New York state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s victory Tuesday over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo capped an astonishing anti-establishment campaign by a 34-year-old who was polling at 1% in January. But perhaps even more remarkably, Mamdani defeated the 67-year-old scion of a political dynasty as a proud socialist. Upon his inauguration in January, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America will preside over New York, the financial capital of America, and the country’s biggest and most influential city.
Mamdani’s win constitutes the 21st century high-water mark for democratic socialists, after two surprisingly popular Democratic presidential campaigns by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., pushed the Democratic policy platform to the left, inspired a wave of elections of socialists to Congress and state legislatures in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and helped trigger a dramatic surge in membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. Prior to Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, DSA’s national membership was around 5,000. Today, it is over 80,000.
Democratic socialists have a more realistic appraisal than establishment Democrats of what must be done to create a better country.
In a country with some 175 million voters, DSA’s membership is tiny. But as a political organization, it punches far above its weight, and my hope is that Mamdani’s extraordinarily buzzy win — following a rare instance of a New York mayoral race becoming national news for months — inspires a wider swath of Americans to consider democratic socialism. What better time than now?
Many Democratic Party voters are rightly disenchanted with their own party and millions of them have left the party in recent years. Some of these discontent Democrats are casting about for a political movement that demonstrates clear commitments and convictions, or a better way to defend the republic against a right-wing demagogue, or a plan for an economy that actually works for the people who power it. Democratic socialism offers a compelling path forward.
Democracy is an animating principle of democratic socialism — so it’s not the 20th century authoritarian communism of the Soviet Union. It’s also not liberalism with an extra shot of progressivism. Defining what democratic socialism is, however, is a little trickier, because it means different things to different people.
“A lot of young people who identify with that label are seeking doses of socialism within capitalism,” Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin Magazine and author of “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,” told me. “They want the state to help make housing more affordable. They want the state to provide universal health insurance. They want it to provide more of the kind of social safety net programs that would make life a lot better for poor and working class people in the U.S.”
Democratic socialism also runs deeper for many of its proponents than just state-backed social rights. “I think beyond that, for me, socialism has to do not just with welfare and distribution of wealth, but also has to do with power and questions of ownership,” Sunkara said. He added that “the other challenge of democratic socialism is how we get to a society in which we don’t just have political democracy, but we have greater economic and social democracy as well, and by that I mean particularly democracy in our workplaces.” This doesn’t mean eliminating private markets, but creating companies owned by workers.
With his calls for higher taxes on the rich, freezing rent, building massive amounts of affordable housing, free buses and publicly subsidized grocery stores, Mamdani’s mayoral campaign slots more neatly into the first, softer definition of democratic socialism: i.e., doses of socialist projects within capitalism. During his campaign, he has described democratic socialism as informing his commitment to making the city government honor “the responsibility to ensure that every New Yorker lives a dignified life.”
Mamdani’s democratic socialism is not substantively asking for something different from Scandinavian social democracy, but it still marks a sharp break from the Democratic establishment. While the Democratic establishment fears backlash from big business and the billionaire class, Mamdani has been happy picking fights with them (and those monied interests spent extraordinary amounts of money in a futile attempt to defeat him).
While the Democratic establishment tends to speak about elevating the economy for everybody, with a vaguely defined upwardly mobile middle class as its audience, socialists such as Sanders and Mamdani center the working class in their policy pitches — and identify capital as adversarial to its interests.
The Democratic establishment tends to pan socialists as hopeless idealists, but moderate liberals are the naive ones. They remain wedded to a party defending the liberal capitalist status quo at a time when the neoliberal consensus has shattered and huge swathes of America rightly feel there’s something fundamentally wrong about the way the economy distributes wealth and determines what's considered livable. Trump cynically lies about immigrants being the source of the problem, but at least he has something to say about the persistent feelings Americans have that the system isn’t working for them. Democrats, to their shame, continue defending a widely disliked status quo. In the process, the party has lost twice to Trump and yet still insists on only incrementally tweaking its standard playbook.
Democratic socialists have a more realistic appraisal than establishment Democrats of what must be done to create a better country. “To be a democratic socialist is to go further than a progressive and say that true democracy can’t coexist with concentrated economic power,” Sunkara said. “That distinction between progressives and democratic socialism isn’t about purity, it’s not about moral superiority. It’s about how deep the problems of inequality run, and therefore how deep the solution has to go.”
Democratic socialism is also a gateway to greater citizen agency.
The distinction matters because different diagnoses of a problem necessitate different solutions. For example, Democrats’ instincts to allay and court big business led them to try to find incremental market-based solutions to America’s long-running health insurance crisis. The result is Obamacare, which helped expand health insurance but has still left tens of millions of people without insurance, tens of millions of Americans in medical debt, and is remarkably vulnerable to incremental weakening by the right. A system like Medicare for All would not only guarantee health care to Americans, but would also be politically harder to dismantle — much the way Medicare and Social Security are.
These sweeping solutions can be harder to achieve, but they also help drive excitement. Mamdani's ambition was infectious on the campaign trail, and drew in an astonishingly large army of tens of thousands of volunteers who intuited that people power is the only way to confront and prevail over elite interests.
Democratic socialism is a gateway to greater citizen agency. DSA is effectively an organization of organizers, a decentralized big tent for people to find other left-wing people to band together with toward specific causes and behind specific change-making candidates, political movements and unions. DSA is a political organization, not a political party, and its members do not harbor a consensus on the best way to fight for the future in the electoral arena or outside of it. But its greatest electoral successes have come by entering the Democratic primary system, and deploying an inside-outside strategy of supporting candidates and pressuring them from the outside.
A recent Gallup poll shows that Democrats view the term "socialism" more far more favorably than "capitalism." It's safe to guess that many of those people don’t really have a clear sense of what democratic socialism really is. But the more they jump into the fight, the more they can will a chance to learn about it and define it in a contemporary American context. It remains to be seen if Mamdani can govern well. But we know that socialists can put up a good fight even when the odds are stacked against them, and that counts for a lot these days.
