New York State of Mind
What New York can and can't teach us about the future of democratic socialism
John B. Judis has argued that within ten or fifteen years, the Democratic Party may be known as “democratic socialist” the way it is now known as “liberal.” Judis grounds this prediction in a “Polanyian moment,” a juncture where the collapse of the neoliberal market order forces a rebalancing between capital and labor, and he traces the opening to 2016 and to Bernie Sanders’s decision to define democratic socialism as an extension of rather than a break with the New Deal order.
Judis is far from naive about the obstacles that stand in the way of building a broader base for democratic socialism. He is a DSA member who spends a substantial share of his essay warning that the organization has to abandon its cultural insularity and learn to appeal beyond what he calls Brooklyn’s “Commie Corridor.” Judis criticizes caucuses within DSA who are still formally committed to revolution rather than to Sanders’s New Deal framing, and the tendency within DSA to treat maximal positions on immigration enforcement, policing, and Palestine as tests of membership rather than as strategic choices that carry different costs in different places. The fact that a hard-nosed realist like Judis would still feel such optimism for the potential of democratic socialism should give skeptics pause.
Rather than hearing both the optimistic, as well as the more sobering part of Judis’s argument, however, most progressive commentators have focused only on the former. Five days after DSA’s New York candidates swept their June congressional primaries earlier this year, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani went on ABC’s This Week and confidently asserted, “I think a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Writing in The Call, the publication of DSA’s “Bread and Roses” caucus, Alex Pellitteri left little doubt about what he sees as DSA’s electoral potential: “The movement in New York City can and must be replicated everywhere,” citing organizing in Portland, Louisville, and northern New Jersey as evidence it already is. And In These Times triumphantly concluded that “Socialists Are Tearing Through the Democratic Party Establishment.”
Are DSA’s victories in New York a harbinger of a coming democratic socialist wave across the country? Just how large is the gap between the districts democratic socialists are winning now and the ones they’d need to win to establish democratic socialism as a viable national tendency rather than a big-city, deep-blue phenomenon?
