Zohran Mamdani Takes Up Bernie Sanders’s Torch
Bernie Sanders clearly sees the future of his movement in Zohran Mamdani, who is now poised to become the next mayor of New York City. In inheriting Sanders’s movement, Mamdani inherits a daunting set of questions and challenges.
Zohran Mamdani’s laser focus on the economic plight of working people and his commitment to building a grassroots movement come out of the Bernie Sanders playbook.
On Saturday, a modest crowd braved on-and-off thunderstorms to pack Brooklyn College’s 2,400-capacity Claire Tow Theater for the latest stop on Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. The town hall was far from the biggest stop on the tour, which drew tens of thousands to rallies earlier this year.
For many in attendance, though, this event was freighted with symbolism. It was a homecoming for Sanders, who briefly attended Brooklyn College and grew up close by. And it was the first time on the barnstorming tour that the Vermont senator was sharing the stage with Zohran Mamdani, the young democratic socialist front-runner for New York City mayor, who spoke at length about his political debt to Sanders.
“It was Bernie’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 that gave me the language of democratic socialism to describe my politics,” Mamdani said. “And it was Bernie’s Queensbridge rally on October 19, 2019, that was the first political event of my campaign for state assembly.”
Mamdani also pointed to Sanders’s insurgent 1981 campaign for mayor of Burlington, and his success in governing the city for the next eight years, as a model. Throughout the evening, Mamdani emphasized a long-standing theme of Sanders’s: that major social change will happen only if masses of ordinary people organize for it: “We are not just here together with the message to come out and vote in November, though that is critically important. We will continue to organize beyond the election. We will continue to organize because we have an agenda to win.”
Sanders was in typical fiery form, shouting as he railed against extreme inequality and consolidation of wealth and oligarchic control over the government and media. And he denounced Democratic leaders who had not yet endorsed Mamdani despite his decisive win in the party’s primary.
“I find it hard to understand how the major Democratic leaders of New York state are not supporting the Democratic candidate,” Sanders said.
Altogether the event left the strong impression that Sanders was passing the torch to Mamdani as a leader of the national movement that has cohered behind the socialist senator in the last decade. Different as they are in many ways — side by side, the smiling, telegenic young Muslim drew a stark contrast to the curmudgeonly, occasionally hoarse Jewish octogenarian — Mamdani is indeed a spiritual successor to Sanders. His willingness to publicly criticize capitalism and challenge Democratic Party elites, his laser focus on the economic plight of working people and his bold populist program, and his commitment to building a grassroots movement all come out of the Sanders playbook.
The Bernie Movement, Continued
If Mamdani is inheriting the Bernie movement and its promise, he is also inheriting a daunting set of challenges and unanswered questions.
One question is how Mamdani and his fellow travelers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib can expand their base to contest for power at the statewide and national level. Mamdani’s campaign has been impressive in its ability to turn out young people and new voters.
Still, the Democratic primary electorate in New York City is a very narrow slice of the population, and an especially socially progressive and college-educated one at that. The movement around Mamdani will have to figure out how to reach broader sections of the working class. In some places, due to the toxicity of the Democratic Party brand, pro-worker populists may have an easier time running as independents, as Sanders has urged.
To expand its base in the working class and give it the institutional and organizational muscle it needs to pass policies that challenge capital, the electoral left needs the support of labor unions. Despite his unflagging support for labor, Sanders was only able to secure the endorsement of a few major unions in his presidential runs, thanks to the labor movement’s conservatism and its fealty to the Democratic establishment.
In New York’s mayoral race, by contrast, Mamdani was able to rack up an impressive slew of local endorsements ahead of the primary election; he has consolidated labor support since his victory. Some important early endorsements, like those of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) District Council 37 and the United Auto Workers’ Region 9A — and the United Federation of Teachers’ decision to stay neutral in the primary — were made possible by the efforts of union reformers and rank-and-file activists. For the Left to gain a foothold in more unions at the national level, more such reform efforts, and more union leaders willing to take a risk on ambitious pro-worker politicians and programs, are needed.
