Jamaal Bowman Is Ready to Join the Squad

Eliot Engel first won his seat in Congress in 1988, in a primary that helped end the old corrupt Bronx machine. Today, according to the official call by the Associated Press, he lost his June primary to newcomer Jamaal Bowman, in a race that became a national symbol of the rise of a new wave of progressives.

A lot is happening in Engel and Bowman’s sliver of the Bronx and Westchester—and a lot is changing. The New York district was home to the state’s first reported coronavirus case, in March, but it’s also home to neighborhoods as different as Riverdale and Co-Op City, a long-standing Jewish community with a burgeoning population of color that has shown little interest in waiting for change. “You know what Donald Trump is more afraid of than anything else? A Black man with power,” Bowman said during his primary-night speech. I asked him why when we spoke shortly after the primary. He told me Trump is “a racist, and a fascist, and he has benefited from white supremacy his entire life. And when you carry that ideology—white supremacy not just as skin color, but as mindset, as ideology—when you benefit