Socialism’s salesman

Zohran Mamdani places his hand on his heart and smiles. He’s wearing black leather gloves against the bitter cold of New York in January. The crowd of thousands who gathered to witness his inauguration chants, “Zohran! Zohran!” He responds by blowing them a kiss. A few moments earlier Mamdani had placed his hand on the Quran and taken the oath of office to become mayor of New York City.

Mamdani invited Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to administer the oath. It was a significant choice because both men are democratic socialists and Sanders also started his political career as a mayor—albeit in the much smaller city of Burlington, Vt. “Thank you to the man whose leadership I seek most to emulate, who I am so grateful to be sworn in by today,” Mamdani said during his address. Another well-known democratic socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kicked off the inauguration. Until Mamdani’s meteoric rise the year before, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were America’s leading proponents of socialism. But today Mamdani is on track to surpass them.

The new mayor owes his victory partly to running against a scandal-­plagued opponent. Mamdani also has enormous personal charisma, and he spoke to voters’ struggles with high costs. But his victory has much deeper roots. Socialism is over two centuries old and continues to have a grip on the human spirit. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which backed Mamdani, is far more formidable than most Americans realize. Its leaders think in decades rather than election cycles. And in Mamdani, it has the perfect pitchman to sell its politics to a new generation of voters in New York and beyond.

After Mamdani took the oath of office, he launched into his address. “My fellow New Yorkers, today begins a new era,” he said, beaming with confidence. Journalist Ross Barkan was not surprised by Mamdani’s relaxed demeanor. “Crowds don’t bother him,” he said. “I’ve never seen him nervous.”

Barkan, who’s writing a book about Mamdani, had a great view of the stage from the press area. While he came to cover the event as a reporter, he was also supporting a friend. Barkan and Mamdani met in late 2017 when Barkan himself was running for office. He wanted to hire Mamdani as his campaign manager. They clicked on a personal and political level. “We both took a withering view of the political elites, the Democratic Party apparatus in New York,” Barkan said. But Mamdani didn’t accept the job until after Barkan proved he could raise funds for his campaign. “He’s not interested in protest campaigns that are guaranteed to lose,” Barkan said. Mamdani signed on, though Barkan did eventually lose his election.

Mamdani persevered in politics and in 2020 was elected to the New York State Assembly. Five years later, he rose from virtual anonymity to defeat Andrew Cuomo and win the Democratic Party’s nomination for New York City mayor. Cuomo is a former state governor who tried to make a comeback after resigning in disgrace in 2021. After losing the nomination, Cuomo ran in the general election as an independent, but Mamdani defeated him again. Some commentators suggested Mamdani’s victory was less about his strengths and more about Cuomo’s weaknesses. Right-wing social media influencers poked fun at Mamdani’s short-lived career as a rapper under the name “Young Cardamon.” Barkan thinks anyone who dismisses Mamdani as an unserious performer is in for a rude shock: “He’s an alpha. He commands the room.”

The word socialist is sometimes used as a political pejorative, but Mamdani embraced it. “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said during his inaugural address. “I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”

Ivan Pongracic, a professor of economics at Hillsdale College, said the definition of socialism hasn’t changed in 200 years: “government ownership and control of the means of production.”

“By means of production we mean any sort of productive good, capital, goods, factories, trains, ships, anything,” he said.

The most famous exponent of socialism is Karl Marx. He argued cap­italism would inevitably lead to such severe exploitation of workers that they would violently overthrow the system, seizing the means of production and ushering in socialism. In his view, socialism required an all-powerful state to control the economy and reshape human nature so that we would all become selfless and collective-minded. “That would then make it possible to usher in the final stage of history, which was communism,” Pongracic said. It would be like “the nonreligious form of heaven.”

Some versions of socialism predate Marx. Pongracic argues Plato was a socialist. “Plato’s ideas were basically that the government should be in control of everything,” he said. Even the Pilgrims tried to start a socialist utopia when they landed in America in 1620. They turned to private property after many of them starved to death.

Pongracic believes socialism’s enduring popularity lies in its promise of “a society which is like a family, where everybody loves each other and takes care of each other, thinks about each other,” he said. “That has a powerful appeal to people.”

