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ELECTING A SOCIALIST IN NEW YORK CITY – WHERE TAKING CARE OF
EVERYONE IS COMMON SENSE.  
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Hamilton Nolan
September 8, 2025
How Things Work
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_ What socialism really means is public services for the public good.
Using government to socialize the things that can help everyone,
rather than allowing the private market to run everything in a way
that preys on the public for private gain. _

Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran
Mamdani participate in a town hall in Brooklyn on September 6., Photo:
Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

 

Bernie Sanders’ childhood home is a six-story tan brick apartment
building on the corner of East 26th Street and Kings Highway, deep
down in Midwood, far south in Brooklyn’s belly. The building has a
few bare cement courtyards and fire escapes and dirty windows with AC
units poking out intermittently and a lobby floor that is a little
grimy from many decades of scuffing feet. It is thoroughly
unremarkable, a building just like mine, a building like thousands of
others that stand on thousands of Brooklyn blocks everywhere south of
Prospect Park, all the way down to the shores of Coney Island.

Stroll down Kings Highway from the Q train stop and you will see
Russians and Asian people and Jewish men in yarmulkes and Muslim women
in hijabs, all shopping at fruit stands where Mexican men stack
avocados and Chinese women ring up purchases. The people who pass in
and out of the average fruit stand anywhere around Kings Highway
represent a broader cross section of the world than you could find
scouring the entire phone books of many large American cities. Look up
the streets all the way to Church Avenue and down the streets all the
way to Brighton Beach and everyone you will see is an immigrant, or
the child or grandchild of immigrants. (Or a reporter from Florida).
That is Brooklyn. That is New York City. We’re all here.

 
Bernie’s childhood home  (Photo:  How Things Work)
One of my most correct opinion
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about American politics is: Nobody knows what socialism means. Perhaps
a better way to say this is that everyone who says “socialism”
means something different. The worst person to ask about what
socialism is is a Republican, who doesn’t know what socialism means,
and will tell you that everything is socialism. The second worst
person to ask is a leftist college professor, who knows exactly what
socialism means, and will tell you that nothing qualifies
as _real_ socialism. Somewhere between these poles lies the elusive
Practical Definition of Socialism, which nobody ever stops long enough
to lay out before launching into their various tirades.

The most common usage of the word “socialism” in mainstream
political discourse is as a slur, something that Republicans hurl at
Democrats, who respond by trying to run in the opposite direction. For
those who actually want to have a good faith discussion about
socialism, it is imperative to agree on what the term means before you
start, or else you and your counterpart are guaranteed to be talking
past one another within minutes. As in all discussions of popular
politics, the useful definition lies at some reasonable midpoint
between What a Textbook Says and What Idiots Think It Means. The
meaning of the word has to be easy enough for anyone to understand,
without falling into the trap of allowing itself to be defined
strictly from the perspective of its enemies.

So what socialism really means in the context of US politics is public
services for the public good. Using government to socialize the things
that can help everyone, rather than allowing the private market to run
everything in a way that preys on the public for private gain. As a
practical matter, this is what most people trying to Do Socialism in
American politics are trying to do. Full state control of the economy
is not and has never been on the table.

Social Security is socialist. 401ks are not. Public schools are
socialist. Private schools are not. Public roads are socialist.
Private toll roads are not. Public parks are socialist. Private
playgrounds are not. The fire department is socialist. Private
firefighters protecting
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mansions of the rich are not. Public health care would be socialist.
The awful private health insurance system we have is not.

When you look at it this way, you may notice that socialism is pretty
popular! People tend to love the socialist things that already exist
as much as they claim to despise the idea of any socialist thing that
does not yet exist. If the general public were just a little less
susceptible to red-baiting, they could have a ton of nice things. Our
unstated national agreement is to all stop calling the socialist parts
of our country “socialist” as soon as they are established. If we
had enough mainstream politicians brave enough not to run away from
the socialist label, people would probably become less frantic about
the concept over time.

The two most famous socialist politicians we have today are Bernie
Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, and on Saturday night, both of them were
on stage in an auditorium at Brooklyn College, just a mile and a half
up Nostrand Avenue from where Bernie was born. Zohran had the crowd
sing “Happy Birthday” to Bernie, who smiled and grimaced
alternately throughout like the lovable, irascible old lion of the
movement that he is. That room, that night, was the epicenter of
socialism’s possibility in America—not an arcane ideological
battlefield for zealots wielding rhetoric, but a place where the
government works to make people’s lives better. Everyone’s lives.

Bernie noted that his parents, who did not make much money, spent 18%
of their income on their Midwood apartment. Today, experts calculate
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it would take an income of $139,000 to “comfortably afford” the
median New York City, meaning that it would require under 30% of
one’s income. Bernie also attended Brooklyn College when its tuition
for city residents was zero dollars per year. The America that he grew
up in was a far less materially wealthy country than we are today, but
it was also a place where economic and social mobility were, in many
ways, more realistic promises.

