How should we think about India Walton’s victory in Buffalo’s Democratic mayoral primary?

Capturing a significant executive office, while not unprecedented in the history of American socialism, has until now mainly eluded the resurgent movement. Over the past several decades, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members won mayoral office in college towns like Ithaca and Berkeley or acted as conventional left-liberal politicians with a mainly sentimental link to the radical left, like David Dinkins in New York City and Ron Dellums in Oakland.

These figures largely represented the electoral afterlife of the New Left: their campaigns followed the New Left’s repression and disintegration in the 1970s and 1980s and amounted to accommodation to the impossibility of radical change. To point this out is not to criticize them, necessarily; defeat brings on difficult choices and constrains what is possible at the local level. Nonetheless, Walton is different: she marks the advance of a historical process of class formation.