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A SOCIALIST TAKES POWER—IN THE UNITED STATES!  
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Van Gosse
November 7, 2025
In the Red

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_ Mayors actually govern. And by any historical measure, Zohran
Mamdani will be the first socialist to hold significant governing
power in U.S. history. _

Zohran Mamdani delivers victory speech, Nov. 4, 2025 , screen grab

 

Zohran Mamdani’s triumph casts a sharp new light on the checkered,
hitherto obscure history of American socialism. _By any historical
measure, he will be the first socialist to hold significant governing
power inside the U.S.’s political system._

Sure, here and there over the past 100-plus years, socialists have won
office. Every good lefty can tell you about Eugene V. Debs getting six
percent (6%!) as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in
1912, and almost a million votes (3.4%) in 1920 even though he was
locked up in the Atlanta Penitentiary for opposing U.S. entry into
World War I. Historians of American radicalism cite a handful of
socialist congressmen prior to the Cold War, including East Harlem’s
beloved Vito Marcantonio
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(in the House from 1936-1950). There were city councilors, state
legislators, and even a few socialist mayors in industrial towns like
Reading, Pennsylvania and Bridgeport, Connecticut. Most notably,
Milwaukee
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kept electing Socialist mayors between 1910 and 1960.

Actual Communists did not gain office anywhere outside of New York,
where Party members Pete Caccione
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and Benjamin Davis, Jr.
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on City Council in the 1940s. After a considerable hiatus during the
Cold War, avowedly left-wing people re-entered electoral politics in
the 1970s; New Yorkers with long memories remember Councilwoman Miriam
Friedlander
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fondly as a progressive who never disavowed her left-wing connections,
which were shared by members of the Congressional Black Caucus like
John Conyers, Jr.
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and George Crockett
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Berkeley’s Ronald V. Dellums
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(in the House 1973-1999) was a longtime Vice-Chair of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA).

And then there was and is Bernie. Since his historic run in 2016, DSA
has mushroomed, electing more than 250 members to office
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from Pennsylvania to California, including three current members of
Congress (AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Greg Casar) and fifty state
legislators.

Realistically, however, all of the above are no more than footnotes in
the history of American politics. In the larger world, socialists and
communists of every variety have routinely held major offices,
governed for better or worse, and built lasting electoral power.
Today, France’s top two cities, Paris and Marseille, are governed by
Socialists, as they have been for decades. In the first case, that’s
led to impressive progressive reforms
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and in the second, it looks like machine politics
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left. And that’s just one country. In 2001-2008, London’s mayor
was “Red Ken” Livingston
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of the London County Council (the functional equivalent of a mayor),
had confronted Margaret Thatcher frontally as a fierce left-winger.
And today, Andy Burnham [[link removed]],
representing what’s left of the Labour Left, is “King of the
North” as Mayor of the UK’s second city, Manchester, since 2017.

I could go on, but you get the point! Mayors actually govern. They
oversee many thousands of employees and vast bureaucracies, with large
budgets, in the case of New York, $112 billion, greater than 48 of the
states [[link removed]].
Whether it’s Paris, London, Tokyo, Rome, Mumbai, Sao Paolo, or
Lagos, their regimes are major political entities within the nation.
So, to repeat: _by any historical measure, Zohran Mamdani will be the
first socialist to hold significant governing power in U.S. history._

What will he (or we) do, as democratic socialists, with this
extraordinary opportunity? That is the question of the hour: how
effective governance, advanced from a clearly socialist perspective,
can be brought from the margins into the mainstream of U.S. politics.
If he looks around the world, as he surely is doing, Mayor Mamdani
will have plenty of useful examples to draw from, although precious
little of relevance here in the U.S.

 
 

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