SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author and is republished from Democratic Left.
New York City DSA knows how to run campaigns. A decade of electing socialists to the New York state assembly, senate, New York City city council, the United States Congress, and last year’s mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani is convincing proof.
Yet, NYC-DSA’s capacity to mobilize voters now stands in contrast with the most powerful municipal office in the U.S. This chasm between the power of the movement as measured by electoral success and its ability to guide the direction of the city and state is immense. If 21st century American socialism is to exist beyond galvanizing campaigns, this truth must be confronted.
The Zohran campaign
Warning signs of the shortcomings of our strategy appeared in the early days of the Mamdani campaign. The mayor-to-be would recount to prospective campaign supporters how free buses, a core platform plank, arrived via an ordinary DSA member as a reason to join this movement. You, yes you, can shape the potential platform that will govern the financial capital of the United States.
Yet that compelling narrative contained a negative that was easy to miss: the proposal did not emerge from an active campaign for free buses within NYC-DSA or even independent of it. It emerged from Mamdani’s campaign, and the only way to pursue that worthy goal was through volunteering for his election. Sans a campaign or organization, no continuous pressure upon the future administration to push for free buses existed. Now a year into Mamdani’s term of office, that organizing is just getting off the ground.
“Hyperpolitics”
Belgian political scientist Anton Jäger coined the phrase “hyperpolitics” earlier this decade to describe the tension between large, headline-grabbing street protests and actions that nonetheless either fail to register political impact or are unable to be reabsorbed into traditional political institutions (unions, political parties, or civic associations). In a recent New Left Review essay, Hyperpolitics in Command?, Jäger assesses Donald Trump’s schizophrenic second term, the listlessness of European elites, and deepening fractures of global capital in the aftermath of the financial crisis. He concludes citing Mamdani’s early days as holding a “commitment to modest but achievable goals”, a direct contrast to the chaos of hyperpolitics. The same institutional collapse and void that produced Trump is filled by a young mayor and array of institutions forced to play catch up.
Mamdani came up through NYC-DSA, but his campaign policy platform did not come out of internal socialist deliberation. As a state assemblyman and now as mayor, Mandani joined picket lines, but his working-class goals did not arrive from union halls. He, not we, created a new left-wing vision for New York City politics. NYC-DSA found itself constantly building towards a project voted on by members (endorsing Mamdani for mayor) but far less prepared, once victory was achieved, for governing a city of eight million people. Mamdani’s campaign vision overshadowed the numerous organizations that powered his primary run as he climbed the polls and those promises took on a life of their own.
Winning and delivering
Political opponents and media skeptics relentlessly mocked Mamdani’s program, but his proposals over many months gained a memetic quality. At rallies, Mamdani would yell: “I’m gonna freeze the…” and the crowd would respond “Rent!” “I’m gonna make buses fast and…” “Free!” “I’m gonna deliver universal…” “Childcare!” Thousands of volunteers would repeat these demands in thousands of doorways across the city, and voters would watch them ricochet across Instagram and TikTok videos for months leading into the primary. Not since Trump’s xenophobic 2016 run and chants of “Build the Wall!” rang out at his rallies did voters in the voting booth so clearly understand what a politician set out to do once in office. The relatively limited scope of the demands allowed potential voters to believe in the feasibility of the campaign and volunteers to earnestly proselytize for specific goals.
One of those slogans (“Freeze the Rent”) did smoothly transition as an agitation campaign into one that didn’t dry up upon his inauguration. Groups like Housing Justice for All and Met Council campaigned directly for a rent freeze in 2025 and continued that organizing in 2026 while the administration’s Office of Mass Engagement sent staff and volunteers to knock on doors and mobilize people to attend hearings at the Rent Guidelines Board. In June, the RGB approved the rent freeze, including two-year leases for the first time. That linkage between a successful electoral campaign and early governance was impossible to ignore. However, this success built on prior work: tenants rights organizations have pushed for a rent freeze for years, long before Mamdani’s arrival.
The rest of the platform lies on flimsier grounds where the gap between the Zohran campaign’s platform and the organized left became clearer.
The call for “fast and free” buses revealed tensions between excitement for the former (fast) but trepidation around the latter (free) in an organization like the Riders Alliance that is trying to build a deeper base of support for the issue. The caution came from a concern that real city investment is needed to improve the quality of the average bus experience, which in itself will cost money. Fareless buses don’t solve that issue. This budgetary concern is understood by the NYC-DSA Transit Working Group, which to avoid splitting Mamdani’s original call has begun canvassing Brooklyn bus riders, who are poised to see early busway improvements.
In the opening weeks of his administration, Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced a major childcare deal that, while not covering everyone, fractured the groups backing the policy. NYC-DSA planned a whole campaign of taxing the rich for childcare and were caught off guard while long-standing childcare advocates were eager to see some progress. Mamdani’s political home wanted an opening to fight for higher taxes but were suddenly on the backfoot due to the mayor and governor’s partnership. A policy win arrived while closing an organizing window.
Where NYC-DSA sees openings for greater demands upon the state, these non-explicitly socialist civic groups appear amenable to technocratic fixes. A less publicized but foundational campaign promise was around police reform, but that’s seen even less traction. An example of the counter-institutional strength of the NYPD and the lack of substantial outside organizing. While Mamdani did back away from increasing police headcount after NYC-DSA and other groups spoke out against it, he retains Jessica Tisch, former disgraced mayor Eric Adams’ police commissioner and a favorite of the centrist governor and the city’s financial elite, in the absence of a strong campaign for her ouster.
Future challenges
The coming years of the Mamdani administration will need to see NYC-DSA more concretely bring on-the-ground organizing for these demands into legible enduring campaigns. Jäger’s thesis on hyperpolitics stresses an understood view on the left of the necessity of working class institutions for meaningful state change. Yet, the atomization and alienation of working class life produces broken communities at the individual level, it also fragments the aims and tactics of organizations that should do some consensus around policy direction.
Whatever the limitations of Mamdanism as a political project, the outsized global reaction to his success speaks to the void of left, or even center, political leadership. This dynamic is consistent with the organizations and electoral base that powered Mamdani’s victory: DSA, the United Auto Workers Region 9A, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, and Jewish Voice for Peace, all organizations that lack the institutional heft of established labor unions, traditional county Democratic parties, or even some democratic reform groups but which nonetheless hold clear policy goals. Historical roots may be lacking, but these newer groups mobilized thousands of New Yorkers to amplify Mamdani’s affordability message and produce a voter turnout not seen in decades.
Jäger’s solution is that a more institutionalized left would see these organizations as ideally building up beyond electoral mobilization and growing in size to speak for a population of over eight million people. Calls for “accountability” of powerful elected officials unintentionally display the left’s weakness. Lists of demands are no substitute for campaigns, institutions, and structures aimed at state power. His aside on Mamdani’s New York City highlights the need for new and reformed institutions to buttress highly targeted demands and convert them into policy victories while DSA evolves towards a 21st century mass party.
Mamdani is not producing socialism in one city or simply DeBlasian progressivism redux. His city government is aiming at rapid gratification for working people. In this chronically unstable political period, NYC-DSA and the broader Mamdani coalition can celebrate campaign victories as milestones, not the culmination of their socialist project.
