03.07.2025

After Mamdani’s victory

We should celebrate the triumph of a DSA member in New York City’s Democratic primary, argues Paul Demarty. But what this once again poses is the question of party control over representatives

There are many things worth celebrating about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for the New York City mayoralty.

The most widespread, if also the most trivial, is sheer Schadenfreude. Faced with the tantrums of thousands of ‘machine Democrats’, Maga hysterics and Zionist agents, it would take, as Oscar Wilde said, a man with a heart of stone not to laugh.

As much as it was a victory for the 33-year-old Mamdani - a New York state representative long associated with the Democratic Socialists of America - this was a defeat for Andrew Cuomo, the presumptive nominee until the final days of the campaign. It was a defeat, likewise, for a complacent Democratic elite, who rallied behind the scandal-ridden former state governor, Cuomo; and for the serried ranks of smug centrist pundits, convinced that even the weak-tea redistributive measures on offer from Mamdani are too hair-raisingly radical ever to be swallowed by the American voter. The idea that leftwing candidates can be defeated by turning politics into a contest over loyalty to Israel has been smashed to pieces. (Jeremy Corbyn’s strategy of constant capitulation on this point now looks, in retrospect, even more foolish.)

Smart

The reaction to Mamdani’s victory, on closer examination, is two-sided. There are the end-of-the-world hysterics, to be sure, but there is also a great deal of quite genuine admiration of the way his campaign overturned apparently insuperable odds. This schizoid attitude is summed up best, perhaps, by the behaviour of Marjorie Taylor Greene - an infamously excitable ultra-Maga congresswoman, who praised Mamdani’s “smart” campaign, while sharing a meme of the Statue of Liberty draped in a burqa. Cuomo, conceding on election night, was gracious and complimentary. Mamdani had run a “really smart and good and impactful campaign … Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won.”

The strange thing is that, if one looks at what all that “smart” campaigning consisted of, there is nothing particularly original about it. He tapped into existing networks of activists, crucially the DSA (whose largest chapter by far is in NYC), put his shoes on and went out to talk to people. He had a handful of flagship policies, all of which were bread-and-butter stuff (free buses, a limited rent freeze, creating a municipal grocery chain to fight price gouging) and hardly ambitious even by the standards of American social democracy. He stuck to his script, even as the attacks on him got worse, often releasing ads that gently poked fun at his enemies (when, late in the campaign, someone threatened to blow up his car, his office released a deadpan statement to the effect that he did not have a car).

Cuomo, bafflingly, did none of these things. He stood for nothing. He was even less to be seen on the campaign trail than Joe Biden last year (who at least had the excuse of being senile). He attempted to make the election about Israel, and failed. He seemed to have no idea what Democratic primary voters cared about, and even less interest in finding out.

Mamdani’s personal strengths were of some importance here. He speaks very well - humorous, but not flippant; serious, but not portentous. He seems to have a natural gift for retail politics (which, in the end, is just an ability to look interested in the people talking to you). He is - let’s be frank here - young, attractive and looks good in a suit, which contrasts pointedly with the Democratic Party’s gerontocracy. Yet he is not some sort of historic political genius. The DSA, with its 50,000 to 100,000 members, must surely have a decent supply of such talent somewhere.

The essential feature of his success is the mobilisation that got his name out to millions of New Yorkers, which was possible only because in New York the DSA is capable of acting something like a party. Some 50,000 volunteers stumped for him - an extraordinary figure, larger than George Washington’s continental army. The effect of such activism is visible in the shape of the vote, especially on the axis of age. In most American elections, older voters turn out in larger numbers than the young. In this Democratic primary, 18-34-year-olds dominated (three times as many 18-24s, the youngest bracket, turned out this time, compared to the last primary in 2021).

Running gauntlet

Can he succeed? Success, I think, would be measurable in this way: he goes on to win the actual mayoral poll; successfully implements his key policies; avoids the acts of sabotage of his enemies; and wins re-election. This, I think, should be an uncontroversial measuring stick. It could surely be applied to any mayoral candidate of any political persuasion. It is also something of a gauntlet to run.

First, there is the general election. Mamdani will certainly face Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the vigilante Guardian Angels gang and noted eccentric (he lives in a one-bedroom apartment with 19 cats!); and incumbent mayor Eric Adams.

Adams is a totally different kettle of fish - an ex-cop elected on a Democratic ticket, but at this point dependent on the patronage of Donald Trump, who is protecting him from prosecution for an enormous series of corruption allegations, centring on his relationship with the Turkish state, in a quid pro quo arrangement conditioned on Adams’s cooperation with the Trump administration’s immigration policy. As a political personality, Adams makes Sliwa look positively straight-laced: he is prone, in his speech, to non-sequiturs and bizarre digressions, rather like his new patron, and he is a serial fabulist. (In spite of everything, he is difficult to truly dislike - a not-particularly-holy fool.) Cuomo is also on the ballot, having already created a cut-out organisation to endorse him, though he may or may not put serious effort in, given the scale of his humiliation in the Democratic primary.

