Embrace Left Wing Machine Politics
Time to get excited about the DSA electoral era.
The farther south you go on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn the more it becomes the sort of lively hectic commercial strip/ party that exists in few places outside of New York. The new sneaker stores and roti restaurants and weird places to buy garish $200 suits and fishnet body suits sit in chipped brick buildings with slapped-up painted wooden signs and you can feel the continuity of history pulsing through, like you could close your eyes and slide right back to the cigar stores and dressmakers that filled those spots a century ago. Set amid this strip is the refurbished King’s Theater—impossibly grand inside, soaring carved wooden columns with twisting, golden wooden flowers and fleur-de-lis and rich crimson curtains dripping in gold fringe. Spectacular. Its unlikely grandeur is somehow enhanced by the fact that it’s shoved down there next to the discount liquor store and the Taco Bell Cantina.
Yesterday afternoon, it was hot and the King’s Theater was full of socialists. The lower level seats, each curved row bookended with handsome decorative woodwork, were full of mostly young Brooklynites who had showed up to a DSA-sponsored Get Out The Vote rally in the hours immediately after the delirious New York Knicks championship parade downtown. New York City was riding high, baby. One girl of twelve or so strode boldly up the aisle in a fresh Knicks hat and a Biggie Smalls “Ready to Die” album cover photo t-shirt and seemed to carry the swagger of the whole city with her, lightly. These are my politics—the girl in the Biggie t-shirt at the King’s Theater socialist rally. The rest of America can come along with us.
Zohran was there, and Bernie Sanders was there, and all of the DSA-approved candidates who are on the ballot were there, all rotating through short and punchy speeches. This rally had a bigger purpose, a bigger frame, than just recruiting canvassers before Election Day next week. Democratic socialists in 2026 are having a moment that is—not to be too bold, not to get too far over my skis in historical terms—more hopeful and more substantial than anything we’ve seen since World War 2. It’s not a momentary moment, since it has been at least a decade in the making, since Bernie’s first run for president began reviving DSA in earnest. It’s years of organizing work coming to fruition. The era of electoral success for the left is here. Yes, it is geographically constrained, and no, it is not an era of political dominance—but the dream of having an organized faction inside of the Democratic Party that can pull it left in a systematic and irresistible way, in a way more powerful than futile appeals to morality, is on the cusp of becoming a reality.
Consider: Zohran won the New York City mayoral election last year. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is set to become the next mayor of Washington, DC. DSA-adjacent Nithya Raman is in a runoff with incumbent Karen Bass for Los Angeles mayor. The reds are taking the cities! Rahhhhhh!
And they aren’t the only ones. On stage yesterday, Bernie called out other successes: Analilia Mejia, elected to Congress in New Jersey last April, and fellow leftist Jerseyite Adam Hamawy, likely to win a Congressional seat this year; Graham Platner in Maine, neck and neck in the Senate race; Chris Rabb, newly elected to the Pennsylvania statehouse; Randy Villegas, a lefty who defeated a mainstream Democrat in a competitive California Congressional district; and recently victorious pro-union progressives with blue collar credentials shooting for Congressional seats in red or purple states, like Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, Brian Poindexter in Ohio, and Sam Forstag in Montana. Not all of these candidates are formally aligned with DSA, but all of them are benefiting, to varying degrees, from the post-2016 yank to the left on the zeitgeist that DSA’s national organizing work has accomplished.
In New York City, we have the privilege of voting for an honest to god democratic socialist slate. Yesterday’s rally boasted five DSA-approved state assembly candidates, followed by three Congressional candidates: aw-shucks Park Slope dad Brad Lander (“People talk about politicians representing Wall Street or Main Street,” emcee Ilana Glazer said. “This guy could represent Sesame Street!”); sober union organizer Claire Valdez; and polished uptown educator and activist Darializa Avila Chevalier. All are trying to establish the supremacy of the left in Democrat-on-Democrat contests. The most important thing that their victories would accomplish would be demonstrate to the national Democratic Party that the DSA is fucking force to be reckoned with. These elections amount to a marker that can be cashed in in 2028, when the grand struggle over what the Democrats will be after Trump goes down.
