By Michael Powell
Monday, August 18, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young Democratic Party
candidate for mayor of New York City, has been hard at work balancing his
deep-dyed socialist beliefs with his need to show voters that he is at least a
cousin to mainstream liberal Democrats.
Last week, he confirmed that he had previously fielded a
phone call from former President Barack Obama. With cameras rolling, Mamdani
spent a day in early August in the political embrace of Elizabeth Warren, a
progressive Democratic doyen. The Massachusetts senator talked passionately of
challenging billionaires while Mamdani talked of his sympathy for police
officers whom he described as overstretched and overworked. The same day, they
sat on a park bench like old buddies, chatting and leaning in toward each
other. Mamdani shed a possibly impromptu tear—after which he and Warren burst
out laughing, in a moment that his campaign promptly retailed on Facebook and
TikTok.
Mamdani, 33, conveys that he is a man prepared to work
with the organs of capitalist democracy to progressive ends and not to demand
ideological litmus tests. But the Mamdani who takes great pride in his identity
as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and who told
Meet
the
Press in late June that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”—to
the alarm of Wall Street donors—has hardly disappeared.
By his own account, his political journey from state
assemblyman to mayoral nominee owes almost entirely to his umbilical connection
with DSA. A cache of podcast interviews and speeches over the past five years
sheds light on his view of this evolution.
Two years ago, in a speech at DSA’s national
convention, he described how belonging to the organization helped him and a
handful of fellow socialist assembly members survive in the cauldron of Albany.
“We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special
because of our organization,” he said. “It is far easier to corrupt an
individual than a mass-movement organization.” He concluded, “So sincerity
forever, solidarity forever, and socialism forever.” In past years, he has also argued that DSA
must push for causes that make some supporters uncomfortable, such as the “end
goal of seizing the means of production.”
The practical meaning of that rhetoric—its old-school
socialist flavor bordering on obscurantist—is difficult to parse, and not just
because Mamdani is remaking his image in real time. The political left from
which Mamdani emerges is a collection of disorderly tribes, sheltering
self-styled revolutionaries alongside those who prize compromise and electoral
victory, and those who want to sand the edges off capitalism alongside those
who want to replace it altogether.
Within DSA, that tendency toward sectarianism can produce
a cacophonous and quarrelsome internal politics: Marx meets the Marx Brothers.
Some members—likely a majority of the organization—seem intent on trying to
change the Democratic Party from within, by supporting figures such as Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in primaries. Some speak of the group
becoming a party of its own. Still others have formed Leninist cliques that
yearn to transform DSA into a revolutionary vanguard.
Earlier this month, a DSA-friendly Substack account
cobbled together a reader’s
guide to the organization’s clotted mass of caucuses. Among them is Red
Star, a Marxist-Leninist outcropping whose unforgiving politics can be
discerned from a recent post entitled “We Do Not Condemn
Hamas, and Neither Should You.” My favorite DSA offshoot is the Caracol
caucus, an eco-socialist degrowth group named for the Spanish word for snail.
Those allied with Mamdani, and those who fear and oppose
him, are alike in speculating how much socialism he might try to bring
to New York. But the bigger question might be what kind of socialism he
embraces. His challenge will be to draw on DSA’s organizing support while
transcending its fractiousness and some members’ ideological excesses.
***
DSA sprang to life in 1982 from the dying embers of
earlier left-wing organizations. Its founders were committed to working within
the Democratic Party. The group’s intellectual father was Michael Harrington,
whose 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States was
credited with helping build support for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society
program. Harrington described DSA as occupying “the left wing of the possible.”
That DSA refused for many years to work with Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyites,
who were seen—for reasons grounded in decades of empirical observation—as
authoritarian and disdainful of democracy. It attracted New York politicians
such as former Mayor David Dinkins and had a membership of about 6,000. It
remained bookish and locally respected and—for the first couple of decades
after the end of the Cold War—more or less irrelevant.
Then came 2016 and Bernie Sanders’s electric run for the
Democratic presidential nomination. The Vermont senator is both avowedly a
democratic socialist and temperamentally unsuited to behaving as any group’s
obedient cadre. He never joined DSA (and long avoided joining the Democratic
Party), but young people flocked to his banner—and to DSA’s. Two years later, a
28-year-old bartender and waitress vanquished a top House Democratic leader in
a congressional primary. That insurgent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a
preternatural political talent. She became the face of DSA and played a role in
attracting tens of thousands more young people to join the organization, whose
national membership stands at about 70,000. The New York City chapter has
10,000 members.
Joshua Freeman, a retired historian at the City
University of New York, joined DSA a few years ago, drawn by its sense of
possibility. “The party is dominated by younger people, which is absolutely
everyone except for about three of us,” he said. The 20-somethings gravitating
to DSA in the past decade could be forgiven for viewing as ancient history the
angry polemics and intellectual brawls that marked relations between
20th-century social democrats, Stalinists, and Trotskyites.
Yet significant divides have opened up within today’s
group. “The problem is that while New York City DSA is pretty much in the ‘left
wing of the possible’ tradition, the national party is not in that place,”
Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College, told me. He was a DSA member
for many decades before quitting when DSA equivocated
about the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. “Once the left sectarians are
lodged in place, they become an immovable force.”
Militant groupings within DSA local chapters wield more
power in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Syracuse, and Portland, Oregon,
than in New York. The Portland branch—four of whose members now sit on the city
council—urges members to pursue a “rupture with the Democratic Party.” And its
co-chair, Olivia Katbi, recently boasted on X of
telling a New York Times reporter to bug off because that newspaper
published “disgusting, racist, dehumanizing propaganda” about Palestinians.
