Why Zohran Mamdani’s Socialism Might Have a Future Outside New York City

In 1973, I was part of the leadership of the New American Movement, a socialist group that would later merge with Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Our San Francisco chapter decided to run candidates for the Board of Supervisors under the rubric of the San Francisco Socialist Coalition. Our leading candidate, a veteran community organizer, finished 16th, only 465 votes ahead of Jesus Christ Satan, who listed his occupation as “metaphysician.”

Flash forward half a century. In New York, the center of American finance, the leading mayoral candidate is DSA-backed Zohran Mamdani — who is not shy about his commitment to socialism. “Zohran Kwame Mamdani,” his website states bluntly, “is a New York State Assemblymember and democratic socialist running for Mayor.” His embrace of socialism has put off some New Yorkers, but not, it seems, enough to deny him a likely victory next week.

And for some critical mass of voters, it may actually be part of his appeal. A son of one of my friends, a young Brooklynite who works for an Amazon subsidiary, recently told me that New York City “has become unlivable for people who are not in a certain tax bracket. And so, I think democratic socialists speak to working-class New Yorkers in a way that I don’t feel other politicians are doing. And yeah, that has certainly resonated with me.” When I interviewed marchers at a recent “No Kings” rally in Queens, I heard, again and again, that people either approved of Mamdani’s democratic socialism or were not put off by it.

Clearly, something about the way people view socialism has changed dramatically since 1973. But why? And does this change portend bigger victories ahead for socialism in American politics? Democratic socialism’s success in New York over the past few months may, of course, prove to be an anomaly, one that could never translate to middle America. And yet there are good historical and demographic reasons to believe that eventually it might get a hearing outside the big metro centers and college towns — that Mamdani’s surge could, in fact, constitute an early step in a long march of socialism toward national political relevance.

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The main reason that a socialist couldn’t win many votes in 1973, even in the country’s most left-wing big city, was that the Cold War was still raging — and so, when Americans thought of socialism, they thought of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, dictatorships that eliminated private property and forbade dissent. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, most observers concluded that socialism itself had suffered a fatal blow.

But the Cold War’s end also meant that people growing up after 1991 were no longer exposed repeatedly to the identification of socialism with communism. That would eventually open the way for a different understanding of socialism — but not immediately. During the boom of the late 1990s, Americans had no interest in alternatives to capitalism. However, following the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2001 and the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, a growing skepticism about capitalism — particularly among the young and even more specifically among young college graduates — began to take root.

From 2000 to 2011, real wages for the lower 70% of college graduates — those who were unlikely to have attended elite universities — fell. Between 2000 and 2023, the wage premium for college graduates — that is, the difference in income between those who completed college and those who didn’t — shrank, while the cost of attending college and the amount of student loan debt skyrocketed. As a result, a cohort of relatively well-educated people found themselves disillusioned with capitalism — and increasingly receptive to alternative economic ideas.

It took political movements and politicians to channel this skepticism. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street, organized in part to protest President Obama’s surrender to Republican demands that he cut the budget amid a recession, highlighted the growing inequality of wealth and power. “We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%” was its slogan. Socialists participated in the protests as they spread around the country, but it was only with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016 that socialism became part of the national political discussion. In the process, Sanders also redefined what socialism meant in the American context.

In his gubernatorial campaign in 1976 and in his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1988, Sanders had espoused an orthodox, Marxist socialism that called for nationalizing major industries and banks. He fashioned himself a disciple of Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, about whom he had made a movie. But when he ran for Congress again in 1990, he changed his approach: He now described himself as a “Swedish-style socialist” and denied that socialism meant “state ownership of everything, by any means.” This time, he won. And when he ran for president 25 years later, he added an American touch to his conception of socialism: On the urging of historian Eric Foner, he depicted his socialism as an extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Four Freedoms, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s communitarian ideals.

Mamdani seems to have gone on a similar ideological journey as Sanders — from orthodox socialism to a more moderate version. NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx

Sanders was abandoning the Marxist view of socialism and history for a view that envisaged socialism as developing within capitalism — through programs like Medicare for All — the way capitalism had developed from within feudalism. That conception went back to the “sewer socialism” of Victor Berger’s Socialist Party in Milwaukee, which ran the city for much of the first half of the twentieth century and created what Berger called “socialism in our time.”

Sanders’ new approach insulated socialism from the taint of communism and allowed its popularity to soar, especially among young voters in big cities. In an extensive poll conducted by the libertarian Cato Institute and YouGov this year, 43% of respondents had a favorable view of socialism, but the number was much higher among 18-to-29-year-olds — 62%. In addition, 67% of Black respondents were favorably disposed, as were 62% of Asians and 56% of those who live in big cities.

