Zohran Is Taking Bernie’s Movement Into the Future

None of it worked. The months of smears. The months of sabotage from the Democratic establishment. The absurd accusations of antisemitism. The even more absurd insinuations that Zohran Mamdani is a secret Islamic fundamentalist plotting to impose Sharia law on the Big Apple.

Voters saw through all of it. They were persuaded by his message of turning the page on billionaire-backed policies and making New York City more affordable for the working class. And they handed him a decisive victory.

This momentous victory wouldn’t have happened if Bernie Sanders hadn’t laid the groundwork during his two historic runs for president, giving birth to the revitalized, millennial-led democratic socialist movement out of which Zohran comes. Bernie, too, began his political career as a local mayor, and he seems to see much of himself in Mamdani.

After the mayoral primary, when the election would have been all but over if the rules of normal politics had been followed (instead of former governor Andrew Cuomo throwing the “vote blue no matter who” rulebook out the window and running as an independent), Sanders emerged as Mamdani’s most outspoken supporter on the national stage.

Of course, all of the democratic socialist elected officials who have won office in recent years are, in a sense, following in Bernie’s footsteps. Members of the congressional “Squad,” for example, support universalist economic redistribution and embrace the “democratic socialist” label Bernie dusted off in his first run for president, just two years before the first of the “Berniecrats” were elected.

But Zohran is Bernie’s heir in particular ways. First, he is, to a unique extent, a product of the post-Bernie “millennial left.” He was deeply involved in its main organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for years before he ran for office.

In high-profile races, DSA branches have often supported candidates with roots entirely outside the group. But Mamdani is a product of New York City DSA (NYC-DSA) and the broader culture of New York City socialism. This even led to a tedious mini-scandal during the campaign about his history of advocating for “socializing the means of production,” revealing the strong influence of the organization’s political philosophy on his development. (Critics seem completely unaware of how many major cities in liberal capitalist nations have been successfully governed by political parties that had such socialization as the long-term horizon of their politics.)

The second sense in which Zohran is Sanders’s heir is even more interesting.

One of Bernie’s greatest strengths as a left-wing communicator has always been that, while he unapologetically holds straight-down-the-line progressive positions on social policy issues, he’s relentlessly focused on broadly appealing calls for universalist economic redistribution. Wake him up in the middle of the night, and the first words out of his mouth might well be, “This is the only major country on earth that doesn’t guarantee health care as a right.”

Bernie’s success in almost single-handedly redrawing the map of American politics to make room for a robust left can’t be disentangled from this approach, which allows him to separate himself somewhat from the day-to-day ebbs and flows of the culture war. He correctly understands Trumpism as a grave authoritarian threat to liberal-democratic norms and sides with mainstream Democrats when he needs to, but he’s become the most popular politician in the country in part by maintaining a certain distance from regular Democratic Party liberalism rather than presenting himself as its furthest left flank. Years of head-to-head matchup polls that show him soundly defeating Donald Trump in a general election are due, at least in part, to his considerable appeal to persuadable voters who might otherwise pull the Republican lever.

From the beginning of his campaign, Zohran has sought to cultivate precisely that kind of appeal. After Trump won again last fall, the future mayor interviewed New Yorkers in working-class neighborhoods who had voted for Trump to see what understandable concerns and frustrations had driven them in that direction. And where so many of the post-2016 Berniecrats have tried to combine Bernie’s economic platform with appeals to Team Blue in the culture war, Zohran has taken a page out of Bernie’s socialist communicator playbook by relentlessly focusing on his core, unifying economic message.

After months of unhinged bigotry culminating in former governor Cuomo insinuating that Zohran would celebrate another 9/11, Zohran made the very reasonable decision to take a short break from usual programming to deliver a moving speech on Islamophobia. Like Bernie, he also answers questions about cultural issues directly when asked.

But week after week, month after month, over the course of a long and grueling campaign, Zohran’s default message on bigotry and prejudice is that they are efforts to “divide us up,” at which point he pivots back to his core themes about making the city more livable for the entire working class. If you woke Zohran up in the middle of the night, I expect he’d mumble something about “affordability.”

Post-liberal writer Sohrab Ahmari, hardly a socialist himself, wrote about this perceptively after Zohran’s historic primary win:

While he has targeted specific New York communities with videos in which he speaks Hindi and Spanish, Mamdani has usually managed to shift every discussion back to issues of class and inequality — the historic mission of the “Old Left” before the so-called cultural turn and the rise of identity politics.

A campaign speech in which he highlighted his father’s anti–Jim Crow activism was instructive. Although he began with themes of racial discrimination in the past, he didn’t make the predictable progressive point that “structural racism” is still with us. Rather, Mamdani argued that the freedoms for which the likes of Martin Luther King fought are meaningless if the poor and working classes are too economically stressed to exercise them.

It’s impossible to imagine Mamdani throwing a marginalized group under the bus in contexts like antidiscrimination protections or standing up to prejudice. But there’s a manifest sense in which he’s taken the torch of Bernie’s economics-first approach to socialist political strategy.

Of course, the story of Mayor Mamdani remains to be written. While he’s made smart moves in threading the needle on policing (a frequent weak spot in progressive municipal government), for example, the capacity of a contentious relationship with the New York Police Department to undermine his mayoralty is considerable. And while New York’s squishy centrist governor, Kathy Hochul, was driven to endorse him by the internal politics of her party, it’s far from clear that she’s prepared to play ball when it comes to state-level cooperation with some of Zohran’s most ambitious proposals. More generally, the power of the billionaire class in New York City is far greater than in Burlington, Vermont, where Bernie was mayor. There are considerable challenges ahead.

Every indication so far, though, suggests that few left politicians could be better suited to meeting those challenges than Zohran Mamdani. His mayoralty is a tremendous opportunity for a democratic socialist movement that has suffered serious setbacks in the last five years. If Trump constantly attacks him and picks fights with him, as seems nearly inevitable (it’s hard to imagine the president being able to help himself), then progressive forces rallying around Mamdani as their new standard-bearer could elevate democratic socialism as an electrifying replacement for the older and less effective “resistance liberalism.”

No one yet knows where all of this will go. But one thing is clear: Zohran is a homegrown millennial socialist, and the fate of our movement is bound up with his.