I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how socialist candidates are making inroads, despite the best efforts of the Democratic establishment.
Neoliberal and centrist politicians either ignored Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral race last year, or tried to dismiss it as an unrepeatable one-off event powered by his personal charisma. But we now have ample evidence that it wasn’t a fluke. In last month’s primary elections, a class of young socialist candidates endorsed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America romped to victory, winning three congressional primaries and a slew of state legislative races. They won because voters responded to their message, and that makes this strategy repeatable elsewhere.
Will mainstream Democrats finally recognize that socialism is no longer a dirty word? Will they join Mamdani’s bandwagon and adopt his pro-affordability, pro-working-class agenda? Or will they double down on their efforts to fight the will of their own voters?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
In an interview, Mamdani rebutted these arguments with a simple, devastating question: “What is a party if not its voters?”
The only thing a political party is—the only thing it could be—is the collective will of its voters. Democrats are the people Democratic voters choose, period. And all these candidates won in closed primaries where only registered Democrats had a say. As Mamdani said, voters got a taste of democratic socialism and decided they wanted more of it.
Carville, Harrison and the others are showing that they, like Trump and the Republicans, conceive of the party not as a big tent, but as an authoritarian hierarchy. They think voters should support whoever they’re told to by establishment gatekeepers, and they get angry and disgruntled when those voters don’t comply.
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