So much for post-election talk of the Democrats moving towards the centre, said National Review. The party is now careering in the opposite direction. In the last year, both New York City and Seattle have elected mayors that are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Washington DC is on course to join them.
And in three New York congressional primaries last week, the socialist candidates backed by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, all trounced establishment Democrats. Even by DSA standards, these are “wild-eyed radicals”. The most extreme is Darializa Avila Chevalier. Her greatest hits include demanding “No more police at all – ever”; claiming that a world without borders or prisons is “possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward”; and insisting that “Israel doesn’t exist!”.
The triumph of Mamdani’s candidates was a “rout for the far-left over the Left”, said The Wall Street Journal – one that could have major knock-on effects for the Democratic Party and US politics as a whole.
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‘Sewer socialism’
The lesson of these primaries, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, is that Democratic voters are exasperated by the “cautious, compromising establishment”. With good reason. A candidate as “flawed” as Chevalier could only have won against a “complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent”.
This is basically a Democratic version of the Tea Party, the fiscally conservative political movement that pushed the Republican Party sharply to the right during the Obama administration. We saw something like this in Trump’s first term, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some other outspoken DSA members won political office; but that movement petered out during Biden’s presidency amid sectarian infighting.
Progressives now have a fresh opportunity to advance their agenda. They could succeed if they steer away from Chevalier’s rigid form of “academic Leftism” and embrace the more pragmatic, optimistic, community-based politics pursued by Mamdani: a “sewer socialism” tightly focused on voters’ everyday material concerns.
‘Dismal’ reality
Americans are certainly open to that type of politics at the moment, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Many voters are unhappy with the status quo and are feeling the pinch as a result of higher interest rates and inflation. In a 2025 poll, 39% of respondents viewed socialism favourably (66% of them Democrats); 54% said the same of capitalism.
The problem for these socialist politicians, though, is that the same “dismal fiscal realities” fuelling discontent also constrain their ability to deliver dramatic change. Mayors can’t squeeze rich residents too much because cities are much easier to leave than states or countries.
Socialism has a hopeless track record, said Aubrey Harris in The American Spectator, but Republican politicians shouldn’t assume that they’re going to benefit from what one dismissed as the Democrats’ “Bolshevik revolution”. To win over voters, the GOP is going to have to come up with some creative solutions of its own to the affordability crisis. If and when it manages that, “the sudden rise of nouveau socialism will come to an end as swiftly as it began”.