At Saturday’s town hall, Sanders declared that Mamdani’s campaign represented “the future of the Democratic Party.” Yet this is far from obvious. Cuomo and other centrist Democrats are willing to go as far as making an alliance with Donald Trump to stop Mamdani; meanwhile prominent New York Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are still sitting on the sidelines, even as Trump threatens to arrest and deport Mamdani and cut federal funding to the city.
At the national level, time and again, party leaders have chosen to reject economic populism and refused to fight for transformative social programs, in keeping with a decades-long turning away from the working class. While outrage at Israel’s genocide grows among Democratic voters, the party remains as committed to Israel as ever. And during Sanders’s own presidential runs, leading Democrats were of course not afraid to put their thumbs on the scale to help sink his campaigns.
All this raises the questions: Can Mamdani be the future of the Democratic Party? How are these deep conflicts to be resolved?
Given US electoral law, the road to forming a new party is a narrow one indeed. But given the extent of corporate domination of the Democrats, the odds of democratic socialists like Mamdani becoming its face don’t seem much better. Confronting the Scylla and Charybdis of marginalization outside the party and marginalization within it, the Left’s best bet is probably to run as Democrats where they are still popular, run as independents elsewhere, and try as much as possible to cohere an organization that can operate independently, with the aim of building a new party as a horizon.
Beyond Redistribution?
Then there is the question of the movement’s program. Mamdani’s platform is by now well known. At Saturday’s rally, he led the crowd in a call and response chant:
“Together we will freeze the —”
“Rent!”
“Make buses fast and —
“Free!”
“Deliver universal —
“Childcare!”
His program is essentially one of redistribution, taxing the rich to expand public services. In this, Mamdani is advancing a kind of municipal version of Sanders’s 2020 platform, which the Vermont senator pitched as a revival and expansion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its signature demands — Medicare for All, tuition-free college, and canceling student and medical debt, funded by raising taxes on corporations and high earners — were generally about redistributing existing wealth and income rather than reconfiguring ownership or production in a more fundamental way. (Though he also campaigned on the Green New Deal, which called for trillions of dollars in public investment to decarbonize the economy.)
The most immediate question for Mamdani and his supporters is how to pass his agenda in the face of a municipal budget crisis, a hostile business elite (and potentially police force), and a governor who has said she is opposed to the tax increases Mamdani will need to fund many of his proposals. He will also have to deal with the prospect of the Trump administration cutting off federal funds or legally persecuting him. To face down these obstacles and pass at least some of his agenda, he will need wide public support and broad-based grassroots organization.
But if the movement can weather these storms and build up its forces at the national level — winning more seats in Congress, and maybe fielding a left-wing presidential challenger in 2028 — it will face a similar set of challenges on an even more daunting scale. What is the Bernie 3.0 platform? And how can we push it forward through a political system designed to stymie the popular will and against a hostile elite with world-historic levels of wealth and power?
Finally, there is the more distant question of what this all means for the prospects of democratic socialism. Neither Mamdani nor Sanders is calling for the collective ownership of society’s productive assets, despite New York Post hysterics to the contrary. Yet their campaigns have energized people in the fight against oligarchy and authoritarianism, injected new energy into the labor movement, and inspired thousands to join the Democratic Socialists of America, like Mamdani himself.
The higher taxes on the wealthy and the expansion of the welfare state that the movement is now calling for are badly needed, and winning them will involve a massive struggle in its own right. Yet historical experience suggests that these achievements will remain fragile as long as capitalists monopolize control of society’s resources. A longer-term vision for the movement — a movement fighting “for each and every person to live a dignified life,” as Mamdani put it on Saturday — must involve organizing the economy on a different, democratic basis.
But first things first: the movement needs to mobilize thousands of volunteers to beat the unholy alliance of Trump, Cuomo, and New York’s ultrarich and get Mamdani to city hall.