The most significant thing about Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic primary last night might be that it’s living proof good things can happen — that the villains don’t always win, that the world is not just destined to get worse and worse, and that things can genuinely change for the better; most important, that it can all happen because the power of ordinary people coming together can make it so.

It has not felt that way for a while. Donald Trump’s shock win in 2016, coupled with Bernie Sanders’s crushing defeat in the 2020 primary, conditioned many on the broad left, even if they might not admit it, to believe the world was simply stuck on an inevitable slide toward darkness. The past eight months didn’t change this prognosis, as Trump not only won back the White House but proceeded to carry out a far more extreme, chaotic, and deliberately cruel agenda than anything we had seen in his first term and than we’d arguably seen in decades of US history. As Election Day in New York City neared, Trump appeared set to plunge the country into another disastrous war in the Middle East, this time with Iran — you can’t get much darker than that.

Mamdani’s landslide victory over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday — so emphatic that Cuomo didn’t even wait for the ranked votes to be counted before he conceded — is a repudiation of those past eight months by the biggest city in the country.