This Is How We Win Without the Dems

Zohran Mamdani offers a blueprint to successful coalition building on the left

Whether you like him or not, whether he is too left or not left enough, if you are someone who hates MAGA more than you hate the new mayor-elect of New York City, there is a lot to learn from what Zohran Mamdani says and how he says it. That storytelling is vital to our success.

Because beneath the charm and that million-watt smile (which can’t be discredited for their hard work), what Zohran Mamdani is doing is political meaning-making as a unifier.

There’s a kind of magic that happens when ordinary people stop asking permission to live with dignity. When a bodega owner, a nurse, a taxi driver, a parent juggling impossible bills, all decide that enough is enough. That’s the moment politics becomes spellwork—not the kind that hides in candles and sigils, but the kind that moves through breath, body, and shared will.

But no spell is complete without both intention and action, which, after all, is the Buddha’s formula for karma (Pāli: kamma)—volitional action, the fusion of what we do and why we do it.

At one point in his victory speech, Mamdani said,

“Central to that vision will be the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello LaGuardia… An agenda that will freeze the rents… make buses fast and free… and deliver universal childcare across our city” (12:13–12:34).

It is both a policy promise and a kind of invocation, a declaration that the magic must be material, not metaphorical. This is form.

And yet, as Pissed Magistus reminds us in his analysis of the same moment, we should be cautious about turning icon or ideology into identity. “When you commit an ideology to your identity,” he says, “then looking for solutions to a problem outside of that ideology becomes sacrilegious… Human society lives, it breathes, it grows. No finite ideology can contain its complexity.” This is emptiness.

Emptiness is a warning against spiritual bypassing and political orthodoxy. In Buddhist terms, it’s the middle path, the impossible balance between right view and not clinging to fixed views.

In magical terms, it’s the reminder that a spell ossifies if you mistake the symbol for the source, if you mistake one person as savior. We can admire the vision and still stay awake to the risk of turning democratic socialism, or any system, into self.

Because what we’re building can’t just be a party platform; it has to be a living practice. Sabotage and concentrated power are what actually kill movements: “When the gap between the people and the powerful grows too big, the people in power start viewing the people as expendable… and the election of Zohran Mamdani is a reaction to this very process,” Pissed Magistus warns.

What Mamdani’s win shows us is that the antidote to authoritarianism is participation. The antidote to despair is agency. The antidote to fear is community.

And the antidote to cynicism is karma understood properly: not cosmic bookkeeping, but intentional, sustained, compassionate action.

I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. We can crush on Mamdani until he takes office. But we must remember that the magic and the liberation lie in our collective hands. It is not democratic socialism, it is not Zohran Mamdani. It is the meaning we are making around collective action and the collective intention behind it.

In his victory speech, Mamdani named the values behind his campaign that created a coalition that wins—without the Democrats.

These are the values that brought so many together. And these are the values, when backed by collective action, that will help us change the tide of growing authoritarianism without the flaccid dems.

So let’s not idolize the man or the party, but only the collective vision, the collective mission, and the collective action to realize it.

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1. Lead with material clarity

Buddhist practice teaches us to see clearly—to cut through illusion. Politics needs the same discipline. We lose when we try to explain ourselves in slogans that float above reality. We win when people can feel the change in their rent, their bus route, their childcare bill.

That means freezing or capping rent hikes nationally. It means making public transit fast and free, building bus lanes before stadiums. It means universal childcare and eldercare paid for by wealth, not wages. It means restoring public housing as a public good.

The spellcaster in us knows that words carry power when they are embodied. The dharma in us knows that liberation is always local. “Freeze rents. Free buses. Universal childcare.” That’s the mantra. Simple enough to chant. Real enough to touch.

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2. Build a multiracial working-class coalition rooted in real life

Every tradition worth keeping teaches that transformation happens in relationship. Sangha, coven, union—different names for the same truth. The people who share food, care, and risk are the ones who change the world.

Victory comes from organizers who speak the language of work, not the language of consultants. We must build movements around jobs, housing, and schools. We must center immigrant, Black, brown, rural, and care-economy workers in leadership—not as props for someone else’s photo op. We must run campaigns in multiple languages and pay translators as sacred workers of democracy.

Coalition is the new coven, the new sangha. It’s where practice becomes policy.

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3. Make democracy something we do, not something done to us

Hope is not a mood, it’s a discipline. In Buddhist practice, we return to the breath over and over. In politics, we return to the people over and over. That’s how cynicism erodes: through consistent, communal attention.

