Mamdani Is Actually a Social Democrat. Here’s Why That Matters.
In his first address as mayor, Zohran Mamdani declared: “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”
That bold assertion delighted many of his admirers on the left while confirming the fears of his critics on the right and center. But in terms of what he aims to accomplish and in the context of history, it was not really true. Mamdani does not intend to give wage-earners control of their workplaces or to turn private businesses into public property, as Karl Marx advocated (along with other renowned socialists he inspired like Eugene Debs, who was also a small-d democrat, and Vladimir Lenin, who was decidedly not). He does not call, as did the U.K. Labour Party right after World War II, to nationalize major industries and have them run by government employees.
Hizzoner wants instead to make transportation, childcare, and housing more “affordable” for every New Yorker. That makes him not a democratic socialist but a social democrat. What’s the difference?
The latter term has never caught on in the United States, but its adherents have a long and successful history in Europe and in developed nations on other continents. Social democrats seek to create a more egalitarian order within a capitalist market society. They build welfare states that provide health care, family leave, and union protection to their citizens and reject the tyrannical one-party states created by the likes of Lenin, Mao, and Castro. There have been many full or partial social democracies; the most successful ones exist throughout Scandinavia. But democratic socialism, aside from the utopian colonies that existed rather briefly in the nineteenth century in the U.S. and Great Britain, has always been an unrealized vision.
The good news for Mamdani, and the models for him to follow, come from the last century, when practical socialists governed, for a time, dozens small and mid-sized American cities where the gap between the wealthy elite and wage-earners had widened alarmingly, much as in New York City today. In St. Mary’s, Ohio, they expanded sewer lines, provided gas and electric service to all neighborhoods for the first time, and made sure working-class children felt welcome in the newly opened high school. In Milwaukee, socialist mayors erected the nation’s first public housing project, won an eight-hour day for municipal workers, and developed an extensive system of public parks.
Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Mamdani proudly belongs, called on his fellow radicals to develop “the left wing of the possible.” New York’s new mayor follows such mentors as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in balancing his dream of a humane, “collectivist” order with the need to fight for changes in the only world they will ever know. All three compete in Democratic primaries—the bailiwick of a “capitalist” party—and seek to implement sweeping reforms that revolutionary socialists once denounced as sly tricks to make a rotten system appear fresh and tolerable but that nearly everyone on the contemporary left supports.
In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a “positive image” of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social-democratic author Irving Howe described those “socialists” who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: “They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.”
Mamdani’s eloquent inaugural address struck those same chords. “City Hall,” he promised, “will deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance, where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated.” A full social democracy cannot be built in a single city, even one as large and consequential as New York. But, unlike the yearning for a revolutionary overhaul of an economic order that has endured for centuries, it is a goal that can sustain popular support as the reality gradually draws near.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc discredited the old definition of socialism that required public ownership of businesses and an army of bureaucrats to run them. But if Mamdani can govern as well as he campaigned, he might spur a new meaning for the s-word grounded in the history of societies more equal and democratic than our own.