It’s Dangerous to Overestimate the Left’s Strength

Be excited about Zohran, but sober about our movement's shallow roots

By Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara

Even with a couple of months’ distance, Zohran Mamdani’s election still feels almost unreal, like a dispatch from an alternate universe. But it’s happening: America’s largest city is now led by a young socialist, a Jacobin subscriber, and a committed member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

For many of us on the New York left, this is the high point of our political lives thus far, a vindication of patient, often grinding organizing. But amid the celebration, there is a note of worry — the feeling that we have won the sprint, and now the marathon begins. For November’s result to mark the beginning of a lasting transformation of not only one city but national politics, we have to start by acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: despite our impressive electoral reach, our movement’s roots are still shallow.

Things were very different when American socialism had its first big electoral breakthrough. The 1910 election of Socialist mayor Emil Seidel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, initiated nearly fifty years of leftist governance in the city. Milwaukee’s triumph was the culmination of decades of escalating working-class militancy and socialist growth. Mamdani’s, by contrast, has taken place despite far lower levels of union and left organization. Consider the raw numbers: while Milwaukee’s Socialists had roughly one member for every one hundred city residents, New York’s chapter of DSA has, even after a big surge in the past decade, one member for every 670 residents.

But organizational size isn’t the biggest difference. In the early twentieth century, Milwaukee’s Socialists led nearly every major union in the city and were woven into working-class neighborhood life. It was this on-the-ground power that made it possible for them to sustain their movement for so long and to pressure intransigent legislators from other parties to pass some of their policy planks, like improving infrastructure and strengthening workers’ legal protections. In contrast, New York’s democratic socialists don’t lead any of the city’s largest unions. And Zohran proved able to win over much of the working class despite NYC-DSA’s disproportionate concentration among college-educated voters in a handful of neighborhoods.

How did we get to this paradox of electoral strength without organizational depth? And what does it mean for Mamdani’s ability to govern, as well as for rebuilding a socialist movement worthy of the name?

Illustration by Rose Wong, Jacobin

How We Got Here

Socialists, not just in Wisconsin but nationally, were once deeply tied to a social base. The late 1930s witnessed the high-water mark of left power within the organized working class and US politics writ large. Well-rooted radicals like the Popular Front–era Communists, Wisconsin’s sewer socialists, and the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party played a central role in a resurgent labor movement and acted as a left flank in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. But widespread elite-stoked backlash blocked the movement’s forward advance and culminated in the mass expulsion of leftists from union leadership nationally during the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s.

No other industrialized country experienced such a dramatic divorce between labor and the Left, a split from which both sides have yet to fully recover. Bureaucratized American unions became narrowly focused on serving their existing members and making backroom deals with Democratic leaders, while socialists henceforth found themselves largely isolated from the broader working class and its organizations.

Though the social movements of the 1960s provided an explosion of activist energy, the socialist left never came anywhere near its early majoritarian peaks. A retreat into academia and nonprofits from the 1980s onward further isolated American leftism, while the union movement, for its part, went into free fall under the combined impact of deindustrialization and Reaganism. By the 1990s and 2000s, both American socialism and, to a lesser extent, organized labor were located firmly on the margins of national political life. Lacking the collective vehicles to advance their interests — and living in an increasingly atomized society where working-class cultural bonds were being steadily eroded — workers turned to individualist survival strategies to simply get by.

The roots of socialism’s rebirth in the United States can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, both of which thrust the question of economic inequality back to the fore. But it really took Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign to drag organized socialism out of the political wilderness. Membership in DSA spurted upward from less than ten thousand in 2016 to nearly one hundred thousand by 2020, and insurgent electoral campaigns within Democratic primaries began to catch on. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018, as was NYC-DSA’s first state legislator, Julia Salazar.

For the first time in more than a century, democratic socialism, at least in New York City, began to build a real political machine capable of vying for power. Faced with a hollowed-out Democratic Party and leaning on the volunteer energy of radicalized, downwardly mobile millennials, it became clear that you could actually win some races — particularly low-turnout contests in neighborhoods with large numbers of college-educated young people — even without very deep roots among the broader working class. Unions, for their part, continued to decline in number and mostly stayed aloof from, if not actively hostile toward, these electoral insurgencies. That distance between the Left’s electoral victories and the overall weakness of working-class organization remains the central contradiction of our political moment — we are a Left with ballots cast but few shop floors won, with more cultural importance than class power.

