Big City Socialism In Every Pot

This is republished from Pirate Wires. The original can be found here.

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Across urban America, the socialists are on a roll.

This week, all three democratic socialist candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries for the U.S. House in deep blue New York City.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Columbia University encampment leader — who has called the U.S. “a f*cking disgrace” and refused four times to say whether murderers should be locked up — beat incumbent progressive Rep. Adriano Espaillat.

Claire Valdez, who supports taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries and a 32-hour workweek with a “federal jobs guarantee,” won her open race.

Brad Lander, who “put his body on the line” in his fight to “abolish ICE,” trounced incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman.

You might be tempted to dismiss the latest victories on the grounds that New York City — which recently elected Mayor Zohran “Warmth of Collectivism” Mamdani — is America’s designated socialism containment zone. But the far-left’s momentum is by no means unique to The Empire State. Arguably more important are the democratic socialists’ victories in some of America’s other largest cities, representing a realignment where the urban, educated base of the Democratic Party increasingly sees the once-poisonous s-word in a candidate’s biography as a credential rather than a liability.

Janeese Lewis George is all but guaranteed to become the next mayor of Washington, D.C. The 38-year-old former prosecutor won the Democratic primary last week with 54% of the vote and faces no serious Republican opposition. Barring an act of near-political fiction, like Congress taking away D.C’s self-rule (which many, including Trump, have fantasized about), the nation’s capital will become the latest major city to succumb to the allure of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Lewis George wants to expand rent stabilization, build affordable housing by leveraging “billions of dollars” from city pension funds, provide universal childcare, and make transit free. She has pledged to end D.C. police’s cooperation with ICE and said “we’re going to find ways to resist” Trump after the president threatened to “take back Washington and run it on a federal basis” if a democratic socialist became mayor. A former defund-the-police supporter, Lewis George has said American policing is “rooted in white supremacy.” She has also said she would not attend events focused on “promoting Zionism and apartheid.”

Katie “Bye Millionaires!” Wilson, of Seattle, took office this January. Since then, Wilson has steered $115 million to the city-run social housing developer and has pushed toward free universal childcare and school meals, which a proposed local capital gains tax would help fund. Wilson joined a Starbucks picket shortly after winning her election, declaring, “I am not buying Starbucks and you should not either,” then called it “not productive” after taking office, so that she could order a blueberry muffin latte. (“I guess I broke my boycott.”)

In New York, Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments is in its final stages. He announced plans for the first city-run grocery store, which will cost $30 million to build ($3,000 per square foot, four times the normal private sector cost). With help from the state, Mamdani’s administration is pouring $1.2 billion into childcare programs with the eventual goal of having universal free childcare. Plans to make buses free and increase the minimum wage to $30 an hour are still in progress.

In Los Angeles, Councilmember Nithya “Ban Backyard BBQs” Raman will face off against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass in November. Raman, who has DSA ties but was not endorsed by the group, has pledged to triple annual housing construction through a combination of public and private efforts, including through permitting and zoning reforms. As a councilmember, she voted against an ordinance banning homeless encampments near schools and against additional police hiring and spending.

LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, a Republican who nearly qualified for the runoff, for one, challenged Raman’s assumption that “street medicine teams” among other things would fix the city’s endemic killer zombie problem, as Solana wrote in May.

“I will go below the harbor freeway tomorrow with her,” Pratt said, “and we can find some of these people she’s going to ‘offer treatment for,’ and she’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or supermeth.”

Pratt’s regular-guy populism is perhaps best suited to define, as a point of contrast, the recent momentum of municipal democratic socialists. In the larger war for the soul of the Democratic Party, appealing to the American center (regular guys) is once again being sacrificed on the mantle of the young, educated, downwardly-mobile professional class. In some ways, it’s a repeat of the 19th-century European labor movement, which happened not among the poorest laborers but among “the aristocracy of labor,” according to John Judis, an author and lifelong democratic socialist. “Craft workers who produced cigars” in the 1860s are analogous to today’s college-educated white collar millennial — the Palestine-supporting, Mamdani-endorsed Starbucks workers protesting Unfair Labor Practices, say — in their support for populism on the left.

“They’re the vanguard of the educated precarious,” Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, told me in an interview. “They’re handling their grievances about their sense of not getting ahead in life … that things are too expensive, and that the whole system’s rigged against them. It’s all one big plot against their mobility.”

Democratic socialists obviously haven’t prevailed in all major cities. In Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who supports “full equality” for illegal immigrants and has said there is no situation in which he would clear a homeless encampment, lost to incumbent mainstream Democrat Jacob Frey in November. In San Francisco, voters elected moderate Daniel Lurie in 2024 over incumbent London Breed amid persistent disorder. Overall crime is now down significantly, downtown foot traffic is up, and retail vacancy is down. Even in New York and Seattle, Mamdani and Wilson are finding their platforms politically constrained by their state governments and city councils.

Yet these experiments in political moderation have done little to diminish socialism’s appeal among younger urban voters.

Part of the reason is that younger voters increasingly mean something different when they use the word “socialism.” As older voters who are familiar with Soviet-style state economic ownership comprise a decreasing share of the electorate, younger voters who associate socialism with European-style welfare states have taken their place. Mamdani, Lewis George, Wilson, and Raman all ran on an “affordability” agenda: calling for more publicly subsidized housing and taxing “the rich,” for example.

“Sewer socialism” is the term often used to describe these kinds of candidates, including by Mamdani himself, emphasizing better and improved public services.

But the modern democratic socialists have a poor record of actually doing that.

“To the extent they’re ‘sewer socialists,’ right now they ain’t fixing too many sewers,” Teixeira said.

Just possibly, fixing sewers is not the point.

To many in the voting base, it’s often the “culturally radical policies” that the DSA is the “vanguard” of, like transgenderism, immigration, and climate maximalism, that is the real draw. Aside from affordability policies, all four mayoral candidates also called for resisting ICE and defunding the police in many instances. For the same reasons radical positions on social issues doomed Kamala Harris in 2024, these takes may prevent the DSA from appealing outside the bluest parts of America in 2028.

So what happens to the cities that embrace these policies? One possibility is, constrained by other levers of government, they indeed fix the sewers and potholes, incentivize wealthy residents and businesses to stay, and solve housing.

“A more likely scenario is they’ll continue to run these places into the ground and eventually people will say, ‘enough,’” Teixeira said.

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Jonas Du is a journalist based in Washington, D.C.