The New Socialist Revolution

Zohran Mamdani's remarkable night

My new novel Colossus is available wherever books are sold. Here’s what Bret Easton Ellis had to say about it: “Barkan is reaching back to the past, to a traditional kind of novel, one much closer to Richard Ford and John Updike ... We are seduced as readers by Teddy Starr, enough to find him sympathetic, relatable, a victim, which I don’t think Ross Barkan cares about as much as is he interesting? And yes, he is.” Buy it in print or get it on audiobook.

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There are elections that not only realign politics but change how we understand concrete reality. Donald Trump’s 2016 triumph qualifies; it remains one of the most consequential elections of the last half century. Trump showed what was possible, reshaping a major political party in his image and dramatically altering how ordinary people relate to their leaders. Zohran Mamdani can never be president, so he cannot shift the currents like that. He is the mayor of New York City. He is, as a 34-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, the most unlikely of mayors, and this lends him national and even international reach. The rest of America is paying a great deal attention to him and his mayoralty, six months into what might be eight years in power. Without the White House, Mamdani cannot impose his will on the Democratic Party like Trump has on the Republicans. The moderate, institutional Democratic faction lucked out; they will not, for now, be driven to extinction. They will not suffer the fate of all the Republican politicians who stood against Trump over the last decade.

Luck, though, comes with caveats. Within the five boroughs—this beating heart of Empire—they are going to have to fight for their life. Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America are still a very long way from demolishing their opposition. The centrist Democrats, that old-line establishment, still outnumber the leftists. They’ve got the governor of New York, enough members of the House delegation, and plenty of state legislators. The socialist caucus in Albany next year will number fourteen: ten state assembly members and four state senators. This isn’t yet enough to dominate bodies of 150 and 63 respectively, but they can begin to apply serious pressure on the legislative leaders and the governor, especially when partnered with Mamdani. In Congress, there will at least three DSA members from New York City. One, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was mostly absent during the primary season, while two others, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, were priority races for Mamdani. He expended tremendous political capital and both won significant victories, along with Brad Lander, who annihilated an Israel hawk incumbent, Dan Goldman.

The spin out of New York—and sometimes, there’s only one kind of spin and it’s correct—is that Mamdani, my old campaign manager, had a fantastic night. All of his endorsed candidates won. He is not the first politician to pick winners. But he is one of the few who is interested in adding allies to a greater political project. Mamdani believes in a stronger welfare state; he wants higher taxes to pay for it. To get what he wants, he must elect politicians who think like him. He also, though he speaks less about it these days, cares a great deal about foreign policy. The Palestinian cause has been vital to him since he was a teenager. A pro-Palestine Democratic Party is, unequivocally, a goal of his, though his primary focus remains on managing the municipal government and implementing his version of sewer socialism. Last night was an absolute disaster for the Israel-adoring flank of the Democratic Party, those who believed they could gobble up AIPAC dollars with impunity and sign off on unconditional military aid for Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard right, theocratic government. The war in Gaza has shaped a young generation like Vietnam. Israel hawks won’t regain the ground they lost. They will, in time, be a minority faction of the Democrats, and many might end up in the GOP, where AIPAC will be tolerated for a little while longer. For American Jews on the left, this is a fine development. A 5,000-year-old faith must be divorced from a single malevolent nation-state that should have little to do with the future of the United States of America. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent felled by Avila Chevalier, now understands why bowing to such a pernicious donor class wasn’t helpful for his political future.

There is nothing magical about DSA. One doesn’t go to a DSA meeting or watch one of their rallies and walk away with the snappy phrase or TikTok tip that unlocks a hundred new votes. They are a decentralized, dues-paying, membership-based organization that prioritizes political organizing above all else. Their top priority is recruiting and engaging enough volunteers on their chosen political campaigns to ensure victory. If a candidate wins a DSA endorsement, they are guaranteed dozens or even hundreds of people who will show up, usually for free, and knock on doors for them. (DSA runs paid canvasses as well.) This is why, in a given year, DSA will keep its endorsement slate relatively small. A labor union or the Working Families Party might endorse in twenty or thirty different races. DSA, conversely, only hands out endorsements to candidates they can bolster with a volunteer operation. The endorsement process itself is fairly intensive. Candidates must fill out a questionnaire and win votes from the borough and citywide chapters. DSA members vet their candidates extensively. Their goal is to elect politicians who will be loyal to the organization, who will listen, collaborate, and back future campaigns. They want politicians who will support a democratic socialist agenda, whether it’s taxing the wealthy or abolishing ICE, and won’t go back on campaign promises. DSA politicians, in office, must remain accountable to the people who elevated them. I know this well because, in 2017, I joined DSA when I decided to run for State Senate. I attempted to win their endorsement. They only supported one Senate campaign in that cycle and it wasn’t mine. I understood. The other race was the only one they had capacity for and Julia Salazar won anyway. She was much more active in DSA than I was. Once my political career ended, I didn’t renew my dues, and that was that.

