Washington D.C. Must Have a Socialist Mayor

Trump’s Coup Grows Nearer Every Day. Kenyan McDuffie Will Do Nothing to Help Stop It. Vote Janeese Lewis George in the coming Democratic Primary.

By T.E. Moon

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 07: Councilmember Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) is seen during a city council meeting in Washington, DC on February 07, 2023. (Photo by Craig Hudson for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Despite the oppression of the withering humidity, Washington, D.C. feels deceptively docile. The district appears managed by the sanitized routine of imperial bureaucracy. Gaggles of National Guardsmen patrol its wide, radiating streets and vast, concrete expanses. But anyone who actually lives there knows this peace is a fiction. 

The masses of D.C. have moved in violent spasms—sudden, righteous, furious eruptions like the massive 1968 uprisings and the 2020 George Floyd rebellion—where the simmering rage of the working class broke through the surface in fits of passion, only to be forced back down until the next spark hit. We are currently living in the quiet space between the fractures.

This is the real backdrop of the 2026 mayoral race. The election simply cannot be cynically dismissed as a mere managerial interview. It is a fight to position our fortifications atop a crucial tactical hill. The outcome helps to determine the owner of the physical infrastructure of the coming January 6th 2.0.

We are staring down the barrel of a nationalist crackdown in 2029. The swamp apes of the liberal establishment have already shown they lack the stomach to do anything but file a polite dissent in the midst of democratic disintegration. And so we must displace this establishment, whole hog, or at least every quivering elected we can manage to pick off in the short time we have. Here lies a great opportunity, right in the nation's capital!

To speak frankly: if a socialist holds the mayor's office, the levers of city logistics—the transit lines, the sanitation fleets, the local police—are placed in prime position to be contested by the people in their struggle with the regime over Trump’s likely attempts to steal the 2028 election.

JLG will not save us from Fascism, nor will she deliver Communism, even in one city. We support her campaign nonetheless because, when Trump’s coup comes, the working class of the capital, like the working class of the country, will need every piece of structural leverage they can get their hands on to save themselves.

The Grievances of the Masses of the Capital

Let me be clear: the defense of democracy cannot be a movement of political tourists flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport for a weekend march, snapping their selfies in front of a barricade, and catching a flight home. The masses of Washington, D.C., fueled by their specific, material grievances, are the indispensable vanguard to lead our genuine, democratic revolution.

Let us start with the legal reality. The District is, structurally and essentially, a colony. Its citizens lack statehood, lack true self-government, and suffer the constant, humiliating overreach of a federal government that casually vetoes local laws and overrides local autonomy. The people who live there do not govern there. Their license plates literally read, “Taxation Without Representation,” a clear indication of the lack of sovereignty enjoyed by the inhabitants of the capital.

This is a dynamic JLG herself personally studied, having written her thesis on D.C. statehood and the city’s enduring colonial status. The current governing framework—the D.C. Home Rule Act—is not some ancient and unchangeable law of scripture but a half-century-old, wobbling political compromise predicated on the people of the district continuing to accept their status as governed.  

This goes without mentioning the local D.C. Metropolitan Police. When not forced to occupy the city at the behest of the feds against the will of local officials, as the Home Rule Act mandates, the department represents the same mandate of racist occupation and counterinsurgency as every other police force in the country. 

The tremendous show of popular outrage against this arrangement throughout the 2010s and 2020s did not lead to police abolition in the District, nor anywhere else. The state was never seized by the people, and so it, and our society, spiraled further into calcified alienation and habitual violence.

Then there is the economic deprivation. D.C. routinely ranks among the most expensive places to live anywhere in the nation. You have a city where systemic poverty, astronomical rent, and the ruthless displacement of the Black working class exist shoulder-to-shoulder with the most powerful political institutions on earth.

The marble monuments are washed and maintained by a precarious, exhausted workforce—the people who clean the buildings, serve the food, and drive the buses—systematically abused by the very system they prop up. 

Hundreds of thousands of Federal workers live in the surrounding D.C., Maryland, and Virginia areas (DMV), their jobs crudely threatened by DOGE and Russ Vought. Thousands more had their livelihood eviscerated by welfare cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill.