It is to be expected that rival candidates will want to get Mamdani on the defensive, and will hammer him on law-and-order issues. This plays to both Sliwa’s and Adams’s strengths, at least. Still, Adams is badly damaged by his various scandals and perceived subjection to Trump, and having three such competitors risks splitting the ‘throw away the key’ vote. All things being equal, Mamdani can probably win.

So can Mayor Zohran then implement his programme? There are good reasons for caution here too. New York has a relatively toothless mayoralty, whose decisions - particularly regarding fundraising - are hostage to the state government. To take one of his proposals: it is perfectly true that free buses are hardly unheard of in great cities, that America’s largest bus service (for schools) is free, and even that the policy has already been piloted successfully in New York itself, thanks in part to Mamdani’s activism in the state assembly. Yet getting anything done depends on the acquiescence in Albany, as we saw recently with governor Kathy Hochul’s veto of a congestion charge.

Moreover, Mamdani’s profile as a self-styled socialist makes him exceptionally vulnerable here, since the bipartisan political elite has every interest in crushing his mayoralty in the egg. When Britain came off the gold standard in 1931, Sidney Webb, who had been a minister in the previous Labour government, is said to have lamented, “They never told us we could do that!” But there is a real sense in which Labour could not have done that, whereas the national government could. Capital is prepared to take a beating, so long as its agents are in charge, and not people of doubtful loyalty.

The possibilities for sabotage are extremely extensive. Trump has already threatened to revoke his citizenship and deport him. Failing that he could withdraw all federal funding from the city if Mamdani wins. He faces powerful lobbies opposed to him from within, including landlords and the police department (the NYPD significantly undermined Adams’s predecessor - the liberal, Bill de Blasio - and will not be keen on losing the impunity it enjoys under the ex-cop, Adams).

Silence

Behind all these dangers is a common phenomenon - the capitalist state machine, in its particular American form. It is a reality that the social democratic wing of the DSA, of which Mamdani is a representative, meets with an awkward silence.

Mamdani carefully distanced himself from any slogans related to cutting the NYPD down to size (the brief popularity, after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, of the slogan, ‘Defund the police’, has become exhibit A in the centrist-Democrat critique of their leftwing challengers, and ‘sensible’ politicians are expected to disown it ritually). If his platform is struck down by the state governor, exactly what is he planning to do? What could he do? He pitched himself to voters on the basis of a series of apparently common-sensical social reforms, and implicitly on the idea that these are in his gift. Certainly, if Trump attempts to crush him, Mamdani could plausibly (and not unfairly) blame the president for spitefully punishing the residents of his home city, and strike a defiant pose. If it is taken apart by Albany under the influence of lobbyists, or by lawfare, what is his answer?

Marxists insist on the salience of this question of the state precisely because we confront it in situations like this. What the hell business is it of upstate conservatives - never mind the White House! - how much New York City charges for a bus fare? In a sane world - one governed by a functional and thoroughgoing democracy - the issue simply would not arise. It arises today because the state protects the owners of capital, and the owners of capital have an interest in the defeat of socialists per se, no matter how modest their concrete political programmes.

Constitution

In America, the state is organised according to the country’s famous constitution, which - despite a few bright spots, like strong protection of the right of free speech, compared to other bourgeois states - bears all the signs of being what it is: a document cooked up by colonial elites, including many slaveowners, and designed to dilute the popular will in every way possible. That is the meaning, in the end, of the separation of powers, and also of the proliferation of executive power throughout the political structure (including, of course, the small fact that every city, town and even village has a mayor - a petty Trump with the right to lord it over their little fiefdom).

The two-party system is not explicitly written into the constitution - like good anti-democrats, most of the founders hoped to avoid the need for parties altogether. It is, however, the inevitable result of pervasive ‘first past the post’ elections, never mind the madness of the electoral college: what naturally ‘falls out’ of this structure are two ‘parties’ in the particular form of clique-ridden bureaucracies. The primary system tends to give the bourgeois media the final say on who is and is not an acceptable candidate for office, although the political careers of both Mamdani and Trump demonstrate that this power is not absolute, and at something of a low ebb in the present situation.

I said earlier that decisive in Mamdani’s victory was the ability of the DSA to act like a party. It is not yet one for real, however, and it hovers shy of becoming one, preferring to combine local activism with cheerleading for the likes of Bernie Saunders and AOC.

It is incumbent on the serious partyist forces, like our friends in the Marxist Unity Group, to ensure that all elected representatives, not least Mamdani, are made fully accountable. They need to report to the DSA, be directed by the DSA and be recallable by the DSA. To use a phrase, that means democratic centralism in the DSA.