To prevent tyranny, fight inequality

Waleed Shahid on how inequality fuels authoritarianism, and the lineage that connects FDR, the United Auto Workers, and now Zohran Mamdani

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In this letter, the political strategist and writer Waleed Shahid situates Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, in an American political tradition that equates the battle against fascism with that against racial and economic exploitation and inequality — the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Shahid, best known to Ink readers for his visionary post-election manifesto, has worked on campaigns for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, and Summer Lee, among others, and is a former Bernie Sanders staffer. He is currently the executive director of the progressive group The Bloc. We encourage you to read and share, and subscribe to Shahid’s newsletter and follow along with his always insightful thinking on the future of progressive politics.

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By Waleed Shahid

In January 1944, as American troops battled fascism abroad, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a stark warning to Congress: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Roosevelt recognized that defeating authoritarianism overseas required confronting economic insecurity at home. Democracy, he insisted, demanded more than abstract political rights — it needed economic dignity. “People who are hungry and out of a job,” he cautioned, “are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

A year later, in September 1945, Walter Reuther, the visionary president of the United Auto Workers, published an influential essay titled "Our Fear of Abundance" in The New York Times Magazine, sounding a different, yet equally urgent warning about democracy’s survival.

America, Reuther argued, faced a crisis not of scarcity, but of abundance mismanaged. The nation's factories had achieved unparalleled productivity due to wartime mobilization. But this vast industrial capacity was fragile, resting precariously on three faulty assumptions: that sustained consumer demand would magically appear; that purchasing power would be evenly distributed; and that a postwar economy could smoothly transition without planning. These flawed premises, he warned, risked plunging the country back into economic crisis, widening inequality, and ultimately undermining democracy itself.

Reuther insisted that abundance required intentional, social democratic planning. He advocated for comprehensive federal action, including converting war factories into civilian industries, establishing public corporations to mass-produce goods and housing, and guaranteeing workers an annual wage to ensure stable purchasing power. Absent deliberate governmental intervention, he feared abundance would fuel monopolistic power, deepen structural inequalities, and lead to political unrest. He underscored that America's vast wartime production was proof not just of what the economy could achieve, but of the urgent need for democratic control and equitable distribution. The alternative, Reuther wrote, was stark:

The flesh and blood must come from our unswerving will to plan and work together for peace and abundance just as we joined forces for death and violence. To assert that planning to fulfill the promise of American life in an economic as well as a political sense must degenerate into tyranny is to utter a counsel of despair and to resign ourselves to drift and ultimate disaster.

If we fail our epitaph will be simply stated: we had the ingenuity to unlock the secrets of the universe for the purposes of destruction but we lacked the courage and imagination to work together in the creative pursuits of peace.

Reuther understood abundance as both an opportunity and a responsibility. If properly managed, it could create widespread prosperity, social harmony, and strengthen democratic institutions. But if left unmanaged — surrendered to monopolists, profit-driven corporations, or short-term political convenience — abundance itself could foster inequality, resentment, and authoritarian tendencies. Like Roosevelt, Reuther saw clearly that democracy's survival depended not merely on political rights, but on material security and economic dignity for all Americans.

Roosevelt had articulated this clearly years earlier, with Europe spiraling toward fascism, when he distilled two simple truths in 1938:

“Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. First, the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. Second, the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

Roosevelt’s argument was direct: democracy dies when wealth concentrates into power, and power corrupts democracy itself. In 1936, during a fierce reelection battle, he went even further, directly confronting the elite who opposed his New Deal reforms:

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain about is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Roosevelt and Reuther both saw clearly that democracy and economic justice were inseparable — that liberty was fragile in a society divided sharply between the privileged few and everyone else. Their warnings remain as urgent today as they were then.

Today, Roosevelt’s insight feels strikingly absent from our conversations about safeguarding democracy. While pundits and politicians debate voting rights, electoral guardrails, and polarization, they often overlook the central conviction of mid-20th-century leaders: economic inequality isn’t simply unjust; it actively undermines democratic stability. Roosevelt’s generation recognized this plainly. Fighting authoritarianism abroad and oligarchy at home were, for them, inseparable. This wasn’t a fringe theory. It was common sense.

Justice Louis Brandeis captured this clearly even before Roosevelt took office, famously stating: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Brandeis recognized that concentrated wealth didn’t merely produce unfairness; it eroded democracy itself. Roosevelt built the New Deal explicitly as a democratic revolution against what he labeled America’s “economic royalists,” unchecked elites whose monopolistic power threatened political freedom. He curbed monopolies, taxed excessive wealth, and empowered labor unions precisely because he saw economic democracy as essential protection against authoritarian drift.

Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry Wallace, articulated this vision even more bluntly in 1944, in his essay “The Danger of American Fascism.”

Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

This insight resonated deeply with labor and civil rights leaders. A. Philip Randolph, who had threatened a March on Washington in the 1940s to demand civil rights protections, clearly understood that America’s battle against fascism abroad would be meaningless unless it also dismantled racial and economic exploitation at home. Writing in 1942, Randolph declared:

“Unless this war sounds the death knell to the old Anglo-American empire systems, the hapless story of which is one of exploitation for the profit and power of a monopoly capitalist economy, it will have been fought in vain. Our aim then must not only be to defeat Nazism, fascism, and militarism on the battlefield, but to win the peace, for democracy, for freedom and the Brotherhood of Man without regard to his pigmentation.”

For Randolph, democracy demanded more than defeating Hitler — it required confronting America’s entrenched racial and economic inequalities directly. Victory abroad without justice at home, he argued, would be hollow.

