Realists (Mamdani, AOC) seek immersion in mass politics; fundamentalists oppose it.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****OCTOBER 09, 2025****

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**The Rift in American Socialism**

**Realists (Mamdani, AOC) seek immersion in mass politics; fundamentalists oppose it. **

As Election Day draws near in New York City, entire genres of attack-pieces against Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani have emerged. **Today’s**

**New York Times** [link removed]

**,**for instance, contains a long analysis of just how much some of Mamdani’s proposals will cost, though equivalent dollar estimates of how much they will boost the city’s economy are nowhere to be found. The piece sets the cost of universal child care at an annual $6 billion, to be paid for through a 2 percent increase—roughly, from 11 to 13 percent—on that portion of individual yearly incomes that exceed $1 million, and a hike to corporate taxes as well. As to the benefits the city will reap from universal child care—higher labor force participation from parents of toddlers, the savings those parents will realize from not having to pay astronomical child care costs that they can then devote to housing and other necessities, and the long-term benefits to the prospects (including economic prospects) of children who receive educational and other head-starts in their most impressionable years—I’ve barely seen a word. 

But the most prevalent genre of Mamdani hit pieces is the attack on many of the positions taken by the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Mamdani belongs and whose New York members have been racking up record levels of door-knocking, precinct walking, and phone banking in support of his campaign. The stated or implied assumptions in these pieces is that Mamdani will carry out even the most utopian or dystopian platform planks that DSA, or some branch of DSA, has supported. 

One such piece was **an op-ed** [link removed] that ran in the print edition of today’s

**Washington Post**, which linked Mamdani’s “possible election” to the most outré and sectarian positions that DSA or some of its subsets have taken. I don’t deny that some of those positions are surely outré; some of them align less with democratic socialism than with authoritarian socialism—the reason why I left the organization last year after nearly half-a-century of membership, much of it in leadership positions.

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