During the Cold War, the United States was often cast as the capitalist alternative to the communism of the Soviet Union. But Barkan says our ­country has a stronger socialist tradition than that simplistic narrative suggests. He notes that socialists governed Milwaukee for around 50 years until 1960, a period called “sewer socialism.” He also points to the New Deal. While President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a socialist, Barkan thinks he took inspiration from socialist ideas. FDR is a “guiding light” for Mamdani, according to Barkan.

The American Socialist Party was prominent in the early 1900s. Eugene V. Debs, one of its founding members, ran for president several times. Before Bernie Sanders, Debs was America’s best-known socialist. Mamdani quoted Debs—“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity”—in his victory speech after winning the election in November.

The link between the two men ­carries even more significance this year, as America prepares to celebrate 250 years of democracy. Debs never hid his disdain for the American experiment. On July 4, 1901—the 125th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—he gave a speech in which he took aim at the Founders. They said all men are ­created equal but “evidently meant themselves alone,” Debs said. He also excoriated working-class people who saluted the American flag on Indepen­dence Day. “Triumphant socialism will haul down that flag and every other that symbolizes capitalist class rule and wage slavery,” he vowed.

THE VIDEO THAT POPPED UP in Kara Branch’s social media feed had a provocative—and irresistible—title: “Why did so many New Yorkers vote for Donald Trump?” Branch clicked on it.

The three-minute video showed Zohran Mamdani taking to the streets of his Queens district a week after the 2024 election to ask his constituents who they voted for. Many said they voted for Trump over concerns about the rising costs of the basic necessities of life. Several expressed frustration that large amounts of money were being sent to wars in Gaza and Ukraine while Americans struggled. Mamdani held his microphone forward and leaned in slightly to show he was listening. Near the end of the video, upbeat music started playing as Mamdani told one man, “We have a mayor’s race coming up next year, and if there was a candidate talking about freezing the rent, making buses free, making universal child care a reality, are those things you’d support?” The man didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely. You’d have my vote all day.”

For Branch—like many—this was her first sight of Mamdani. The video quickly went viral. It stood out because Mamdani showed respect and concern, in contrast to the derision Democrats often direct at Trump voters. Branch has lived in New York for 15 years and liked what she saw, but she didn’t have much hope for Mamdani’s prospects. “Oh well, that’s sweet,” she thought. “That’s cute. That’s not what wins.”

The video contained the main planks of Mamdani’s future campaign platform. He offered simple, easy-to-­understand proposals that signaled to voters he cared about “affordability,” or the daily struggle to make ends meet. He proposed fast and free buses, freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, free universal child care, and five city-owned grocery stores, one for each ­borough of New York.

“For me personally, the one that ­resonated most is probably rent,” said Branch. She lives in a rent-stabilized apartment and just saw her rent go up. Nearly half of all occupied housing units in New York City are rent-stabilized. That means landlords can only raise rent by percentages set by the NYC Rent Guidelines Board. Mamdani plans to appoint board members who will stop the increases.

After watching the video, Branch was pleasantly surprised to see Mamdani’s popularity surge. She hoped New Yorkers might be willing to try something new. “Because what we’re trying to do right now—on the left, the right, the center—all of it is not working.”

Two groups helped propel Mamdani to victory. First, immigrants. Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved to America as a child, becoming a citizen in 2018. Exit polls indicated he won 85% of voters who had lived in New York for less than five years. Immigrants are an enormous voting bloc. A 2025 study found that 25% of residents have limited English proficiency and 50% speak a ­language other than English at home.

Mamdani also did particularly well among younger voters. According to an ABC News exit poll, he captured 78% of voters under 30 and 66% of voters aged 30 to 44. Voters aged 45 and over preferred Cuomo.

Nathan Halberstadt is a partner at New Founding, a venture capital firm. He fears young Mamdani voters who “just want to blow up the system” are a symptom of deeper problems.

Last fall, Halberstadt produced a graph shared widely on social media. It showed that in 1950, 50% of Americans were married and owned a home at age 30. “That meant you could expect, as a young person growing up in America, to have a normal life,” he said. In 2025, only around 12% of 30-year-olds were married homeowners.