These voters primarily see socialism the way Sanders came to see it. When Gallup asked in 1949 what socialism meant, 34% said “government ownership or control” of major segments of the economy. By 2018, the year democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was first elected to Congress, that percentage had dropped to 17%. “Americans’ views of socialism have broadened,” Gallup polling analyst Frank Newport concluded. “While many still view socialism as government control of the economy, as modified communism and as embodying restrictions on freedoms in several ways, an increased percentage see it as representing equality and government provision of benefits.” Enter Zohran Mamdani.

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Mamdani seems to have gone on a similar ideological journey as Sanders. In college, he founded Bowdoin’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which espouses “anti-capitalism” and “anti-imperialism” and has worked closely with orthodox socialist groups. He has said that Sanders’ 2016 campaign “gave me the confidence to call myself a socialist”; soon after, he joined DSA. In 2020, with the help of DSA volunteers, he won a seat in the New York State Assembly.

Thanks to the Sanders campaign, DSA had gone from a marginal groupuscule of a few thousand mainly older participants to what, by the standards of American left-wing politics, is a large organization, with about 80,000 members composed heavily of the young and less affluent college-educated. As it has grown, DSA has become divided between two kinds of socialists. Some of the leadership elected at conventions espouse an orthodox socialism combined with “woke” views on social issues. They have described themselves as “Marxists” and have advocated a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party that would lead to a new socialist labor party. But many members, particularly in the 11,000-strong New York City chapter — plus many of those who were inspired to join by the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaigns, but who have not been involved in DSA’s day-to-day work or attended its conventions — favor a version of Sanders’ reformist socialism within capitalism. They are also content to change, rather than try to split, the Democratic Party.

Mamdani appears to have been drawn initially toward an orthodox socialism. In a speech to DSA’s youth wing in 2021, he noted the popularity of socialist ideas like the cancellation of student debt, but he also spoke of “other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS” — the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls for a boycott of Israel — “or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment.” That’s the heady talk of anti-capitalist revolution that doomed many older socialist groups to irrelevance.

By contrast, when he has described his socialism during his mayoral campaign, Mamdani has largely taken the path of Sanders. When prompted to explain his views of socialism, he has cited Roosevelt, King and Fiorello LaGuardia. Asked by CNN’s Erin Burnett in June whether he liked capitalism, Mamdani first said, “No, I have many critiques of capitalism.” But then he pivoted to an answer that was very much in the vein of late-career Sanders: “Ultimately, the definition for me of why I call myself a democratic socialist is the words of Dr. King decades ago. He said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism. There must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.’ And that’s what I am focused on, is dignity and taking on income inequality.” In an interview with The Nation, he cited Berger’s “sewer socialism” and LaGuardia’s creation of a Parks Department and construction of public housing.

Mamdani has also rejected the national DSA’s equivocal approach to the Democratic Party. In an interview with The New York Times, Mamdani described his strategy succinctly: “I am both a democratic socialist and I’m also a Democrat. One is a description of my political ideology, the other is a description of the party that I belong to.” Addressing some of the organization’s more radical stances, he said, “My platform is not the same as national DSA.”

As I learned when I went to the “No Kings” march in Queens, Mamdani’s supporters appear to share his newer view of socialism. Queens is one of the most ethnically and racially diverse places in America, and it showed in the thousands of marchers who, on a sunny Saturday, filled three or four long blocks on their way to a spirited rally at the Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens. It was easy to find Mamdani supporters. Out of a score of people I talked to, several told me they had voted for other candidates in the primary, but they uniformly said they planned to vote for Mamdani in the general election.

I talked to demonstrators who were just out of college, 30-somethings with children in strollers, men and women who were retired or about to retire, whites, Blacks, Latinos, South Asians, the children of Soviet emigres. A few had sophisticated views of democratic socialism; others had fairly simple, even inchoate, views; but no one brought up public ownership and control of the means of production — the classic Marxist and Debsian description of socialism — except to say that they didn’t think that’s what democratic socialism was.

I talked to two 21-year-olds, a couple, who just graduated from college and planned to vote for the first time. Their idea of democratic socialism, the young man said, was “nothing complicated.” Then they each chimed in, describing the parts of Mamdani’s program that constituted socialism in their view — city-run grocery stores, free buses, upping the corporate tax rate. An older nurse practitioner, noting that Mamdani’s democratic socialism isn’t as extreme as people think, said, “I don’t think all those ideas are gonna fly, but one or two could land. The people who take the bus need it to be free, you know. I think that’s a good idea. City groceries — not a bad idea.”

A young woman said she became favorably disposed toward socialism from working in a corporate office, where she saw “greed” playing a large role. A middle-aged woman said, “I think democratic socialism is actually a better thing than capitalism in some ways, because it actually doesn’t eliminate the drive that capitalism brings. But it does put the focus on the idea that government is supposed to be for the people, and I think that the capitalist greed will have enough of a counterbalance that we’re not going to end up like Russia.” A retired postal clerk said, “To me, it’s … the European socialists. They are the Democratic Party as you would like it to be. Social democrats, that’s the ticket. That certainly doesn’t scare me.”

