Liberal and conservative commentators have rushed to downplay the importance of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral election. “The odds are that Mamdani’s victory is actually less significant than you think,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. The Third Way, a Washington thinktank, urged “Democrats at all levels to resist the pressure to align with Mamdani’s politics and agenda.” And my sometime co-author Ruy Teixeira, writing in The Liberal Patriot, went further and declared the seeming triumph of the left an illusion. “The left’s 21st century project has failed,” he wrote.
I’ll grant that in 2028, Democrats should recognize that a politics and a persona that wins voters in New York City or in Seattle, where socialist Katie Wilson was elected mayor, may not play as well in York, Pa. or Green Bay, Wis. But for all its limitations, the Democrats’ left wing is now the principal source of the party’s energy and ideas. After Donald Trump passes from the scene, the battle for the nation’s political future could as well be fought between the Democratic left and the Republican right, with the centrists from the Third Way watching from the sidelines.
Teixeira, who is the most dismissive of the American left’s accomplishments, traces its trajectory and fall over the last 125 years:
The 20th century encompassed the era of social democracy followed by an attempt to resurrect the left through the Third Way after that era’s ignominious end. In the 21st century, the left embarked on a new project they hoped would remedy 20th century weaknesses and inaugurate a new era of political and governance success.
“The American left, by any reasonable measure, has enjoyed a revival in this century.”
This project, he contends, “has failed and failed badly.” He cites, among other things, its failures “to stop the rise of rightwing populism,” to “retain its working-class base,” and to “create durable electoral majorities.” This history identifies the left with the Democratic Party, and that party’s rise and fall in the 20th century with that of social democracy. But in fact, the American left, by any reasonable measure, has enjoyed a revival in this century after having been dormant for much of the last century.