And, finally, there exists no shortage of political grievances. To the right-wing nationalist coalition, D.C. is not a city of living, breathing people. It is a degenerate symbol to be tamed, leashed, and made to shut up. 

We have seen this playbook before in the federal occupation of Minneapolis—where ICE raids and state-sanctioned violence became the daily reality of the people there. D.C. already lives under the weight of this dynamic. 

The federal apparatus is actively channeling the bile of a nationalist base that despises the city and everything its multi-racial working class represents. Trump and his cronies want to make a bloody example out of them—and they have the guns, and the opportunity, to try.

The Pivot to District Power

To fight this, the Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America (MDCDSA) must continue to evolve. They did not sprout from the earth fully formed; they built power over a decade of working the organizing grind.

And as recent history has proven, socialist growth does not come from inward-facing navel-gazing or perfecting internal committee structures. It comes from large, combative, external campaigns that identify an enemy and pick a fight.

For years, progressives in D.C. and across the country have played "survival politics"—mitigating harm, negotiating with the center, and trying to push a hostile establishment slightly to the left. The campaign for JLG represents a critical opportunity to leap towards "hegemonic politics"—to break the establishment Democratic machine that has mismanaged and oppressed America and its people for decades, and to replace their power centers with our own.

JLG is imperfect. The people of the capital, the MDCDSA, and JLG herself assuredly know this. She is a politician navigating a treacherous landscape, and she does not claim to be a revolutionary saint. But the objective here is not just holding a progressive line against the remnants of Mayor Bowser's machine or delivering on some set of policies. 

The goal is winning the local executive apparatus of the capital—the D.C. mayoral authority—and pressuring for the implementation of a rival governing vision that mobilizes the masses in preparation for Trump's despotic machinations. In this way, we build a bulwark of working-class power right in the nation's nerve center in a crucial hour of political instability. 

Yes, the D.C. local government is weak, by design. All the better! A victory for the Socialists presents an opportunity for both us and the working people of the city. The working people of the city have been neglected, occupied, and humiliated. Their institutions are feckless, their leaders cowards, and their powers feeble. 

We must be their weapon! We can offer them a muscular D.C. government, one willing to marshal the might of the millions living in the DMV.

What Can a Mayor Actually Do?

When I have looked toward the inevitable constitutional crisis of 2029, cynics have always interjected: We can't win! The Left cannot possibly defeat the American military in a mass uprising.

This assumes we intend to line up on the National Mall and trade rifle volleys with the 101st Airborne. As I’ve said before and will say again, we do not have to, nor is it desirable to, outshoot the federal apparatus. We must paralyze it. And this is exactly why the Mayor’s office matters.

Yes, the D.C. Mayor occupies a technically weak office, hobbled by congressional oversight and lacking command of a National Guard. But the Mayor controls the physical logistics of the city.

Look at Jacob Frey in Minneapolis in 2020. When the crisis hit, his instincts defaulted to the preservation of 'good order'—which is to say, bourgeois property. He ended up urging the people to stand down and categorically refused to mobilize forces under his command. Instead, Frey collaborated with the administration to trick the people into submission by means of a temporary DHS retreat from the city. 

But what could a mayor have done? What must our demands be?

The D.C. Mayor commands the Department of Public Works. In a crisis of dual power, thirty-ton garbage trucks parked horizontally across the Arlington Memorial Bridge are worth a thousand rhetorical flourishes. 

The Mayor commands the Metropolitan Police Department. An executive order can instruct the MPD to stand down, to refuse all logistical cooperation with ICE, and to deny the federal government the local muscle it needs to kettle protesters. 

She also controls the District Department of Transportation (DDOT). City buses and municipal vehicles can be strategically deployed to block regime loyalists, close physical streets, and supply the mass democratic movement occupying the avenues.

Unfortunately, under the Home Rule Act, the President has the explicit legal authority to federalize the MPD during an emergency. The regime will inevitably attempt to strip these powers from the toolkit of an unfriendly mayor. 

