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democratic socialism
Mamdani for NYC Mayor: The Fight We’ve Been Waiting for
Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over establishment candidates and billionaire cash, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie presidential campaign.
Jul 27, 2025
I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee (Mamdani) to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all.
Instead, he finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.
On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues—increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line—in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there. On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the overprivileged few—the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them—are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.
First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels. Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented—as it is in all things—by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city, and even taking direct control of it—a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.
The upshot of all this? This is our race.
Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class—unfortunately a rather large sector of the party—along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza, two groups with significant overlap. This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress—Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer—are Brooklyn voters. So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, representative of a New York city-adjacent district. for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”
Next we have the independent candidates themselves, who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current mayor of New York. That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump. The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million—the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics. Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.” His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke—the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.
And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is—he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa)—dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000. Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.
And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires—in this case for Eric Adams—including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor. As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.” At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.
(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist—said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era—I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.)
The upshot of all this? This is our race.
Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way to wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck—even if just that—all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.
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The Grassroots Fight For Affordable Housing
From Tacoma, Washington to Kansas City, Missouri, people power is key to creating communities where working people can live.
Jul 23, 2025
In the United States, the housing situation is abysmal and getting worse.
A few statewide and local statistics are emblematic of a broader national problem. For example, in Washington state, according to the New York Times, rental housing prices rose by 43% from 2001 to 2023 while, during the same time period, the income of state renters grew by only 26%. Meanwhile in New York City, The Wall Street Journal reported last month that the average price of a two-bedroom apartment was $5,560. The Journal headline of the article in which that statistic was cited nicely embodied a rising feeling among ordinary New York City residents: “New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist is Poised to Become Mayor,” referring of course to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who is the frontrunner to win the city’s mayoral election in November. Rates of homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures remain high around the country.
In the face of this ever growing crisis, mainstream politicians—Democrats and Republicans—have virtually nothing useful to say. They’ve doubled down on existing national, state, and local government subsidies for affordable housing—which do not even remotely begin to produce the supply of housing at levels needed—while insisting that the unregulated free market in housing (increasingly controlled by an ever smaller number of corporations) operate as much as possible.
Grassroots Resistance
Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000, 35 miles southwest of Seattle. It is largely a working class town; the Tacoma News Tribune recently reported that 77% of the jobs within it “don’t pay enough for a single worker to be able to comfortably afford housing on their own.” In the whole of Pierce County (of which Tacoma is the county seat), 37% of renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.
A group which has attempted to alleviate this situation, with modest but tangible success, is Tacoma For All (T4A), a group founded by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 and the Tacoma Democratic Socialists of America. T4A’s most noticeable achievement has been launching and successfully influencing the passage of Initiative 1 by Tacoma voters in November 2023, securing relatively strong eviction protections for the city’s renters and a cap on rent increases.
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales.
However, the most impressive achievement of T4A has been its building of an organization, democratically run by its dues-paying members, devoted to educating ordinary people about their legal rights as tenants and to acting in solidarity to protect the rights of other tenants against the depredations of corporate landlords. The organization regularly sends teams of organizers to knock on doors of Tacoma apartment buildings, asking tenants about any issues they might be having with landlords, and offering the organization’s assistance and solidarity in addressing those issues. T4A has established Tacoma Tenant Legal Aid to help tenants pursue their rights. The organization has achieved real successes in helping Tacoma residents stay in their homes
Another successful grassroots organization is KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri. It is profiled in Jonathan Tarleton’s 2025 book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons. While the group is anti-capitalist, KC Tenants foremost approach to tenants is not to preach socialism but to help them navigate bread-and-butter housing issues. The presentation of their critique of racial capitalism or lessons on the virtues of social housing comes later in the process of integrating tenants into their organization. As KC Tenants organizer Tara Raghuveer told Tarleton, the group’s initial approach is to simply ask tenants, “How the fuck are you?...We knock [on] doors asking people how they’re living now, which by itself is a very politicizing line of questioning because the people are not living good.”
For tenants suffering from serious psychological trauma and anger because of housing issues, the approach of KC Tenants organizers—the message that people are here to offer assistance to them without judgement and structures for solidarity with other people going through similar issues—can be exhilarating, even liberating. Similar feelings have also been felt by KC Tenants professional organizers. One of them is Magda Werkmeister, who at one point left Kansas City for back East to complete a college degree but eventually returned to continue working with KC Tenants. She told Tarleton that she returned to the group because “I was missing out on something that makes life more joyous, and I think that was just the sense of community… and these people that you are able to care about and [who] care about you.”
Social Housing
In order to assist in meeting the crisis of affordable housing, KC Tenants and T4A have both made a strong push for government-funded social housing within their particular locales. Other municipalities have followed suit: For example, Seattle voters approved funding for a city social housing developer in February, and in May the Chicago City Council passed a Green Social Housing Ordinance.
