In the aftermath of New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s White House meeting with Donald Trump, in which the so-called “democratic socialist” and the fascist would-be dictator exchanged pleasantries and mutual praise, Jacobin, the unofficial organ of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has published a series of articles hailing the meeting and praising Mamdani’s capitulation to Trump as a political tour de force.

One of the most significant of these articles is a commentary by Christopher Marquis headlined “Trump and Mamdani Agree on the State, Not on Whom It Serves.” In the course of the article, Marquis, a professor of management at the University of Cambridge, argues that the capitalist state is not intrinsically hostile to the interests of the working class and can, through prodding from the “left,” be either pressured to serve the needs of working people or captured outright by them.

This argument exemplifies the role of the DSA and the middle class pseudo-left more broadly in promoting illusions in the Democratic Party and propping up the capitalist system, which is careening toward fascism and world war, defending it against the coming revolutionary challenge from the working class.

The article is not an academic exercise. It is a political manifesto by the DSA and Jacobin’s privileged petty-bourgeois milieu, justifying their open collaboration with a fascistic administration and defending the capitalist state itself. The headline’s claim that “Trump and Mamdani agree on the state” is correct. There is an underlying agreement between the two, as well as the DSA, that the existing state is sacrosanct.