DSA has existed since the 1980s, but has only mattered, in a political sense, since 2017, when the followers of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign sought an outlet for their ambitions. Sanders had lost, but why abandon politics altogether? DSA boomed. After membership tailed off in the early 2020s, it ballooned again when Mamdani ran for mayor. They are at a new apogee, or still far away from a peak—we won’t know for a while. As long as they have a mayor who is willing to stump for them, anything is possible. Mamdani, notably, did not endorse the entire DSA slate. To appease Carl Heastie, the Assembly speaker, he remained neutral in races where DSA insurgents were directly challenging members of the Assembly. It was a move I questioned, but one that ultimately worked to Mamdani’s favor because he got everything he wanted: the insurgents, minus one, won anyway, and he got credit for delivering the victories of Valdez, Chevalier Avila, and Lander. And it’s inarguable that his support was essential for the two women, who were in much tougher fights than Lander and had far less political experience. Espaillat does not get beaten without Mamdani. Valdez, with DSA, might have eked out a victory against Brooklyn Borough President Antontio Reynoso, but it’s hard to imagine she’s obliterating him by twenty points without the full-throated Mamdani endorsement. He cut ads for her, campaigned for her, and ensured every voter of his knew who he wanted for Congress. Mamdani brought her to the mountaintop.

A complaint about DSA, lodged from those who resent their presence, is that it’s a club for lonely young gentrifiers—the childless, the drifters, the people who’ve yet to get “serious” about their lives. The youth element, in particular, is often skewered. These people just want to hang out. They don’t know any better. Maybe. But really, it doesn’t matter at all why they do what they do, if they knock on doors for Claire Valdez because they care about passing Medicare for All or they want to meet their next lover. In fact, it was once the political establishment—the so-called machines—that understood this best of all. One of my chief contentions, borne out by the last ten years of politics in New York, is that the political machine as we know it is dead. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slayed Joe Crowley, the Queens Democratic boss, in 2018, an illusion was finally shattered. It had been a decade, maybe more, since the actual Queens Democratic Party organized voters for their chosen candidates. The political clubs had become, by the 2010s, shell organizations, and the establishment stopped doing the difficult work of signing up new voters, passing out palm cards at the subway stations, and trudging up apartment staircases to meet registered Democrats. In the twentieth century, they in fact did all of this work. The machines were real. They could support a candidate and a guarantee a thousand votes. They had, of course, patronage to dole out, and that kept enough voters in line. You backed the party candidate so, maybe, you or your cousin could get on the public payroll and enjoy the sort of job that paid you for full-time labor but only needed you there on a Monday or Thursday. The political clubs—reform and establishment alike—were also packed with human beings, many of them young and excited to volunteer on a campaign. I know this because my own mother, in her twenties, belonged to a political club in Brooklyn. It was how you found friends and dated around. Jobs, too, could be on the offer.

DSA has ended the organizing interregnum in New York City. In the 2000s and 2010s, establishment Democrats abandoned organizing; they lost interest. The best explanation is they got lazy and self-satisfied, and no one was holding them accountable until a bartender who grew up in Westchester decided to wage war against the boss of it all. Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Sanders, kicked off an organizing revolution that has not let up. The old party bosses—the Meade Espositos, the Charles Francis Murphys—knew how to counter that. You get into the streets and find your own people. But who does that anymore? Organized labor, for the most part, is insular, and is only helpful if a district has any union density that is particular to that union. The NGO or Alphabet Left, which has both partnered with DSA and opposed it, has taken all the wrong lessons of the last decade. The Working Families Party, at its foundation, cared greatly about grassroots political organizing. Now it is hard to say, beyond handing out copious endorsements and spending a bit of money, what it truly does. The rule of politics, today and always, is that a group is only worth something to a candidate if they can bring volunteers or cut a check. The WFP does spend money and the left needs a vehicle like that; it is, effectively, a super PAC that is allowed to coordinate with campaigns because it is a political party in New York. But Reynoso v. Valdez should put to rest the fiction that they are able to marshal any kind of volunteer army for a candidate they endorse. Valdez’s DSA contingent overran a borough president who had also spent eight years in the City Council and had the support of the outgoing congresswoman. It was less a primary of people v. money than people v. people-less nonprofits. In that case, one might even wonder why Valdez’s margin wasn’t even larger.

Mamdani should feel less restrained in the next election cycle. Over the last eight months, he helped the political establishment quite a bit; he needed the backing of the governor to ensure significant elements of his political agenda, which require Albany approval, could be implemented, and he kneecapped primary challengers to her and Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year. If Mamdani was right to leave Jeffries alone, he should not be so deferent to the rest of the political class going forward. Most either opposed him or wished him to fail. They are now soldiers without guns, bullies without muscle. They can’t raise more money than him. They can’t hunt up more volunteers than him. They can’t go on television or TikTok and sound a tenth as compelling as him. It’s time they understand there is a political boss in this city, and he lives in Gracie Mansion. They can do business with him; Mamdani is forever amiable. He is not a vindictive person. The next few years needn’t be bitter. But the establishment Democrats who revile Mamdani so much should understand 2028 is going to look like 2026. There will be more races to be run, more incumbents to replace. For a century, since successive Red Scares squelched socialism in this country, the left has been in a defensive crouch. Only now can the socialists hit back. Only now can they escape the margins. They found their generational talent. It’s a fair fight, at last.