Left Populism and Democratic Socialism

 

Much national attention has been given to the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral election in New York City. But in Seattle and King County Washington there were equally astonishing local election outcomes in the races for mayor of Seattle and the King County executive.

In the County executive race Girmay Zahilay won. He is 38 years old of Ethiopian descent. He was born in a refugee camp in Sudan to parents fleeing civil war in their home country. Ivy League educated, he first made waves by defeating Larry Gossett for a seat on the King County Council in 2019. Gossett, a former Black Panther and president of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition, had served since 1993. In a hotly contested county executive election Zahilay bested Claudia Balducci, a multi-term county councilwoman from the center-left with demonstrated ability to get things done.

Simultaneously, Katie Wilson, aged 43 defeated the Afro-Japanese incumbent Bruce Harrell by less than a one percent margin. Wilson dropped out of Oxford University within a semester of graduating with honors in physics and philosophy. She describes herself as a socialist but is not a member of any socialist organization and the Democratic Socialist of America chapter in Seattle did not endorse her.

Seattle/King County is home to Microsoft and Amazon. As a center of the tech boom the region has witnessed extreme polarization of wealth and has a large, unhoused population. Even more than is true elsewhere affordability is a hotbed issue. After the murder of George Floyd Seattle saw one of the more explosive “defund the police” movements. It featured the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) where activist took over a city park causing the city to abandon the police precinct across the street. The fallout from the city’s handling of the movement would see the police chief resign and a mayor who had been the darling of the city’s elite decide not to run for re-election.[1]

In these posts I focus on the role of race in distinguishing between left and right populism. But I also highlight the way that populism pushes the political mainstreams on each side toward new objectives. Today I want to tease out the way that left populist economic thinking is pushing mainstream liberalism toward either an explicit advancement of social liberalism or possibly democratic socialism (See Figure 1).

The Political Careers of Zahilay and Mamdani

                                                                 Girmay Zahilay                            

                                                                                    Katie Wilson

Like Zohran Mamdani, Zahilay and Wilson are left-wing populist. As someone who had resided in public housing as a youth Zahilay campaigned on the expansion of public housing and opposition to traditional juvenile detention methods.[2]  In a city that fell behind in mass transit as it grew with the tech boom, Wilson co-founded The Seattle Transit Riders Union in 2011.

Both candidates represent a younger generation that is concerned about social justice and affordability. As a county councilman Zahilay secured funding for a community center in the underserved neighborhood that he grew up in. And he was behind the building of tiny homes to get people off the streets.

Under Wilson’s leadership the Transit Riders Union has lobbied for the entire range of issues affecting transit riders: ‘a mission that encompasses everything from bus fares to affordable housing to preventing sweeps of homeless encampments.’[3] In 2020, Wilson successfully advocated for the creation of Seattle's JumpStart tax, which taxes private employers to fund affordable housing.  During her campaign Wilson criticized Mayor Harrell for proposing to take funds from JumpStart funds to balance the city budget.  

Both of these young public servants are clearly progressive. I could not find any statements on Zahilay’s political views, but he identifies as a Democrat. As mentioned above Wilson identifies as a socialist ideologically but she also stood for office as a Democrat.

Democratic Socialism and Social Liberalism

The establishment gets itself into a tither over the intrusion of socialism into our national political discourse as a legitimate worldview. Because this ‘s’ word has been off limits in this land of quintessential capitalism, we don’t teach the broad body of socialist ideas in our schools. Moreover, socialism isn’t talked about in day-to-day conversations by anyone who isn’t far to the left of center in national politics.

But that is starting to change! The problem of affordability in contemporary society is a crisis of capitalism. Socialism broadly is belief in any set of policies that tax or regulate the private sector of the economy in the name of collective well-being. Most Americans equate socialism with communism of the kind witnessed in Eastern bloc countries and China during the Cold War. That state socialism eliminated the private sector of the economy and market competition. But in Scandinavia (and to a lesser extent much of Western Europe) we see democratic socialism which permits capitalism to function, but imposes higher taxes to pay for health care, education and other social services. Read that as capitalism as a principle of wealth creation and socialism as a principle for the redistribution of wealth and opportunity.

