest city that relied upon mass mobilization from downwardly mobile and economically disenfranchised millennial and gen Z voters. It was hailed as a generational shift in US politics, inaugurating a new, 21st-century vision for the party.

And less than two days later, from his Mar-a-Lago resort, Donald Trump, who was once thought to represent a decisive shift for his own Republican party, announced that his administration had carried out an action that seemed characteristic of the old, Bush-era past. An abrupt overseas bombing campaign and the kidnapping of a foreign head of state, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, were facilitated without UN or congressional approval, in plain violation of international law and the US constitution. The raid was meant to inaugurate a regime change in the South American country and to facilitate a neocolonial-style mass theft of that country’s oil and mineral resources.

One project was produced by a massive grassroots

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