Since when have you, a frustrated progressive voter, had a slate to consult? This is the good kind of machine politics, a thing that has not happened to this extent in modern Democratic Party history. This is an organized faction inside of this shitty and frustrating and corporate-captured party that can actually win and thereby wield power and force the centrists and the money candidates to listen to the left’s demands. That is a new thing. New York City is the most concentrated site of DSA power, and what happens in these New York races matters nationwide, because the bigger the beachhead that socialists are able to build in Congress and in statehouses, the more muscular they can be in positioning the party in presidential campaign season. It’s best to think of the Democratic Party not as one organization, but rather as a field of struggle between many different political factions. The left, at last, may be poised to be strong enough to not get pushed off that field when it matters.
If the 2026 elections go well for DSA candidates, it seems very likely (just based on common sense) that AOC will run for president, becoming the successor to Bernie’s legacy and the focal point for all of the left’s growing political energy. These are the stakes in these lower-level races. Every win matters. We all need to think of the big picture. Claire Valdez, for example, is running against Antonio Reynoso, who is also very progressive and very pro-labor and who, I trust, would be almost completely politically aligned with me if he were in Congress. But a win for Valdez comes with the added importance of serving as a demonstration of DSA’s power. That, by itself, is vital, and therefore I hope that she wins.
Bernie Sanders is 84 years old and he has been trying for decades. This current crop of elected socialists amount to the culmination of his life’s work. He, like MLK, is not going to get to the mountaintop with us, but his presidential campaigns and infusion of energy into DSA may be the fuel that propels a new generation to that peak. I want everyone to vote for DSA candidates in 2026 not just because I am a socialist, but because each vote amounts to ammunition for the left’s larger, looming battle inside of the Democratic Party.
For my entire lifetime, the left has been splintered, marginalized, and often demoralized, grasping for momentary small victories amid a ceaseless background of defeat. Bernie’s successes, inadequate though they were, gave the left more genuine electoral hope—but it was very much tied to Bernie himself. Now, we are at last seeing the glimmering possibility of systemic, organized left politics that are robust enough to break free of any one personality and flourish in both likely and unlikely districts across the country. “Our work has never been about one person,” Zohran Mamdani, the most popular man in New York City after Jalen Brunson, said on stage yesterday. “Our work has been about one movement.”
This is not about DSA. This is about the vision to see the American left as an actual movement—a movement for people over money, workers over investors, human rights over corporate rights, socialism over capitalism. DSA has built a platform strong enough to carry that vision into the political mainstream, and we all owe them our thanks. But we’re all riding in with them. If we’re smart, we’re all going to get together and go through the door that is opening and not keep banging our heads against the wall. This election is the appetizer and 2028 is the chance for a left wing main course for America. It feels more promising, in that particular sense, than any era in my lifetime or even my parents’ lifetime. Opportunity is knocking, my people. Get on board. It’s okay to feel a little hopeful. Follow NYC to the mountaintop now.
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Related reading: New York Socialist City; Up With Zohran; On Zohran’s election; Our interview with Zohran; Our interview with Claire Valdez; Our interview with Brad Lander; Bernie Sanders in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone (2015).
Join DSA. They are looking for door knockers right now. Get in touch with an organizer to help you unionize your workplace. Unions are the backbone of the left and we need a lot more of them. Here is a book you can read about that.
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If we put our minds to it, Bernie will be able to feel at least a little shade from the trees he's helped plant— it's not impossible. (Things are shifting!)
So ready for this. Was very excited to see the win in DC this week, and so many DC voters saying they wanted their own "Mamdani". Hoping these moderate Dems wake up, and that the coming progressive wave will wash them out if they don't.