Capitalism grows out of another great philosophical tradition ... liberalism. Liberalism is the belief in individual liberty, equality before the law and the protection of property rights. Economic liberalism emphasizes property rights and a fee market economy. Across the 19th century the polarization of wealth created by industrial capitalism saw the emergence of social liberalism as a doctrine foregrounding equality, not just before the law, but of opportunities to pursue ‘life, liberty and happiness.’

Equality in the realm of opportunity required government intervention into the economy to ameliorate the inequality produced by capitalism. That also meant higher taxes to pay for health care, education and other social services ... Sounds a lot like socialism!

Therein lies the conundrum for the Democratic Party and the way it handles candidates like Zahilay, Wilson and Mamdani. Zahilay identifies as a Democrat and his political positions place him squarely in the left-populist wing of the party. He’s not saying, perhaps because he’s savvy enough not to, but I would categorize him as a social liberal. As I’ve shown that’s not much different than democratic socialism.

Bernie Sanders’ unflinching presentation of himself as a democratic socialist since his 2016 presidential run, coming as it did in the wake of the Great Recession, has done much to popularize socialism in recent times among the young. Also, a lot of us have been socialist-oriented or open to socialistic policies since the 1960s. The FBI Counterintelligence Program repressed much of the extreme left, but many of the rest of us put our heads down, immersed ourselves in civil society and kept our views to ourselves.

Sanders’ popularity and the emergence of young charismatic socialists like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani have served to make the word more palatable in mainstream political discourse for young and old alike.  The Democratic establishment is thrilled that affordability was embraced by center-left candidates like Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia as well as Mamdani in New York City. But while the two governors elect stop with groceries and gasolene, Mamdani’s platform includes housing, healthcare and transportation.

Zahilay the social liberal and Wilson, the democratic socialist share those policy agendas as well. They speak to the concerns and real human needs of working and middle-class people in an economy that makes the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness out of reach for more and more people.

The late African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral puts it best.

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, ... They are fighting to win

material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the

future of their children.[4]

So, Democrats can try to pigeonhole the Wilsons and the Zahilays of the world into abstract ideas, or they can embrace them because they are fighting for to win better material benefits for their families and communities in the future.

 

Figure 1. Progressivism and Ideology

                                                                Liberalism                              Populism (Sanders)

Economic Policy Orientation

social welfarist capitalism

social welfarist capitalism,         democratic socialism

 

 

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[1]Brad Holden, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) or Organized Protest (CHOP) (Seattle),

Posted 12/30/2023, https://www.historylink.org/File/22870

 

[2] Smith, Rich (June 7, 2019). "Larry Gossett Faces His First Serious Challenger in Girmay Zahilay". The Stranger.

[3] Erica C. Barnett, October 18, 2018, Seattle Magazine, https://seattlemag.com/features/seattles-most-influential-people-2018-transit-riders-union-general-secretary/

 

[4] Amilcar Cabral, ‘Tell No Lies,! Claim No Easy Victories! Revolution in Guinea. Mothly Review Press, 1969, p. 86.

Do Not Lose Faith in Our Own Strength or Our Own Future

 

                     Do Not Lose Faith in Our Own Strength or Our Own Future 

My debt to the analytical framework of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is well-known to those of you who follow my posts. I have been particularly interested in his concept of the “war of position”: the cultural and political contestation within the institutions of state and civil society. A la Gramsci, I believe that contention over the values society should be organized around occur at a myriad of micro-sites in the labyrinthine institutional systems of modern capitalism.  

In July 2023 I remarked on the massive street protests that had occurred on the left during movements from civil rights in the 1950s and 60s to BLM in the 2010s and 2020. Those episodes rocked the political establishment to its foundations. We won some incremental victories and we imagined that we had taken the first steps to setting the social order on a fundamentally new course. In the institutional setting it was akin to “a fierce artillery attack (that) seemed to have destroyed the enemy’s entire defensive system.”[1] But as Gramsci points out, in modern industrial societies like the US “the superstructures (or institutions) of civil society are like the trench systems of modern warfare.” Actually our street protests and eloquent pleas in the media, etc., “had only destroyed the outer perimeter, and our valient comrades found “ themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective,” because “the defenders (of the system) are not demoralized, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future.”[2]

Corporate America, the Federalist Society, White Christian nationalists ... these are the bastions of the “system” which have withstood massive assaults over the generations, have not lost faith in their own strength of their own futures. They are still there and show no signs of going away.

