In June, amid ongoing unrest following George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, members of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took to the streets to pressure Gotham officials to slash the New York Police Department budget. Protesters rallied at the homes of several powerful council members, banging on doors and demanding to speak to the officials. One Queens councilman, Daniel Dromm, described by a neighborhood paper as “clearly resentful that his progressive credentials were being challenged,” dismissed the protesters as “Brooklyn trust fund babies”—a reference to the reputation of the DSA as a party of young, well-to-do neighborhood newcomers, sometimes dubbed gentrifiers. Laurie Cumbo, the city council’s majority leader, was even more incensed, threatening the protesters, who included Cumbo’s opponent in a previous election, in a tweet: “you come to my home again or anyplace where I am with my son with a bullhorn & you too will be met with a group of protesters & they won’t be gentrifiers.”
Yet the socialists’ aggressiveness had a clear purpose. The city’s main socialist party is looking to use the momentum generated by the stunning success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 election in New York’s 14th Congressional District to build a larger movement, and it has targeted New York’s 2021 municipal elections as potentially winnable for its candidates. Party members have already begun directing withering criticism at local Democrats and progressives, painting them as insufficiently leftist.
New York socialists aren’t alone. Around the country, septuagenarian Bernie Sanders sparked a new interest in socialism with his 2016 and 2020 runs for the Democratic presidential nomination. Though Sanders himself was unlikely ever to win a national election running on a platform of vastly expanding social welfare and redistributing income, his campaigns are credited with producing a surge in youthful membership in far-left parties like the Democratic Socialists of America. Now those gains are translating into grassroots electoral victories in municipal governments, where socialists haven’t had such successes in a century. Just in the last four years, several dozen socialist candidates have won office in major cities like Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. With Republicans a nonfactor in many of these places, the rise of a new breed of socialist candidate is forcing the traditional Democratic Party further left, threatening the grip that established political machines have on some cities and even shaking up Democrats’ union allies.
Though some of these candidates disavow the Marxist label, they openly espouse worker control of the means of production, government management of industries like electrical supply, and a regulatory state that narrows the ability of property owners to control the destiny of their holdings. The disruptive methods of some of these new American socialists, meantime, are often ripped from the handbook of radical activists like Saul Alinsky. They advocate protest and disruption of their own local governments, ruling more as outsiders even after winning office.
Though the last socialist surge in U.S. city government petered out long ago, this new movement is composed more broadly of educated, urbanized college graduates. Their heavily redistributionist policies and promises of free stuff—college, health care, even income—have proved appealing, at least for now, in some already-progressive municipalities. Are American socialists poised for even bigger gains?
The socialist movement of the early twentieth century took root in agrarian and mining states like Oklahoma, Nevada, Idaho, and Montana, and then spread gradually to the blue-collar manufacturing districts of some urban centers like Schenectady, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Back then, socialists were more likely to find success in municipalities throughout Ohio and West Virginia than in some of America’s biggest cities. Victorious socialist candidates campaigned on worker control over farms, mines, and manufacturers, as well as progressive reforms of government, including initiative and referendum and greater regulation of corporations. They utilized massive general strikes and other social disruptions to promote their radical agenda—a strategy that may have helped bring about their downfall.
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Today’s socialist movement is cut from another cloth, with a different geographic and demographic makeup: educated young urbanities moving to some of America’s most progressive cities. There, they’ve often found high housing costs, poor schools, and declining economic opportunity and mobility. But rather than see these problems as the result of misguided big government—restrictions on building, say, or monopoly control of education by teachers’ unions, or excessive taxes and regulations on business—they have determined that what ails such places is too much free market and not enough government.
That’s why Sanders’s message of Medicare for All, free college, and universal basic income resonated. Sanders’s influence is also reflected in the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.
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And when pressed, socialist candidates have trouble squaring their tear-the-system-down philosophy with effective local government. When Denver City Council member and Democratic Socialist Candi CdeBaca said that she favored “community ownership of land, labor, resources and distribution of those resources,” critics branded her a Communist. She demurred, saying that while she did not support capitalism, she preferred the label “anarchist.” It’s a strange statement from someone in a job that’s normally about delivering local services.
Fiorello La Guardia once crystallized the responsibilities of municipal officials when he said that there was no Democrat or Republican way to pick up the garbage. It’s not clear whether there’s a socialist (or anarchist) way of picking up the trash, either, or how much this new breed of local politician even cares about such things. One suspects that their constituents still do—how much will become more apparent over the next few election cycles.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
