And So It Begins
What We Do Next Matters Most
Tuesday night delivered something worth celebrating: voters chose care over cruelty, community over isolation, systems designed to serve life over systems designed to extract from it.
Zohran Mamdani won New York City on a platform of free buses, rent freezes, and living wages. Abigail Spanberger became Virginia’s first female governor. Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey. California voters approved redistricting that could shift congressional power. Democrats retained and expanded state-level positions across multiple states.
These are real victories with real policies that will improve lives.
People will benefit. Communities will have more breathing room. These wins matter. And they’re not enough—not because they’re inadequate, but because no electoral victory alone can transform the systems within which it operates.
Why We Voted
We voted because voting matters—not as salvation, but as care. As maintenance of the space in which transformation becomes possible. We chose leaders whose vision enlarges rather than contracts, whose empathy reaches beyond their own reflection. That was the right choice. That was necessary.
But voting prevents further harm; it doesn’t build liberation. It opens doors; it doesn’t construct what lies beyond them. The ballot is a language of relation with power—a way of saying “legitimacy is lent, not owned.”
What we voted for on Tuesday was breathing room. The chance to build. Space to construct what electoral politics alone can never deliver.
That work is done. Now comes the next part.
The Structural Limit
Elections are fundamentally limited not because candidates are insincere or policies inadequate. It’s because the greatest electoral victories still yield results within systems designed for extraction.
Free transit still requires infrastructure controlled by state bureaucracies. Affordable housing still depends on developers, financiers, and zoning boards. Living wages still leave workers dependent on employers for survival. Rent controls still treat housing as commodity rather than commons.
These are reforms within existing systems, not alternatives to them.
These alone are insufficient. Electoral wins without systemic transformation follow a predictable arc:
Initial victory
Partial implementation,
Structural resistance,
Slow erosion,
Eventual reversion.
The system absorbs what it can, resists what it must, and the fundamental architecture remains unchanged.
We’ve seen this pattern repeat: progressive mayors in the 1980s and 90s, municipal socialism experiments in the early 2000s, recent rent control victories that face immediate legal challenges and market workarounds. Regardless of who governs, well-intentioned leaders deliver improvements, then watch as structural constraints limit what’s possible.
We can’t transform extraction into regeneration from within. The logic of domination can’t be voted away while we still operate within institutions designed to concentrate power.
The alternative isn’t opposing these victories. It’s building alongside them.
What We Must Build
The energy currently flowing needs to redirect into construction.
Not as replacement for electoral participation, but as completion of it. Voting opens doors. What we build upon walking through them determines whether change compounds or dissipates.
As mayors negotiate for housing funds, we build community land trusts that remove housing from the market entirely. When new administrations implement transit improvements, we establish neighborhood councils that coordinate mutual aid beyond city services. When governors push for better wages. We launch worker cooperatives where wage labor becomes irrelevant because surplus belongs to those who create it. When celebrating electoral wins, we come together and plan infrastructure that makes institutional constraint less determinative in our lives.
Use electoral victories as the impetus for building what doesn’t require approval or permission, things that can’t be reversed by the next administration, things that demonstrate liberation instead of promising it.
Community land trusts remove housing from commodity markets entirely.
Worker cooperatives make minimum wage policy irrelevant by eliminating wage labor itself.
Mutual aid networks provide what government services can’t or won’t, independent of who governs.
Neighborhood assemblies practice direct democracy that doesn’t require city council approval.
Food cooperatives create community-controlled systems beyond market volatility and policy shifts.
These models already exist and work. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston has held community land trust property for decades. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain employ around 70,000 people. Mutual aid networks sustained communities through the Covid-19 pandemic when government systems failed.
What’s missing isn’t proof of concept—it’s scale.
The Two-Front Strategy
Most movements falter by treating electoral politics and alternative infrastructure as competing strategies rather than complementary ones.
History shows us what works: movements that combine institutional participation with parallel construction. Labor movements fought for legislative protections while building union halls and cooperative enterprises. Civil rights organizations pursued legal victories while establishing independent schools, credit unions, and community centers. Religious communities have sustained themselves for centuries through both civic engagement and mutual support networks.
Successful transformation happens when people work within existing systems while simultaneously building alternatives that demonstrate what’s possible beyond them.
Reform and revolution simultaneously—that’s what’s needed. Defend reforms that improve conditions while revolutionizing conditions fundamentally.
Electoral wins create openings. Good policies provide impetus for construction. Support every reform that improves lives, but don’t confuse electoral victory with transformation and don’t mistake better leadership for liberated communities.
We can’t let the energy of this moment dissipate into hope that someone else will fix what we alone can build.
The Deeper Protection
The infrastructure we build serves multiple purposes simultaneously.
Community land trusts protect housing from both market speculation and commodification within capitalism. Worker cooperatives eliminate the wage labor relationship itself, not just its worst exploitation. Mutual aid networks provide what institutions fail to deliver while making dependence on those institutions less total.
Building these alternatives makes systemic extraction—regardless of who administers it—less determinative of our lives.
Transformation happens through lived proof that alternatives work better than what they replace. People don’t radicalize through rhetoric. They radicalize through experience. They experience community land trusts providing stable housing, while private markets exclude them. They work in cooperatives where they control surplus. They encounter mutual aid networks delivering what institutions won’t or can’t.
Build infrastructure that improves lives right now while demonstrating what’s possible.
Forge it while we have momentum from Tuesday’s wins. Construct it so when the next crisis comes—regardless of who governs—people experience working alternatives, not just electoral promises.
Next Steps
The person you need to unite with isn’t on a ballot. They’re next door. In your building. At your workplace. They’re the ones who will help you start the community land trust, form the worker cooperative, organize the mutual aid network, establish the neighborhood assembly.
Politicians can open doors. Tuesday’s winners will create space for change. But the change itself? That happens between you and your neighbors deciding you’re all done waiting for permission to make your lives better.
Always vote for candidates who serve life, and support policies that create breathing room. But always always remember to use every opening electoral victories create.
And then build. Build the infrastructure that demonstrates what’s possible. Build the systems that prove community works. Build what survives regardless of who’s in office or what the next election brings.
That’s the strategy. Networks of people making their communities work better than the systems designed to extract from them.
Tuesday opened doors, no doubt. It’s time we walk through them and construct what lies beyond.
We have momentum, now let’s use it.