Martin Luther King Jr. later echoed Randolph’s vision, underscoring the emptiness of racial equality without economic justice. In 1968, standing alongside striking sanitation workers in Memphis, King made clear the inseparable nature of civil and economic rights:

“It isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough to buy a hamburger?”

King, a child of the apartheid American South, understood deeply what Roosevelt had recognized a generation earlier — that democracy only endures when it meaningfully improves people’s lives, offering dignity alongside political rights. He articulated this connection powerfully in his address at the conclusion of the 1965 Selma March, where he explained the historical origins of racial segregation as a deliberate strategy aimed at dividing workers and undermining economic solidarity, in one of the most profound speeches in American political history:

“Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.”

Nor was this insight uniquely American. After the rise of fascism, European social democrats, from Germany’s Willy Brandt to Sweden’s Olof Palme, similarly insisted that democratic stability hinged explicitly upon widespread economic justice. Brandt declared that democracy had to deliver “social progress and human dignity,” while Palme argued democratic systems must guarantee basic economic security as protection against extremism. Harry Truman echoed this sentiment clearly in 1947 when he justified the Marshall Plan by stating plainly, “The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want.”

Today, this broad mid-century consensus is largely forgotten. Current debates about democracy’s survival rarely acknowledge concentrated economic power itself as a mortal threat. Even contemporary liberal debates, epitomized by recent exchanges between proponents of “abundance liberalism” (spearheaded by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson) and advocates of “progressive populism,” have begun to deprioritize inequality’s corrosive impact on democracy. Abundance liberals argue persuasively for growth, housing, clean energy infrastructure, and innovation, yet often sidestep direct confrontation with concentrated economic power and conversations around redistribution. Populists warn this approach risks deepening structural inequalities, inadvertently fueling the very backlash liberals aim to prevent.

Roosevelt, Reuther, Wallace, Randolph, and King would have viewed this compartmentalization as dangerously naive. To them, concentrated wealth did not simply coexist uneasily with democracy; it actively undermined it. Inequality wasn’t merely an economic issue; it was fundamentally a political threat. Today’s economic royalists, including private equity billionaires hollowing out communities, tech monopolists wielding unchecked political influence, and corporate interests dominating policy outcomes, mirror threats Roosevelt explicitly identified. If democracy is to endure, today’s leaders must confront these forces directly, as Roosevelt once did.

Recent political victories show signs of reviving Roosevelt’s forgotten consensus. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani recently won his mayoral primary by explicitly reconnecting democracy with economic justice, quoting Roosevelt directly in his victory speech to argue that democracy collapses not from a rejection of democratic ideals, but because it fails to deliver basic economic security. Mamdani consciously revives Roosevelt’s insight that democracy must tangibly improve lives.

Yet Mamdani’s understanding of democracy's fragility is also shaped profoundly by his own experience as a Muslim American, an experience that Hanif Abdurraqib describes as confronting the relentless "static" of Islamophobia. Abdurraqib notes that this prejudice — always present, often quiet, sometimes deafening — regularly erupts into open hostility, suspicion, and authoritarian impulses, threatening Muslims with exclusion, marginalization, and worse. Mamdani has faced these impulses directly, confronting persistent accusations that portray him as outside the boundaries of legitimate democratic participation.

In this way, his candidacy not only revives Roosevelt’s warnings about economic inequality but also illuminates how easily democracy erodes when entire communities are denied dignity, security, and visibility. Just as Roosevelt, Randolph, King, and Reuther recognized economic injustice as a catalyst for authoritarianism, Mamdani recognizes from personal experience that when democracy fails to protect dignity for all — those often erased or demonized — it creates fertile ground for authoritarian fears to flourish. Democracy, Mamdani and Abdurraqib remind us, demands confronting inequality in all its forms — not merely economic insecurity, but the social and political marginalization of entire communities whose humanity is persistently questioned or undermined.

The stakes today rival those Roosevelt faced. Yet perhaps we don’t need brand new theories. America already possesses a robust tradition combining pragmatic governance, regulated capitalism, economic dignity, and democratic accountability. Roosevelt warned clearly that democracies collapse not simply from abstract ideological conflicts but from unmet material needs. When democracy doesn’t deliver shared prosperity, citizens lose faith, and authoritarian temptations grow attractive. The threats we face today, from right-wing populism to the erosion of democratic norms, have deeper roots in economic insecurity and concentrated wealth than many acknowledge.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy succinctly reiterated Roosevelt’s wisdom: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Democracy has never been merely an idea; it's always been a promise, that ordinary people could reclaim power from entrenched elites, and use that power to stand together against those private interests who would otherwise write the rules for themselves. Defeating authoritarianism required dismantling oligarchic power at home, not merely defeating dictators abroad.

Today’s leaders must relearn this essential lesson. Democracy cannot survive on abstract principles alone. Fighting authoritarianism explicitly means fighting inequality and oligarchy. If democracy fails to improve ordinary people’s lives, it won’t protect anyone’s freedoms for long.

The fight against fascism and economic inequality were never separate battles. They aren’t today. Roosevelt’s warning remains relevant: democracy thrives only when it serves the many, not merely protects the few. The forgotten consensus of Roosevelt’s era must urgently be rediscovered if democracy is to endure.

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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images; Walter Reuther from Time Magazine, December 3, 1945; Franklin Delano Roosevelt courtesy Getty Images; Walter Reuther photo public domain/American Friends Service Committee; Henry Wallace Jacob Harris/AP Photo; Martin Luther King, Jr. by Steven Schapiro.