Zohran’s Breakthrough

Zohran’s mayoral campaign was a breakthrough for the Left in many ways. Unlike Bernie, he proved able to dramatically increase youth turnout. And perhaps most important, propelled by his astounding success with young minorities, he won over a decisive majority of working-class voters well beyond the white-collar workers and professionals upon which the Democrats and the Left have both increasingly come to depend.

However, precisely because his margins of victory were so unprecedented for a modern democratic socialist, it’d be dangerous to overestimate the Left’s strength. Though the roughly one hundred thousand volunteers that powered Zohran’s campaign constitute an important extension of organized power into the broader working class, most of these people are only loosely engaged. One of the crucial challenges for the movement will be to develop enough of these volunteers into cadre for Zohran’s agenda in office and, to the greatest extent possible, for a democratic socialist future.

November’s decisive victory demonstrates that working-class politics can effectively speak to the anger of everyday people. But in terms of organization, there remains an undeniable gap between the more than one million New Yorkers who voted for Zohran and the still quite narrow base of organized democratic socialists in New York City. Everything now depends on finding ways to bridge this gap.

Reverse Engineering a Workers’ Movement

The task ahead is to make use of the momentum of the mayoral victory, plus the levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough to transform New York City. Many will do this by joining DSA, others by unionizing their workplaces — some by doing both.

Most urgent of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers will need to plug into efforts like NYC DSA’s Tax the Rich and Our Time, a new campaign meant to sustain and deepen Zohran’s canvassing operation to win free childcare, affordable housing, and better transit by taxing the rich. Workplace and neighborhood Our Time hubs could coordinate petitioning efforts, hold potluck socials, develop creative ways to reach peers, and escalate campaigns to pressure the governor and state legislators to back an affordability agenda. Changing the relationship of forces through outward-facing organizing will do far more to help make Zohran’s platform a reality than denunciations of the administration’s inevitable limitations and compromises.

Still, one socialist insight must never be forgotten: there are limits to how many doses of socialism within capitalism the system can tolerate even at the national level, much less the municipal one. And when you’re up against some of the world’s most powerful corporate interests, just getting elected and pursuing smart insider politics isn’t enough to pass even modest social democratic policies.

The fact that establishment politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani testifies to the strength of the movement behind him. But our veto-holding governor’s continued hesitation to support taxing the rich illustrates just how far we still have to go. To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund reforms — and to keep up Zohran’s popularity in the face of inevitable attacks and crises (including those imposed by Donald Trump) — New York’s left will need more popular depth and breadth. Without such a working-class movement, there’s a real danger that Zohran’s agenda will get blocked or that, even if it partially passes, most working people will be too busy with the day-to-day grind or too swayed by media spin to give him credit.

Nor can we expect that Zohran’s charisma and viral videos will be sufficient to keep him popular. When the going gets rough — and it certainly will in the face of concerted billionaire opposition — even the best communications game won’t be able to assuage the doubts, misunderstandings, and fears that will arise among ordinary people. For that, you need trusted on-the-ground organizers talking to their coworkers, neighbors, family members, and friends. Developing such a broad layer of well-rooted working-class activists is the key strategic challenge of the coming months and years.

Given that the central obstacle to socialist power and growth is working-class resignation, perhaps the single most important thing about Mamdani’s election is that it has the potential to erode the despair and fear that have dominated our daily lives and politics for decades. Zohran himself stressed this dynamic in his victory speech:

There are [some] who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears…. While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now it is something that we do.

New Yorkers were given a reason to hope — and they seized it at the ballot box. The big question now is whether we will be able to lean on that hope to rebuild a powerful working-class movement in workplaces and neighborhoods across our city and across the nation.

[A version of this article was published in the recent print issue of Jacobin, which you can subscribe to here.]

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• Paul Heideman has written a great new book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos, you should get a copy here.

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