American Progressives Are Now Exporting Strategy. Here's What They're Teaching Europe.
For decades, the right had the transnational infrastructure — think tanks, conferences, policy networks. Now a Zohran Mamdani aide is advising British progressives, and something that looks a lot like a progressive international is quietly taking shape.
Crowd gathered at a political organizing event, hands raised in solidarity
Key Points
•Morris Katz, top aide to NYC Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, is advising British progressives — one signal of a broader left internationalism
•The "Mamdani playbook" centers on kitchen-table economics, multi-racial coalition building, and refusing corporate PAC money
•For decades conservatives built transnational infrastructure through think tanks; progressives are now doing something similar — and faster
•Former Bernie Sanders adviser Matt Duss describes a genuine "global appetite" for American progressive strategy
The Flight to London
Morris Katz didn't go to London for a vacation. The top political aide to New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani — the democratic socialist who ran the most talked-about housing campaign in New York politics in years — traveled to Britain to teach. British progressives had requested a meeting. They'd been studying the Mamdani campaign the way a coach studies game tape: what worked, what didn't, how a candidate with no corporate money and an unapologetically left platform had managed to build the kind of coalition that makes establishment operatives nervous.
That meeting, reported this week by Politico, is a small moment with a large implication [1]. American progressives aren't just fighting for their political lives at home. They're exporting a playbook.
Matt Duss, the former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders and current president of the Center for International Policy, put it plainly: there's a "global appetite" for what American progressives have figured out about organizing, messaging, and coalition-building. European counterparts — particularly in the UK, where Labour's left flank is recalibrating after Keir Starmer's centrist pivot — are watching American progressive campaigns the way a startup watches a competitor that just cracked product-market fit.
The Mamdani campaign became a case study in progressive organizing — studied not just in New York, but increasingly abroad.
To understand why this is resonating internationally, you have to understand what Mamdani's operation actually did — and what it didn't do. The playbook is not, first of all, about making the loudest possible ideological statement. It's about something more boring and more durable: organizing at the precinct level around issues that affect people's daily lives. Housing costs. Transit reliability. Healthcare accessibility. The stuff that doesn't require voters to have a political science degree to care about.
The Mamdani campaign made a deliberate choice to compete on material conditions rather than identity signaling. This isn't a distinction a lot of progressive campaigns make clearly, and it's one of the reasons the model travels. A tenant paying 60% of their income on rent in Queens has a lot in common with a renter getting priced out of Sheffield. The specific political systems differ; the underlying economic pressure doesn't.
Progressives in the US and Europe are watching and learning from each other.
— Matt Duss, Center for International Policy
The refusal to take money from real estate PACs, corporate donors, and industry bundlers is also part of what's being studied. It's not just an ethical position — it's a strategic one. Campaigns that rely on small-dollar donors are campaigns that have to actually persuade and mobilize a base, rather than outsource persuasion to TV ad buys funded by people who expect something in return. British progressives watching a Corbyn-era hangover reshape their options are understandably interested in whether there's a model that doesn't require choosing between electability and independence.
The Infrastructure Gap — and Why It's Finally Closing
Here's the honest truth about why this moment matters: the political right has been doing this for fifty years. Friedrich Hayek's Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947, was explicitly a transnational project — a network of economists, journalists, and politicians across the US and Europe who shared a vision of free-market governance and worked systematically to move that vision from the fringe to the mainstream. By the 1980s, you had the Heritage Foundation in Washington coordinating with the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, the Fraser Institute in Canada, and dozens of similar organizations globally. Thatcher and Reagan didn't happen simultaneously by accident. They happened because a movement had spent thirty years building the policy pipelines, the talent networks, and the shared intellectual frameworks that made coordinated conservative governance possible across national borders [1].
While some quarters of American politics are busy debating which corporate food products deserve a government health warning — an interesting innovation from a movement that usually prefers markets to make those calls — another movement is quietly exporting something more durable: a theory of how to win.
Progressives have no equivalent fifty-year head start. The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020, whatever their electoral outcomes, functioned as infrastructure-building exercises — they trained thousands of organizers, created new donor networks, and, crucially, demonstrated that a left campaign could be viable at the national level without corporate money. Now some of those alumni, and the ideas they developed, are moving across borders. It's not yet Heritage Foundation scale. But it's something.
Transnational progressive coordination is accelerating, with American organizers increasingly sought out by European counterparts.
What's Actually Being Taught — and What Doesn't Travel
Let's be honest about the limits of this, because progressives are at their least persuasive when they oversell the universality of their own ideas. The Mamdani model works in New York City, which has a specific housing market, a specific demographic composition, a specific political culture shaped by decades of labor organizing, and a specific left-media ecosystem that can amplify unconventional campaigns. You can't drop that into, say, rural Pennsylvania and expect the same results. British politics has its own immigration fault lines, its own class-based party loyalties, its own media environment dominated by tabloids that would make Roger Ailes blush.
What does travel, according to the people doing this exchange, is less about specific policy positions and more about methodology: the discipline of organizing around economic grievances rather than cultural ones, the strategic value of small-dollar donor networks, the importance of deep precinct-level work over top-down messaging, and the willingness to say what you actually believe rather than triangulating toward an imagined median voter. These are techniques, not doctrines. And techniques are exportable in ways that doctrines often aren't.
Why This Moment Is Different
There's a broader context here that the Politico piece only gestures at. American foreign policy — under both Trump and, to a lesser extent, Biden — has increasingly strained traditional transatlantic relationships. The Iran strikes, the erosion of multilateral commitments, the chaotic approach to NATO allies: all of it has created a political opening for center-left and left parties in Europe to differentiate themselves from both American militarism and American market fundamentalism. The Munich Security Conference in February was notable not just for what governments said, but for the conversations happening on the margins — including development cooperation advocates arguing that security cannot be separated from economic equity [2].
Into that opening, American progressive organizing ideas are flowing. Not because European progressives are deferring to Americans, but because they're looking for anything that works in an environment where the center-left establishment has repeatedly failed to build durable majorities. If a housing organizer from Queens figured out how to win in a polarized environment without becoming the thing he was fighting, that's worth a plane ticket to study.
The Bigger Picture
Progressive internationalism isn't new as a concept — the labor movement, the anti-war movement, climate activism have all operated across borders for decades. What's new is the specificity and the professionalization. This isn't a protest coalition sharing chants. It's campaign operatives sharing data on what messaging breaks through to non-aligned voters, what fundraising models build genuine independence from donor pressure, and what coalition configurations can withstand the inevitable backlash from established interests.
The right has had this infrastructure for fifty years. The left is building it now, faster than it ever has before, and doing it not by building a central committee but by connecting practitioners who are learning from each other in real time. It's messier. It's less coordinated. And it's actually happening.
Zohran Mamdani hasn't won statewide office yet. Morris Katz's advice might or might not help UK progressives find their footing. The global progressive exchange is real but nascent. None of that should be minimized. But here's what I know after watching American progressive politics for the past decade: the movement is more serious, more organized, and more internationalist than it has ever been. It took the right fifty years to build what it built. The left is trying to do it faster. Morris Katz just got on a plane. That's a start.