A 30-year-old who isn’t married and doesn’t own a home is probably “rootless, atomized,” Halberstadt said. They likely moved away from their hometown in pursuit of better opportunities, may not attend church, and spend much of their time online. This can funnel people into either the far right or the far left. “They don’t have anywhere to turn, and so they turn to radical politics,” Halberstadt said.

DANIEL GOULDEN adjusted his face mask as he prepared to speak on a panel at the Socialism 2025 conference last July in Chicago. The panelists sitting around him were also in face masks. “Zohran is gonna really attempt to do what conservatives say we want to do, which is provide gender-­affirming care to anyone who wants it for free,” said Goulden, a member of the Steering Committee of the New York City branch of Democratic Socialists of America. For the panel discussion, he’d donned a black T-shirt that read “Protect Trans Kids.” “We’re going to fly people in and pay for their hotel rooms, and we’re going to do all of the Fox News stuff. We’re getting ideas from Fox News,” he added, eliciting laughter from the room.

Goulden worked on Mamdani’s campaign, helped write the campaign’s trans policy platform, and said he regularly meets with Mamdani and his staff. “With Zohran, we’re in basically the best possible position to seize state power that we can be in. Because we’re like this,” he said as he crossed his index and middle fingers.

In the 2025 election cycle, centrist Democrats tried to inch away from transgenderism once it became controversial. While Mamdani focused on affordability, he also never shied away from identity-­based progressive ideology.

Hillsdale’s Ivan Pongracic thinks that fits naturally with Mamdani’s socialism. After World War II, many countries including Germany experienced massive economic growth, with incomes rising for rich and poor alike. “It was obvious that the Marxian story of the economic exploitation of workers was not making sense anymore,” Pongracic said. Academics at the University of Frankfurt in Germany came up with a modified version of Marxism, where class struggle was framed in cultural terms rather than economic ones. “It was about men exploiting women. White people exploiting black people. Christians exploiting Muslims,” said Pongracic. In this line of thinking, the government must right those wrongs. Pongracic thinks cultural Marxism took root in the United States in the 1970s. Today, transgender people fit into the framework as a so-called exploited group.

Goulden is one of many DSA vol­unteers who helped get Mamdani’s ­campaign off the ground.

The DSA was founded in 1982 and today has over 100,000 members. It got a massive boost from Bernie Sanders’ two attempts to win the Democratic nomination. Stu Smith, an investigative analyst for the Manhattan Institute, thinks Sanders’ popularity lowered the average DSA member’s age from 70 to the mid-30s. “And I feel like with Mamdani, that’s only gotten lower,” he said. Smith described the DSA and the Democratic Party as “frenemies.”

“They use each other when it is useful, but there is no illusion that they are competing to define and represent the American left,” he said.

Smith warns Americans underestimate the dedication of DSA activists who “devote nearly every free hour to advancing socialism locally, nationally, and even internationally.”

He said they think in decades rather than election cycles. Up to now they’ve been “content to win slowly, advancing socialism inch by inch while others underestimate their resolve,” Smith said. But they are “super energized” by their big win in New York.

In Mamdani, they’ve acquired a charismatic public face who can promote their ideas and candidates. New York law allows him to hold two consecutive four-year terms as mayor. However, because he’s a naturalized citizen, he cannot run for president.

Mamdani scored a victory just one week after taking office. He teamed up with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to announce a $1.7 billion expansion of taxpayer-subsidized child care.

But Pongracic doesn’t think Mamdani can make socialism work in the long term. “It taxes the productive people in the economy, and when it taxes them, it incentivizes them to actually work less and to create less tax revenues. Bureaucracies will inevitably want to spend more and will run out of money.” However, he notes that Adam Smith famously said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” New York is a wealthy city and can keep going for a long time under poor governance.

In recent decades, New York has roughly alternated between liberal and slightly more conservative mayors. But Nathan Halberstadt believes it’s foolish to assume the political pendulum will always keep swinging back and forth. Sometimes it swings one way and stays there. “I always push back strongly against people who say, ‘New York City just needs to learn its lesson. It’s actually a good thing for the country to learn that state-run grocery stores don’t work.’” He thinks it will be very difficult for conservatives to take back New York. And that could have a cascading effect across the country.

“We shouldn’t underestimate how talented Mamdani is,” Halberstadt added.