In the traumatizing wake of Trump’s return to office many of us have been in a quandary as to what to do to stop his regime’s massive assault on progressivism. I am among many who have advised us not to obey in advance, and to defend institutions.[3] In my posts I have done my best to chronicle those who have done those two things.  

As I digest the outcomes of local and state elections across the country this week it occurs to me that after Trumps frontal assault on agencies, bureaucracies, cities and entire states we in Blue America have been reeling. But from the beginning there have been some naysayers willing to stick their necks out in defiance, including, let me just once again acknowledge, several federal court judges in this regard.

Recent cracks in Trumps edifice include:

·       Farmers, many of whom voted for Trump, are starting to have buyer’s remorse as China begins to import from elsewhere  in response to Trump’s tariffs.

·       When ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel suggested that the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk was a MAGA person, ABC suspended his show. ABC is a Disney company. Consumers demonstrated their power by dropping their subscriptions from Hulu and other Disney + streaming services. Disney + services lost nearly 3 million subscribers in September. Kimmel was quickly put back on the air. [4]

·       In October a number of renowned artists and cultural organizations announced a series of events they’re calling “Fall of Freedom” to oppose the “authoritarian overreach by the Trump administration” in the world of the arts and cultural production. Scheduled for November 21, “Fall for Freedom” will involve filmmakers Ava DuVernay and Michael Moore, and leading institutions such as the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York) Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) and the Woolly Mammoth Theater (Washington, D.C.). It’s billed as parallel to the “No Kings Movement” orchestrated by Indivisible.[5]

And on November 4th is their first opportunity to be heard since last November voters nationwide delivered strong rebukes to the direction the country is going under Trump 2.0. The sweeping victories of Abigail Spanberger for governor of Virginia and Mikie Sherrill for governor of New Jersey defied pundits seeing races they thought were tightening in recent weeks. The victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, who ran as a Democrat, in the New York City mayoral election was also important for those opposing Trump, but for different reasons. Add to these the overwhelming approval of Proposition 50 in California, which counters Texas’s mid-decade pro-Republican gerrymandering of Congressional seats with the same tactics for California, and one sees many reasons to hope that we can sustain our multiracial democracy.

New Jersey and Virginia are different than New York City. Sherrill and Spanberger ran as centrist while Mamdani represents the progressive wing of the party. But they all ran on bread-and-butter issues of affordability and inflation in the costs of groceries, gasolene and in Mamdani’s case housing. These were all things Trump and MAGA were supposed to fix, yet inflation in these areas and more continues apace fueled by Trump’s tariffs. The pushback from private places in civil society and the expression of anti-MAGA sentiments in the political sphere suggest that after being back on our heels the broad left has steadied itself and is pushing back.

So now I want to flip the script. I have suggested in earlier posts that we must defend Blue spaces against the Trumpian onslaught. The results from this week’s elections suggest that Red America behind Trump is being confronted by a line of defence which was still effective,” that WE  “are not demoralized.” WE have not “ abandoned our positions, ... nor (lost) faith in (our) own strength or (our) future.”[6] Rather, WE are fighting the war of position in the trenches of civil society and the state. Hitch up your seatbelts. That struggle is far from over.

 

 

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1 Hoare, Q., & Smith, G.N. (Eds.). (1971). Selections from (Gramsci) the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. (p. 235)

 

2 Ibid.

 

[3] Most prominently, Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny,

[4] It should be noted that Kimmel’s program is still scheduled for cancellation when his contract expires next year. See https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/disney-lost-nearly-3-million-subscribers-after-jimmy-kimmel-suspension-report/ar-AA1OV7V4

 

[5] Small, Z. Artist Plan to Unite in Defiance,” New York Times, Octber 15, 2025, p. C5.

[6] Hoare and Smith, p. 235.