New York City is a great place for socialism. We are big and crowded
and full of people and therefore the necessity that we establish rules
that will allow everyone to survive and get along is vital in a way
that it is not in places with more open space. Everyone rides the
subway together. Everyone walks the sidewalks together. Everyone
dodges one another on bikes and on streets and in parks. We are all
here, together. I don’t want to sound too utopian—there are
certainly many rich people in New York City who live in rich people
bubbles—but even they must sometimes set foot outside of their
lavish apartment buildings, and when they do, they find themselves
right next to a hot dog vendor from Queens via Bangladesh and a
bootleg sunglasses vendor from Africa and a whole bunch of people who
are in too much of a rush to scrape and bow before their social and
economic superiors. Even the lavish apartment buildings have graffiti
on them. Bubbles in New York City are more permeable than anywhere
else. If you cannot tolerate other people, you cannot live here. If
you want other people to be tolerable, you want them to be living
tolerable lives. Giving everyone a decent standard of living is
mutually beneficial in New York City, because everyone else is right
here, next to you, and if they are having a bad time, you soon will be
too.

 
May Day 1934, New York City.  (Photo:  How Things Work)
This common sense reality of life in the metropolis, I think, accounts
for some of Zohran’s popularity, and also serves to highlight the
ridiculousness of the attacks that rain down upon him from people who
do not live here, or who live in the most insular bubbles of all.
His platform [[link removed]] consists mostly
of policies that aim to solve some of the most common headaches of
regular people in this city: Free buses. Free child care. Higher
minimum wages. Less crazy rents. Is this socialism? Who fucking cares?
Have you ever tried to take your child in a stroller on a city bus to
their expensive day care so you can get to your low wage job that
barely pays your high rent? It sucks! To see a politician who is, at
least, trying to directly solve some of those problems get
characterized as some sort of _threat_ has to make you laugh. Threat
to who? To your landlord, to your landlord’s banker, to Uber and
DoorDash and other multibillion-dollar companies that want to pay you
less and make your life suck more so some rich person who never has to
take the bus can get richer? Is that supposed to be appealing? Zohran
is going to win. Enacting his agenda will be hard, but the specter of
local billionaires wracking their brains to concoct charges against
him that might resonate with normal voters (He might open a new
grocery store that would be cheaper than the piece of shit other
grocery store in your neighborhood!!) is pretty amusing to watch.

On stage at Brooklyn College, Bernie pointed at Zohran to make this
point. “Seems to be a nice guy. Dresses nice. Beautiful smile,” he
said. So why the insane tenor of opposition? Because, he said, they
are “afraid of him becoming an example of what can happen all over
this country.”

_Normal _socialism. That is the most important thing that Zohran
represents to me. A socialism that means “It’s easier to take the
bus and the subway and pay the rent and take care of your kids and
generally live a decent life.” A socialism that means that the
government is a thing that works on behalf of the public to make the
public’s life better. That’s all! That’s it! Can we not try
this? Are we to believe this is a foolish dream—for the bus to be
free and on time? For it to be possible for a normal person to live a
normal life in the biggest city in America? Zohran had a good line
about the perpetual flood of scolding from purported experts who seem
to exist for the sole purpose of heaping derision upon any hopeful
vision of collective progress.

“When you ask the experts to show their work,” he said, “it is
the life that we live today.”

The life that we live today is one in which New York City has
the greatest
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inequality of any city in America. We are a city that is home to 123
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with a collective net worth of $759 billion, and also a city
where 350,000
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spent a night homeless this year. We are a city that has some of the
greatest examples of socialized public treasures in the country—the
libraries! Central Park! The subway system! —and also a city that
has allowed our public housing system to become underfunded
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of billions of dollars. Any moron, any drooling idiot, can see that
there is an urgent moral and practical case for taking a little more
money from the rich and using it to pay for vital things that help the
millions of people that make this city into the amazing place that it
is, which is why all the rich people are here in the first place. It
is obvious, obvious, that we need decent public transportation and
public schools and public services to make this enormous seething city
into a livable and functional place, and that funding these public
good will create public benefits that will accrue to rich and poor
alike. This extremely basic, common-sense insight has a name:
Socialism.

The New York City version of the American dream is not Bill Ackman
standing in a penthouse apartment, gazing down at all the pitiful
people below. It is, instead, the promise that anyone can come here
and work hard and afford to raise a family in a perfectly normal
apartment in Midwood near a good fruit stand. And thanks to all of the
wonderful things that are available to everyone in this great city,
the kid who grows up in that Midwood apartment can grow up to be a
happy and righteous man, whereas Bill Ackman will always be a clown
with no swag who probably has never even been to a fruit stand on
Kings Highway. Your loss, Bill Ackman. There are many more of us in
big brick apartment buildings in Brooklyn than there are billionaires
on 57th Street. The city is ours. We are going to make it suck less,
through socialism, whether you like it or not. If that makes you run
away, I’m not surprised. New York City might be a little too fast
for a small mind.

_[HAMILTON NOLAN is a journalist who writes about labor and
politics.]_

* Zohran Mamdani
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* Bernie Sanders
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* socialists
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* democratic socialist
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* New York City
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* New York City mayoral election
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* 2025 Elections
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* Democratic Party
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* Andrew Cuomo
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* Eric Adams
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* free childcare
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* Public transportation
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* public housing
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* rent
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* rent subsidies
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* Public Education
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* Healthcare
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* City College
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* public services
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* sewer socialism
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