Zohran Mamdani’s triumph casts a sharp new light on the checkered, hitherto obscure history of American socialism. By any historical measure, he will be the first socialist to hold significant governing power inside the U.S.’s political system.
Sure, here and there over the past 100-plus years, socialists have won office. Every good lefty can tell you about Eugene V. Debs getting six percent (6%!) as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 1912, and almost a million votes (3.4%) in 1920 even though he was locked up in the Atlanta Penitentiary for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. Historians of American radicalism cite a handful of socialist congressmen prior to the Cold War, including East Harlem’s beloved Vito Marcantonio (in the House from 1936-1950). There were city councilors, state legislators, and even a few socialist mayors in industrial towns like Reading, Pennsylvania and Bridgeport, Connecticut. Most notably, Milwaukee kept electing Socialist mayors between 1910 and 1960.
Actual Communists did not gain office anywhere outside of New York, where Party members Pete Caccione and Benjamin Davis, Jr. sat on City Council in the 1940s. After a considerable hiatus during the Cold War, avowedly left-wing people re-entered electoral politics in the 1970s; New Yorkers with long memories remember Councilwoman Miriam Friedlander fondly as a progressive who never disavowed her left-wing connections, which were shared by members of the Congressional Black Caucus like John Conyers, Jr. and George Crockett. Berkeley’s Ronald V. Dellums (in the House 1973-1999) was a longtime Vice-Chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
And then there was and is Bernie. Since his historic run in 2016, DSA has mushroomed, electing more than 250 members to office from Pennsylvania to California, including three current members of Congress (AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Greg Casar) and fifty state legislators.
Realistically, however, all of the above are no more than footnotes in the history of American politics. In the larger world, socialists and communists of every variety have routinely held major offices, governed for better or worse, and built lasting electoral power. Today, France’s top two cities, Paris and Marseille, are governed by Socialists, as they have been for decades. In the first case, that’s led to impressive progressive reforms, and in the second, it looks like machine politics but from the left. And that’s just one country. In 2001-2008, London’s mayor was “Red Ken” Livingston, who earlier, as head of the London County Council (the functional equivalent of a mayor), had confronted Margaret Thatcher frontally as a fierce left-winger. And today, Andy Burnham, representing what’s left of the Labour Left, is “King of the North” as Mayor of the UK’s second city, Manchester, since 2017.
I could go on, but you get the point! Mayors actually govern. They oversee many thousands of employees and vast bureaucracies, with large budgets, in the case of New York, $112 billion, greater than 48 of the states. Whether it’s Paris, London, Tokyo, Rome, Mumbai, Sao Paolo, or Lagos, their regimes are major political entities within the nation. So, to repeat: by any historical measure, Zohran Mamdani will be the first socialist to hold significant governing power in U.S. history.
What will he (or we) do, as democratic socialists, with this extraordinary opportunity? That is the question of the hour: how effective governance, advanced from a clearly socialist perspective, can be brought from the margins into the mainstream of U.S. politics. If he looks around the world, as he surely is doing, Mayor Mamdani will have plenty of useful examples to draw from, although precious little of relevance here in the U.S.