Social housing is a form of public housing: It is meant to assist persons of a wide range of income levels (not merely low income) and utilize government subsidies to ensure the rents it charges are substantially below market rate. The most successful example of social housing in the world is found in Vienna, Austria. The success of Vienna’s social housing seemingly played a role in Economist Intelligence naming it in 2024 as the world’s most livable city.
The Bottom Line: People Power
It seems likely that Zohran Mamdani—who has cited the Vienna model of housing as a major influence—will have immense difficulties in implementing social housing in New York City, as well as his other proposals like free childcare and free bus service. These programs will require tax increases on the city’s businesses and wealthy as well as increases in New York City’s debt limit; both require the approval of New York’s business-friendly Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and she is unlikely to accommodate Mamdani’s requests to any significant extent. Moreover, there is risk that city business leaders and the wealthy—fearful of the threat to their bottom line should Mamdani win election in November and try to implement his relatively mild democratic socialist program—will engage in capital flight, wrecking the city’s tax base.
Regardless of whether Mamdani is, somehow, able to resist the establishment pressure and implement major parts of his agenda—or whether that pressure forces him to sell out that agenda—it is obviously crucial that ordinary people and grassroots activists stick unflinchingly to core principles and relentlessly pressure politicians to follow them.
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Minneapolis Dems Endorse Democratic Socialist Fateh for Mayor Over Incumbent Frey
"Today we witnessed a rejection of politics as usual, a rejection of the inhumane way we have been treating our unhoused neighbors, a rejection of the way our mayor has turned his back on labor," said Omar Fateh.
Jul 21, 2025
Omar Fateh—a democratic socialist Minnesota state senator and son of Somali immigrants running for mayor of Minneapolis—on Saturday won the endorsement of the city's Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party, an affiliate of the national Democratic Party, which chose him over two-term incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Fateh (DFL-62) won at least 60% of the Minneapolis DFL delegate vote in what is the party's first-ever mayoral endorsement.
"Today we witnessed a rejection of politics as usual, a rejection of the inhumane way we have been treating our unhoused neighbors, a rejection of the way our mayor has turned his back on labor," Fateh said following the vote. "Yes, we secured the DFL endorsement, but we know the status quo are going to do anything and everything to maintain power. They'll have all the money in the world, they'll have all the influence in the world—but they don't have you."
I am incredibly honored to be the DFL endorsed candidate for Minneapolis Mayor. This endorsement is a message that Minneapolis residents are done with broken promises, vetoes, and politics as usual. It’s a mandate to build a city that works for all of us. fatehformayor.com/donate
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— Omar Fateh (@omarfatehmn.com) July 19, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Frey campaign manager Sam Schulenberg said in a statement that "this election should be decided by the entire city rather than the small group of people who became delegates, particularly in light of the extremely flawed and irregular conduct of this convention."
According to the Star Tribune, "confusion and distrust over electronic balloting snarled" much of the endorsement process, but there was no indication that this favored any candidate.
"Voters will now have a clear choice between the records and the leadership of Sen. Fateh and Mayor Frey," Schulenberg added. "We look forward to taking our vision to the voters in November."
Among the dozens of bills authored by Fateh are a successful proposal to fund tuition-free public colleges and universities and tribal colleges for students from families with household incomes below $80,000, including undocumented immigrants, and another measure that exempted fentanyl test strips from being considered drug paraphernalia.
Fateh was also the chief state Senate author of a bill that would have ensured that drivers on ride-hailing applications like Uber and Lyft were paid minimum wage and received workplace protections. Although the bill was approved by both houses of the state Legislature, it was vetoed by DFL Gov. Tim Walz, sparking widespread outrage among progressives.
Numerous progressive state and local elected officials have endorsed Fateh, as have the hospitality union Unite Here! Local 17, Service Employees International Union Minnesota, and the Twin Cities branches of Democratic Socialists of America, Our Revolution, and Sunrise Movement.
Fateh's ascent has been compared to that of Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who is also a democratic socialist. Like Mamdani, Fateh has also been bombarded with racist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic hate by prominent right-wing social media users. Many haters have told the Washington, D.C.-born Fateh to "go back to Somalia."
The Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations last week condemned these attacks and linked politically motivated hatred with the recent assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman (DFL-34B) and her husband, and shooting of John Hoffman (DFL-34) and his wife.
Hoffman phoned into the Minnesota DFL convention to endorse Fateh for mayor—a move that stood in stark contrast with New York Democrats including U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who have not endorsed Mamdani.
"Schumer and Jeffries could learn a thing or two from Minnesotans," said Austin Ahlman, a reporter and researcher with the Open Markets Institute's Center for Journalism & Liberty.
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