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, 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 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
What such attacks miss is that DSA is well down the road that many organizations and parties have taken, particularly those organizations and parties that began with fringe ideologies. (By “fringe,” I don’t mean implausible; I mean outside the existing belief systems.) The problem, if problem it be, comes when those beliefs cease to be fringe, when they gain support within broader sectors of the public. That’s exactly what happened to Germany’s Greens, who organized themselves into a fringe political party in the 1980s, only to find that by the 1990s, their numbers had grown to the point that they could block the rule of the nation’s more conservative party (the Christian Democrats) and get some of their own proposals enacted by entering into coalition governments with the Social Democrats in various states and, eventually, into the federal government, where their leader, Joschka Fischer, became the nation’s foreign minister.
All this posed an existential crisis for the Greens. One wing, the “fundis” (short for fundamentalists), saw such actions as a sell-out, compelling them to accept Social Democratic positions they saw as either deficient or wrong. This course of action impeded their ability to stake out their more purebred positions and counterpose them not just to those of the Christian Dems, but the Social Dems as well. Fighting province by province, and eventually nationally, they refused to support the party’s entry into such positions of semi-power. Their rival wing, the “realos” (short for realists), believed that their party’s actual rise to numerical significance (and the unlikeliness of their rise to dominant majority status) opened the door to their realizing some actual victories and blocking some terrible options (as Fischer’s opposition to the 2003 U.S.-U.K Iraq War compelled Germany to stay out of it).
Just like Germany’s late 20th-century’s Greens, today’s DSA is very much divided between its realos and fundis. Its growth has opened the door to its winning elections in cities across the country, though when those elections have been partisan (some municipal elections are non-partisan), its victors have virtually always run as Democrats. Indeed, it was precisely because Bernie Sanders ran for president in Democratic primaries that the very idea of socialism reached so many ears that the organization grew nearly ten-fold in the years immediately following. (Compare and contrast, for instance, the visibility and audibility of third-party presidential candidate Jill Stein.) It was precisely because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated establishment Democrat Joe Crowley in a 2018 Democratic congressional primary, rather than losing to him as a third-party candidate that November, that she became the national figure she is today—and also reached enough ears to boost DSA membership even further.
Sanders and AOC have both made the most of their power, promoting causes that wouldn’t get as much attention had they not won elections and caucused with the Democrats. Both, for instance, were calling for stopping U.S. provision of offensive weapons to Israel for its Gaza war—a position that has gained major Democratic support since they initially advanced it.
At the same time, both have incurred the censure of DSA’s fundis. Many of them still oppose working within the Democratic Party, and many of them have refused to support them because they haven’t toed the DSA line on some issues. The DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC), for instance, refused to endorse AOC for re-election in 2024 because she had stated her support for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself with the Iron Dome anti-missiles.
But the NPC overrepresents DSA’s fundis. The organization’s New York local, which boasts more than a tenth of the national organization’s members, enthusiastically supported AOC, just as it supports Mamdani now, even though, by running on a narrowly drawn platform of economic issues, he has effectively declined to embrace a host of DSA’s more sectarian positions. By the process of reaching out to hundreds of thousands of non-members in the course of campaigning for Mamdani, the local seems to have realized that Mamdani will be answerable to a host of constituencies if and when he’s elected, not just to the DSA. His campaign has been brilliant, both for his compelling advocacy of social democratic positions, but also for his resistance to backing positions that may be popular among many DSA members but have little appeal to the mass of his supporters, much less swing voters.
(One more split between the organization’s realos and fundis: The NPC has refused to endorse participation in any of the mass No Kings Day demonstrations, including the one upcoming on October 18—plainly, they’re ideologically insufficient bourgie distractions. Many DSA locals, by contrast, have endorsed them, and will generate large turnouts of their members.)
For all the coverage that Bernie Sanders has received since he first ran for president, not enough attention has been paid to his consistent non-membership in DSA, even though it was his efforts that were responsible for the organization’s renaissance. As a young man, Sanders belonged to small left sects and third parties; I suspect he may have since concluded that he’d seen enough of the sectarian sensibility and believed he could better advance his vision of democratic socialism absent the confines of purism that some on the left seek to impose.
The attack on DSA and Mamdani in today’s Post notes that the organization has drifted from the democratic socialism of the organization’s founder, Michael Harrington. It quotes one DSA convention delegate crowing that “Michael Harrington’s DSA is dead.” With that quote, the authors mean that DSA’s vision of socialism is no longer all that democratic—and if you restrict that indictment to some (by no means all) DSA leaders and members, then it’s correct.
But Michael Harrington’s DSA was not only anti-authoritarian; it was also anti-sectarian. It believed that democratic socialists could win support of millions of Americans, that their candidates could win primaries and general elections, particularly if they ran within the Democratic Party. Founded as it was in the waning years of the broad prosperity of the postwar years, this was then an article of faith lacking much confirmation. Today, with economic inequality skyrocketing and the decades of broadly shared prosperity now a distant memory, it’s no longer quite so dim a prospect. In that sense, the tens of thousands of New York DSAers pounding the city’s sidewalks between now and November 4th are not only Zohran Mamdani’s socialists; they’re Michael Harrington’s socialists, too.
Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.
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