We can build year-round canvassing that doubles as community care—tenant defense, legal aid, childcare swaps. We can track local wins publicly: rents frozen, clinics opened, parks cleaned, neighbors fed. We can replace consultant-run campaigns with neighbors who actually know the block. Democracy, like mindfulness, is not an event; it’s a practice.

When we breathe together, the illusion of separation collapses.

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4. Confront oligarchy with solidarity, not slogans

There’s a reason every mystical tradition warns against illusion: the powerful depend on it. The billionaire class thrives by convincing the $30-an-hour worker that their enemy is the one making $20.

We can break that spell. End billionaire tax loopholes and corporate subsidies. Expand the right to unionize and get money out of politics. Break up monopoly landlords, insurers, and tech conglomerates. Establish public banks and cooperative ownership models that circulate wealth like blood instead of hoarding it like a dragon.

Solidarity is the anti-illusion. It’s the light that makes shadows visible.

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5. Redefine safety as collective care

In both witchcraft and dharma, protection doesn’t come from fear, it comes from connection. True safety is not a wall; it’s a web.

We can build departments of community care that focus on housing, mental health, and food security. We can replace police in non-violent crisis calls with trained non-police responders. We can invest in restorative justice, housing-first programs, and worker rights as the real form of crime prevention.

Safety is when everyone is housed, fed, and known. It’s when a city becomes a refuge instead of a threat. That’s not idealism; it’s interdependence operationalized.

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6. Govern like organizers, not managers

Dharma practice teaches us to act without attachment to results but with complete attention to causes and conditions. Governance can work the same way. “Relentless improvement” is not perfectionism—it’s humility in motion.

Hire more teachers, nurses, and public workers. Measure success by lived experience, not spreadsheets: wait times, air quality, eviction rates. Cut bureaucratic bloat and reinvest in front-line care. Make every meeting public by default, every dataset open-source. Transparency banishes corruption.

Competence and compassion are not opposites—they are how wisdom looks when applied.

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7. Refuse division, practice belonging

All separation is delusion. Every “us vs. them” is a trick of the mind—one that has justified centuries of domination. The spiritual task of our time is to dissolve those lines in public life as fiercely as we dissolve them in private practice.

We must codify anti-hate protections and equal rights at every level of government. We must offer sanctuary to immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees, and dismantle the for-profit detention machine. We must defend the rights and dignity of trans people, women, and families of all forms.

A democracy that forgets its own plurality becomes its own curse.

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8. Beat authoritarianism by dismantling its fuel

Fascism feeds on scarcity, humiliation, and despair. It is not defeated by clever arguments but by changing the material and emotional conditions that give it life. The antidote to fear is belonging.

Economic security is democracy’s immune system: a jobs guarantee, a living wage, union power. Massive public investment in housing, healthcare, and climate resilience must become the norm. We need truthful media reform and digital democracy to break the corporate capture of our attention. And we must weave local mutual-aid networks into national solidarity funds so that care becomes a civic right, not a private burden.

As the Buddha said: “Hatred is never appeased by hatred. It is only appeased by love.” Love, in this context, looks like policy.

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9. Make hope the organizing strategy

Hope is not naive. It’s the refusal to stop showing up. It’s the discipline of returning, again and again, to what’s alive.

Every spell has an ingredient list—salt, flame, smoke, word—but the most important ingredient is action. A spell uncast is only potential. The same is true of the dharma. Karma means volitional action: deed infused with intent. It is both what we do and why we do it.

That’s the hinge of spellwork. When we align intent (compassion, clarity, courage) with action (policy, protest, daily care), the world changes shape. Not by accident, but by law. That is karma’s most radical teaching: that no action disappears. Every breath, every effort, every knock on a neighbor’s door ripples outward into the web of becoming.

Every campaign should end with one clear next step: a canvass, a clinic, a care drive. Art, story, and ritual must live at the center of our politics, so belonging replaces burnout. Celebrate small wins publicly and often, joy is a renewable resource.

Magic is not about bending reality to our will; it’s about aligning will with what’s real. The dharma says the same. When we act in harmony with the laws of interdependence, change is inevitable.

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Power doesn’t live in one person or one party. It lives where we organize it: in rent strikes, union drives, food pantries, mutual-aid circles, city halls reclaimed from cynicism, and neighborhoods that learn to breathe together again.

We can win without the Democrats because we were never meant to wait for them in the first place.

Action is the spell. Intent is the vow. Together, they’re karma—the engine of our wildest moral imagination come to fruition.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Constant Craving ✨