One young woman, who said Mamdani had not been her first choice in the primary, bore out the political sea-change among people who came of age after the Cold War: She said she has a “different opinion” and is a “different generation” from her father’s side of her family, who had been refugees from communism. None of the demonstrators I talked to — or several other people I interviewed for this story — said they were voting for Mamdani entirely because he was a socialist. But they did not identify socialism with communism, and they either approved of socialism or thought it didn’t matter whether Mamdani said he was a democratic socialist.

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Some of my socialist friends are already contemplating a socialist future for America after Mamdani’s victory, but there are, to be sure, reasons why they shouldn’t get ahead of themselves. For one thing, it is still possible that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo could overtake Mamdani. In Buffalo in 2021, a Democratic mayor was upset in the primary by a DSA-backed socialist candidate, but the incumbent then upset the socialist in the general election as a write-in candidate. Mamdani must contend not only with voters who distrust his socialism but with voters who believe, based on his opposition to Zionism, that he is an antisemite.

If Mamdani does win, he could also prove a bust as mayor. Many of his most ambitious proposals require approval from a recalcitrant Albany, which, since the 1975 debt crisis, has had the final say on New York City’s fiscal policy. And even if he wins and is at minimum a moderate success, there are certainly reasons to believe that what plays in New York City might not appeal in most of the country — yet. In the Cato poll, 56% of suburbanites, 69% of those from small towns, and 70% from rural areas disapproved of socialism. Meanwhile, most older voters continue to recoil: 61% of those 45 to 54 years old, 65% of those 55 to 64, and 68% of those 65 and over have an “unfavorable” view of socialism.

It is still possible that Cuomo could overtake Mamdani. Angelina Katsanis/AP

Many older voters are reacting negatively because of the legacy of the Cold War. But in addition, socialism awakens among many Americans a fear of “big government” that goes back to the American Revolution. That fear was on display in 2016 when a Sanders-backed initiative for a state Medicare for All plan was on the Colorado ballot. It lost by 79% to 21%. There were numerous reasons for the initiative’s failure, but a dislike of big government was one of them.

There are other reasons, too, to think that some particulars of Mamdani’s campaign and politics would not play well outside New York and other big metro areas. His permissive stance on immigration is at odds with the views of many Americans, as shown in the 2024 election. An immigrant himself, who lives in and represents a borough almost half of whose population is foreign-born, Mamdani backs New York’s status as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants.

However, there are compelling reasons to think that the influence of politicians like Sanders or Mamdani could continue to grow. The first is purely demographic. The generations of Americans who grew up during the Cold War are dying out. Those who grew up afterward, and didn’t imbibe the identification of socialism with communism, will make up ever larger chunks of the electorate.

A second reason is more complicated. For about 40 years, American economic and foreign policy was driven by what is commonly called neoliberalism — the removal of national barriers to foreign investment, trade and immigration on the assumption that decreasing government control would induce prosperity for all. When the promise of neoliberalism did not pan out — and instead contributed to the worst recession since the Great Depression — Democrats and Republicans alike began pushing more active government intervention into the economy. Both former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump have pursued versions of an “industrial policy,” and Trump has even gone so far as to demand that corporations grant government a stake in their operation. In other words, both parties are defying, and perhaps allaying, Americans’ fear of big government. Mamdani reflected this trend when he said at a recent rally, “We need a government that is every bit as ambitious as our adversaries, a government strong enough to refuse the realities we will not accept and forge the future we know we deserve.”

Democrats could, of course, describe their version of industrial policy as “liberal” or “progressive” instead of “socialist”; political language is notoriously malleable. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose ideas are very similar to those of Sanders, calls herself a “progressive” and “capitalist to the bone.”

But in 2019, as she ran for president, financier and former Democratic official Steven Rattner objected: “She’s really a democratic socialist in some ways.” He was right. And today, as liberalism and progressivism have become increasingly identified with controversial and sometimes unpopular social stands, “socialism” may actually provide a clearer label, in the minds of voters, for the types of economic policies that Sanders, Warren and Mamdani favor — efforts to boost the economy that directly benefit the many and not merely the few.

In the future, perhaps politicians who share Sanders’ and Warren’s convictions about government and economic equality, whose ranks have swelled since the 2024 election, will unhesitatingly call themselves “democratic socialists.” If so, Mamdani’s campaign may prove to be a harbinger of a politics that half a century ago in San Francisco, when socialism barely edged out Satanism, seemed inconceivable.

John B. Judis is the author of “The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism” and an editor at large at Talking Points Memo.