We do not have to guess what this escalating subjugation looks like; a test run already occurred in August 2025, when Trump invoked Section 740 of the Home Rule Act to strip control of the MPD from local officials. 

While that particular direct police takeover legally expired after thirty days, the regime simply pivoted, currently planning to flood the District with National Guardsmen for a heavily militarized “America 250 celebration summer surge"—another example of the provocations the liberal establishment is currently trying, and failing, to politely litigate away in the courts.

We must force the question. We must make the federal government actively seize the city's police force from municipal control. We must prove our point, expose the colonial occupation for what it is, and rally the masses against it. The campaign and the office must serve as the point of unity for the people, consolidating their strength and daring the state to show its true authoritarian face.  

This “position of weakness” is simply the struggle itself honestly laid bare. And if nothing else, the socialist mayor is a wrench in the machine that makes the opposite result—the weaponization of the D.C. mayor’s office against the people, or their completely silencing, impossible. 

We do not elect Janeese Lewis George expecting her to single-handedly engineer our salvation. We elect her so that we can construct a political environment where her hand is forced. A liberal opponent will always prioritize peace over justice. JLG, structurally tethered to the socialist coalition that will put her in office, will operate on a different calculus. 

But that only happens if the democratic revolution builds a popular front so overwhelmingly powerful—so undeniable in the streets—that it becomes politically and materially impossible for her to side with the regime.

The False Choice of Betrayal

This brings us to the final, fatalistic critique of the electoral project: Mayors don't matter. There is no difference between a Jacob Frey—who sold out the Minneapolis uprising to protect capitalist property and Fascist order—and a socialist mayor. JLG will just betray us when the pressure is on.

Even if JLG deeply desires stability and faces intense material pressure from capital and the regime to crush the protests, she remains uniquely cross-pressured. Unlike a neoliberal mayor whose survival depends on real estate developers and corporate donors, JLG's political survival relies entirely on the socialist, progressive, and labor coalition that will carry her into power.

She is in fact already backed by all the left and labor support that D.C. politics can muster. She will be the product of a movement already in existence now, that has already demonstrated the capacity to fight: from the efforts against slashing over a billion dollars from the D.C. government budget to the mass action of Washingtonian students and activists during the Palestinian solidarity encampments and marches.

But let us entertain the absolute worst-case scenario. What if JLG does betray the movement? What if she proves to be a coward and a social democrat when the tear gas starts flying?

Her failure to channel the will of the people would perfectly expose the limits of social democracy, demonstrating it for all the people to see. It would strip away the illusion of reformism not just in theory, but in the lived experience of the people. 

In other words, it provides the exact historical opening needed for a genuine, uncompromising communist politics to articulate itself and assume leadership of the vanguard in the wake. Our odds of winning rise precipitously if she holds the line, and we draw the battlefield with pristine clarity if she breaks.

Victory in the D.C. mayor’s race will serve as yet another demonstration of the power of the current populist wave. More optimistically, a Janeese Lewis George administration will provide necessary political cover for the working class to consolidate its power, in addition to breaking the centrist clique’s stranglehold on the Democratic Party. Communities fighting displacement and workers resisting federal austerity will suddenly have the explicit backing of the district executive. The resulting friction between her office and the federal regime will act as a continuous organizing catalyst, forging a loose coalition of activists into a disciplined, mass-mobilized vanguard prepared to contest the state when the 2029 crisis arrives. 

The occupation of D.C. has been ongoing for years, right now, as you read this sentence. The constitutional crisis of 2029 is rapidly approaching, as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise. We must secure as much of the terrain as is in our power to hold. 

We must fight for Janeese Lewis George not because she will individually save us, nor because her victory represents some final, grand, and ultimate triumph of Communism. 

We must fight because securing the institutional leverage of the mayor’s office helps to give the working class of Washington, D.C. the tools needed to tangibly and concretely defeat the regime. 

This election is nowhere near the end of our struggles, but a crucial prerequisite to our eventual victory.  

The primary is June 16th. Vote Janeese Lewis George. 

Geese Magazine and T. E. Moon have no professional relationship with the Janeese Lewis George campaign.