In the fall of 1990, Mayor David Dinkins was watching homicides surge and his popularity plummet — “Dave, Do Something,” implored The New York Post — when he found himself in a room that was much more comfortable, more matched up with the lefty ideals that had sent him into politics in the first place.
Under a banner of the fist and rose, facing union bigwigs and foreign left-wing leaders, the mayor of New York gave a speech not about the crises of the city, but about the promises of socialism.
“Socialist ideals have played a powerful role in this city,” Mr. Dinkins, dressed in a sharp suit and striped tie, told a council meeting of the Socialist International in October 1990. “Public education, a strong and vibrant trade union movement and many great cultural institutions are products of the socialist movement.”
Historically, he’s right: Throughout the history of New York, a city of immigrants and political machines and union loyalists, democratic socialist voices have been part of the thrum of local politics. Mr. Dinkins himself was, at some point, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yet as Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner in this year’s mayoral race, campaigns as a D.S.A. member, his opponents have cast the prospect of a socialist in City Hall as simply un-New York — a big-city mismatch up there with pastrami with mayo.
“Socialism is not going to work for New York,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, one of Mr. Mamdani’s opponents in the general election, said bluntly last month.
“You are a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America,” Whitney Tilson, the former hedge fund executive who ran for mayor, said to Mr. Mamdani during a Democratic debate in June. “You refer to each other as comrade.”
“Yes, like David Dinkins, I am a member,” Mr. Mamdani shot back.
In fact, Mr. Dinkins is not to only city leader to have had ties to socialism. Fiorello La Guardia, the three-term Republican mayor, ran for re-election to Congress in 1924 on the socialist party line (for pure political convenience, after he couldn’t get the Republican nomination). Ruth Messinger, who served as Manhattan borough president in the 1990s and ran for mayor in 1997, was a D.S.A. member. In 1917, a socialist union lawyer named Morris Hillquit ran for mayor and won nearly a quarter of the vote. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez catapulted to Congress in an upset over the Democratic establishment in 2018, she did so as a member of the D.S.A., which endorsed her just before the primary.
“It’s a misunderstanding of our history to think our leaders have not been affected by and connected to deep progressive traditions,” said former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who attended a D.S.A. conference in the early 1980s and wrestled with whether to call himself a democratic socialist. “They were seen as a moral force,” he added, referring to the D.S.A.
Mr. Mamdani’s relationship with the D.S.A., though, is in many ways distinct, reflecting an organization whose profile is rising fast among an electorate with an appetite for change.
Mr. Mamdani joined the New York City D.S.A. around 2017, when he was in his mid-20s. The organization’s membership was surging at the time, thanks to Bernie Sanders, whose presidential candidacy had turned “millionaires and billionaires” into a galvanizing slogan for hundreds of thousands of politically unmoored millennials. Mr. Mamdani spoke at the D.S.A.’s national convention in 2023. The New York chapter endorsed him in his run for State Assembly and when he announced his mayoral campaign.
Mr. Mamdani has said that his “platform is not the same as national D.S.A.” His, for example, doesn’t propose eliminating all misdemeanor offenses. Still, his “affordability” proposals, such as city-owned grocery stores and free child care, reflect his socialist thinking. The New York City chapter of D.S.A. has emphasized the essential role it has played in his political rise: sending members to knock on thousands of doors and weighing in on Mr. Mamdani’s policy priorities, particularly his push for “fast and free buses.”
“We were his political home when he was working for a City Council candidate in 2017,” said Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of New York City’s D.S.A. chapter. “That experience became his launchpad into politics.”
“Zohran told us that if we did not endorse his mayoral campaign, he would not go forward with a push to run for mayor,” Mr. Gordillo added. (A spokeswoman for the Mamdani campaign confirmed this.)
City Hall has never had a leader with ties quite that close to democratic socialism.
Some scholars of democratic socialism say Mr. La Guardia governed like a socialist, though he wasn’t one. In City Hall, he took an expansive approach to government services, creating sweeping public housing developments and extending public transit’s reach. La Guardia, who was half Jewish and a Yiddish speaker, like many card-carrying socialists at the time, employed socialists in his administration. A protégé turned aide, Vito Marcantonio, later became a congressman in the American Labor Party, representing East Harlem.
“He was mayor at a time when expansive government was not seen as subversive or anti-American,” said Joshua Freeman, a professor emeritus of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. “He was ruling during the period of the New Deal.”
Some mayors who came after La Guardia were eager to distance themselves from the political left, especially socialists and communists. During the Cold War, some political aides recalled, “socialism” became almost a dirty word in City Hall. John LoCicero, who was special adviser to Mayor Ed Koch, was emphatic about his boss’s view.
“He was against socialism!” said Mr. LoCicero, now 95. He recalled how Mr. Koch would open City Hall’s doors to “refuseniks,” or Soviet dissidents, who would come into his office and tell their stories of coming to America.
Mr. Koch’s press secretary, George Arzt, whose parents immigrated to New York from Poland just before World War II, recalled the fears his mother and father had about both socialism and communism. “They would talk to me in Yiddish and if I said something wrong, they’d say: ‘Bist du communist?’” (“Are you a communist?”)
Socialist activists set about working to change public perception of their ideology, both during the Cold War and as it was fading. Both on the national stage and in local politics, they sought to distance democratic socialism — meaning socialists committed to liberal democracy — from communist and nondemocratic socialists leaders abroad.
In 1982, two sprawling left-wing groups merged to form the D.S.A. For some political leaders, especially in liberal New York, joining the group became a way to prove their progressive bona fides.
By the late 1980s, the D.S.A. was far from an influential force in New York City life. Nationally, the group had under 10,000 members; today it has more than 90,000. But some longtime D.S.A. members, and friends of Mr. Dinkins, said it wasn’t a surprise that the mayor was part of the group and occasionally attended its meetings because D.S.A. members shared his left-wing principles. Mr. Dinkins also had a close aide, Bill Lynch, who was a D.S.A. member and trade unionist, and may have encouraged his involvement.
“David didn’t run around talking about himself that much, but he considered himself a member,” recalled Ms. Messinger, who worked closely with Mr. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. “It’s logical, given David’s interest in making sure that the needs of all people in New York were being met, that he would find the group attractive.”
The affiliation wasn’t the slightest bit influential in Mr. Dinkins’s decision-making. Few people who worked with Dinkins recall democratic socialism ever coming up.
“I knew Dinkins pretty well; I’ve known him since I was a baby,” said Keith Wright, a former New York State assemblyman. “I never knew that he was a member of the D.S.A.”
And some who have studied Mr. Dinkins’s involvement with the D.S.A. note that he struggled to translate some of his high-minded progressive values into the more quotidien duties of being mayor, from dealing with trash to crime — a challenge some say Mr. Mamdani could face, too.
“He may have on some level thought of himself as a democratic socialist,” Mr. Freeman said of Mr. Dinkins. “But when it came to running the city there wasn’t a whole lot that could have meant.”
Emma Goldberg is a Times reporter who writes about political subcultures and the way we live now.
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