These militant caucuses wield considerable power on DSA’s
national committee, which controls national endorsements. The militants hold
candidates to exacting, even self-defeating, standards. In 2024 the national
organization withdrew
its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s best-known candidate. She
apparently had paid insufficient attention to its Federal Socialists in Office
Committee and, in a moment of apostasy, had co-signed a press release
supporting stronger anti-missile systems to help Israel defend its civilian
population.
DSA’s New York City branch, by contrast, voted
by
a wide margin to endorse her. “We’re concerned at the increasing
mismanagement and sectarianism in DSA’s national leadership,” a caucus
prominent in the New York chapter said in
a statement, “as some leaders attempt to steer the organization into
powerlessness and isolation.” (Ocasio-Cortez survived the national DSA snub,
besting her Republican opponent by 38
points.)
Mamdani is more of a from-the-cradle socialist than
Ocasio-Cortez. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent theorist of settler
colonialism at Columbia University; his mother, Mira Nair, is a well-known
filmmaker—Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and The
Reluctant Fundamentalist—with left-wing politics. When invited to attend
the progressive Haifa International Film Festival in Israel in 2013, she declined,
tweeting
that she would go there only when Israel ended the occupation and stopped
“privileging one religion over another.” Zohran, who identifies as a Muslim,
noted in August 2023 that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his
politics and was the cause that drew him to DSA.
DSA’s national political platform, rewritten when Mamdani
was an assemblyman, is a gumbo of left-wing positions, many of which sit miles
from the political mainstream. The organization would free all inmates from
prisons and jails and decriminalize the drug trade, prostitution, and squatting
in unoccupied homes. DSA endorses
cutting police budgets “annually towards zero,” disarming cops, and
decertifying their unions.
Mamdani has hauled some of this ideological baggage into
the national spotlight. In December 2020, just after he was elected to the
state assembly, Mamdani wrote of New
York City’s police force: “There is no negotiating with an institution this
wicked & corrupt. Defund it.” That view has not aged well. Mamdani of late
has taken to energetically disavowing his former view, portraying it as an
artifact from many years past, before he was an elected official. “I am not
defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told
reporters last month, after meeting in late July with the family of a police
officer killed in a mass shooting. Mamdani said
that he is a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that
leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.”
***
The political successes of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and
now Mamdani have done much to rehabilitate the term socialist and even
give it a hip aura. Evidence that the term no longer carries a toxic sting can
be heard on the right, as conservative commentators now use a harsher term to
describe Mamdani: communist.
His actual positions
range from splendidly consumer-friendly promises such as free municipal buses
and cheap groceries in city-owned supermarkets to universal day care for all
children ages six weeks to 5 years. He promises to freeze apartment-building
rents and to triple the city’s capital budget, creating 200,000 units of
publicly subsidized housing. The price tag for this is $100 billion over 10
years. He has sidestepped the question of how he would pay for all this,
however badly day care and housing are needed, other than to propose billions
of dollars in new taxes, all of which are controlled by the state legislature
and governor.
As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani met recently with the
Partnership for New York City, a chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate,
and corporate leaders. Afterward, Kathryn S. Wylde, its longtime president,
told me that although Mamdani “has no policy chops—none—he is smart, has a
smile that will kill, and he will listen.” He has overhauled his communications
and campaign team, importing distinctly non-cadre sorts from the Democratic
mainstream.
Mamdani seems aware that, however much he might still
listen to his DSA comrades, he faces a larger reality: He could soon oversee
some 300,000 employees in a city of 8.5 million people.
Still, unease among wealthy New Yorkers is palpable. They
are accustomed to winning and not inclined to bet on the chances that a smart
left-wing candidate might moderate after being elected mayor. They would prefer
to spend money and seek his defeat. Several years ago, Mamdani joked about this
reflex: “It’s almost a ritual of the donor class to set their money on fire
when it comes to running against DSA candidates.”
Exhibit A is an email that an acquaintance forwarded to
me in late July. Written by Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global
equity-management firm, the message predicted that a Mamdani victory would have
“dire consequences.” It proposed a joint fund that would shower millions of
dollars on a competing candidate. In his email, Sandler, who did not respond to
my request for an interview, pledged to toss in $500,000, and he set the
desired minimum counterrevolutionary donation at $25,000.
Alas, the donor class’s other choices are not appetizing.
They include formerly indicted Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an independent;
former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now running a sputtering independent
campaign after Mamdani soundly defeated him in the Democratic primary; and
Curtis Sliwa, a Republican best known for founding the anti-crime group
Guardian Angels in the 1970s and more recently for sharing his apartment with 16
cats. (According to his campaign, he now has only six cats.)
Mamdani’s commanding lead in the polls offers him much
room for political redefinition. His transition in the past five years—from
obscure socialist state assembly candidate to a TikTok star who attracts
Obama’s interest and sheds an artful tear with Warren—is remarkable. It is
premature to say that he will wind up as just another left-liberal Democrat. He
has been insistent throughout his brief political career on the centrality of
his identity as a socialist. Without that, he told the DSA convention two
years ago, “you will start to rationalize that which you initially rebelled
against.” Socialists know, he told the convention, that “winning an election is
not an end, but a means to an end.” The precise contours of his desired end
remain, for now, something of a mystery.
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