I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how socialist candidates are making inroads, despite the best efforts of the Democratic establishment.
Neoliberal and centrist politicians either ignored Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral race last year, or tried to dismiss it as an unrepeatable one-off event powered by his personal charisma. But we now have ample evidence that it wasn’t a fluke. In last month’s primary elections, a class of young socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America romped to victory, winning three congressional primaries and a slew of state legislative races. They won because voters responded to their message, and that makes this strategy repeatable elsewhere.
Will mainstream Democrats finally recognize that socialism is no longer a dirty word? Will they join Mamdani’s bandwagon and adopt his pro-affordability, pro-working-class agenda? Or will they double down on their efforts to fight the will of their own voters?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
In an interview, Mamdani rebutted these arguments with a simple, devastating question: “What is a party if not its voters?”
The only thing a political party is—the only thing it could be—is the collective will of its voters. Democrats are the people Democratic voters choose, period. And all these candidates won in closed primaries where only registered Democrats had a say. As Mamdani said, voters got a taste of democratic socialism and decided they wanted more of it.
Carville, Harrison and the others are showing that they, like Trump and the Republicans, conceive of the party not as a big tent, but as an authoritarian hierarchy. They think voters should support whoever they’re told to by establishment gatekeepers, and they get angry and disgruntled when those voters don’t comply.
peeps saying mamdarmy?
I’ve lived in the US a few years as a kid, and here in EU I always joke that the US has a right wing party (perhaps with a couple of centrists in it) and a party so far off to the right it fell off the edge of the map.
Glad to see some change happening! Hope it lasts.
The old neoliberal Dem bros need to remember that, from surveys and such, progressive policies have been popular in America for quite a while. And that, in fact, when a candidate ran on a progressive platform, they would often win.
They have the arrogance to claim that the Democratic party belongs to them, and that it is they who determine who and what it is the party is, that they make those decisions.
I wonder if they can look up from their neoliberalism, and the money that their corporate friends funnel their way, long enough to notice that now, when Democratics run on these progressive, socialist-ic platforms, they *win elections*. Isn’t that supposed to be the point of this exercise?
No matter if they’re socialists, Democrats will be winning more elections. That’s a *good* thing, right? So, I hope that the old toads can close their eyes and hold their noses and keep from whining while their party wins more and more.
The party is full of people who skew center to center-right and have a role only as long as people believe they know the only way to win. By not following their playbook, Mamdani shows there are other paths. By winning, he discredits them.
Most of the problem is generational: the “centrists” or “moderates” or “establishment” Democrats, or whatever else we call them, represent a generation who were so severely traumatized and demoralized by Reagan’s victory in 1980 that they allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Republican stooges into learning all the wrong lessons from it: that we lost because we were “too liberal” and “out of touch” and “elitist.” None of that was true, but by letting Republican blithering-heads beat it into us, we ended up internalizing it and acting to MAKE it true.
Here’s the REAL lesson we should have learned from 1980: Democrats didn’t lose because we were “too liberal” — we lost because our President was incompetent, inarticulate, inconsistent, and incapable of leading with a clear and coherent message from one week to the next. Carter didn’t lose because people didn’t like him or didn’t agree with what he proposed to do; he lost because he totally failed to lead the people when they were willing, and even demanding, to be led.
Does anyone remember Reagan’s favorite catch-phrase? It was “stay the course.” Something the people knew we needed, but which Carter spent four years utterly failing to do. IF he had shown any kind of vision and resolve — instead of waffling and watering down his policies every time some interest group started crying — he would quite likely have won in 1980, and we’d all be a much healthier and better country as a result. I really hope this next generation of Democratic leaders understand this, and stop listening to their beaten and traumatized elders.