U.S. Democratic Socialism Has A Future

Don't be weird, be like Zohran

I wouldn’t have thought so, but now I think I can see a path. The recent electoral successes are attracting thousands of supporters to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to join its most famous member, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. I’m told just the New York City chapter is up to 13,000 members.

It begins with the reality that DSA is a two-headed creature. It has the socialist brand, which matters, but it is of two minds, charitably speaking. One head is the official National Political Committee (NPC), that is narrowly divided between the sane and the insane. The latter fancy themselves Marxist-Leninists and harbors dreams of third parties and mass strikes, neither of which are happening in your lifetimes.

The nutty half instills enough hesitation in their peers on the NPC to render DSA meaningless as a national organization. To give you an idea of the milieu, it includes a band of comrades who call themselves the “communist caucus.” Imagine that, a communist caucus inside “Democratic Socialists of America.”

The relatively sane on the NPC tack more to the other head, the mass constituencies that have given us AOC and now the mayor of fucking NEW YORK CITY! Oh and there is also the mayor of that little place on the Left Coast known as Seattle, and a strong mayoral contender in the great city of Minneapolis, MN. New York State boasts several DSA members in its legislature, as do the city councils of Chicago, Los Angeles, and other places I haven’t bothered to keep track of.

The key dynamic is that successful electoral campaigns will drive the misguided M-Ls to organizational irrelevance. Getting elected forces DSA members to transact with non-socialists, a practice that is the bane of the ultra-lefts, who don’t get parliamentary politics. Or politics in general. All they get is clique maneuvers, like in high school, and fiddling with the organization’s social media.

Fact is, the real work is done in the chapters. The NPC is more figurehead than national leadership. They either go with the flow or they get lost. They are capable of sabotaging legitimate efforts, as we saw in the crack-up of Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s campaign for reelection, but so far with Mamdani they are mostly hanging back. Some gripes about his police commissioner. At least they have the wit to not get in the way of a political freight train. Chapters on the train have leave to do their own thing, and that thing will increasingly become electing democratic socialists.

What’s that, you’ve never heard of anyone on the DSA National Political Committee? That’s because they are all complete unknowns. We will know the dam is starting to break when DSA recruits some real celebrity-leaders to the NPC. DSA used to have people you have heard of, such as Cornel West and Barbara Ehrenreich. West has been on some kind of nutty political bender, while alas Barbara is no longer with us. How Bernie is able to carry on at his age is a miracle. Although his campaigns have been major catalysts for DSA recruitment, he has never joined himself. Neither has AOC. (Not true, actually. AOC is a member. Corrected by a reader.) That should tell you something.

The New York City triumph suggests both programmatic and organizational directions.

On program, it centers on what is being talked about as “affordability.” I’ve said this is a misleading surrogate for what’s at the bottom of affordability, namely jobs, income, and public benefits. But I have lost that debate.

Broadly speaking, “affordability” does speak elliptically to incomes, but it has proven a more accessible predicate. At the municipal level, it points straight to public groceries and eliminating regressive user fees for public transportation. Not far behind could be public colleges and utilities. The elderly among us can still remember when the storied City College of New York, 1930s spawning ground of eminent socialists, was free.

This programmatic approach dovetails with the burgeoning constituency for democratic socialism — the young and those tenuously employed. The latter are sometimes called the “precariat,” as in the economically precarious. Put these together, and I would say you have the power of the Mamdani tendency. So far, it is mostly an urban phenomenon.

Fortifying the trend should be the stance of DSA veterans who were among the founders, presently alienated from the hijinks of the NPC but on board with the new direction. Numerically tiny, they punch above their weight politically and will recommit to the organization.

A more serious intellectual challenge to the current trend is the interest in so-called “market socialism,” which usually means, roughly, an economy made up of business firms owned and/or managed by their workers who produce for markets and transact freely among themselves. I hope to have more to say on that front, mostly as a wet blanket, before long.

Democratic socialism is flowering in the nation’s cities. Its key task is to break out of urban concentrations and gain toeholds in rural areas and red states. A key link will be the burgeoning anti-Trump resistance movements, typified by the “No Kings” protests, especially the pro-LGBTQI “wine moms,” in the suburbs. Somebody smarter than me will figure out how to do that, as they already have in electing the mayor of fucking NEW YORK CITY. Can the District of Columbia be far behind? Talk about low-hanging fruit. I note with approval that others appreciate the need for the mobilization to continue, the better to support Mamdani’s term in office and his ability to deliver reforms.

One question is how the emerging political left will deal with the gerontocratic Democratic Party establishment, who as I’ve said would rather lose elections than lose their control of the party. A key sticking point has been Israel and Zionism, from what I can see a divide strongly driven by age. Zionism has lost most if not all of its moral authority among the young, especially those with ancestral roots in the global south.

One little crack in the dam of official indulgence of Zionism, in “How Democrats Blew It On Gaza,” Obama’s foreign policy maven Ben Rhodes urges non-support of the Israeli government. His reference to Jewish and Israeli political donors has drawn accusations of antisemitism, yet another illustration of how avowed anti-antisemites further foment antisemitism by diluting the meaning of the term.

For better or worse, DSA has been at the crest of this wave, not always exercising much political sophistication, but it has won the pro-Palestine franchise. So too with championing trans rights. Sometimes DSA’s obliviousness to politics brings political gains over time. Premature anti-Zionism will become a political asset. Ideologues might want to call it adherence to principle; I call it dumb luck. Recent elections in Virginia and New Jersey suggest that the transphobia fever seems to be abating. Of course, in the cities it has no purchase at all.

A final thought that occurred to me, in the dead of night . . . Hey, I don’t have to figure everything out. There are many bright young minds onto this with much more initiative, motivation, and energy. One of these people is Chris Maisano of Jacobin in this very smart Dissent essay. He reports there are one million Muslims in New York City. (The winner in the election, Mamdani, got close to a million votes, obvs not all Muslim.)

Just roll with it. I’m ready to do more, but unless called upon, I can just sit back and enjoy the show, send in a few nickels now and then.