New York City’s next mayor is an actual democratic socialist. It would be a mistake to underemphasize the radical nature of this ideology.
New York City’s next mayor will be Zohran Mamdani, who is not merely an extreme left progressive but an actual democratic socialist. It would be a mistake to underemphasize the radical nature of this ideology.
And yet, that’s precisely what some in the media are doing. The BBC, for instance, featured an infographic that described Mamdani’s democratic socialism as an ideology “which has no clear definition but essentially means giving a voice to workers, not corporations.”
The BBC defines “democratic socialism”. pic.twitter.com/Sxk52XB68Y
Sam Bowman (@s8mb) November 5, 2025
That’s an extremely evasive way of describing a radical political vision. No one would say that national socialism—the ideology of the German Nazi Party—had no clear definition and implied only good things about the empowerment of the working class.
It is not difficult to understand what is meant by the term democratic socialism. Plain-old socialism is a revolutionary economic and political system that involves the workers seizing the means of production from the capitalist class. In practice, this necessitates a strong centralized state exerting significant control over and management of the economy: confiscation of private property, nationalization of various industries, and redistribution. Since such a system inevitably produces shortages, suffering, and eventually public discontent, actually existing socialist regimes throughout history have tended toward authoritarianism. The Soviet Union, for example, brutally suppressed internal dissent. In a 2021 story for Reason titled “Yes, It was an Evil Empire”, the writer Cathy Young, who was born in Moscow prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse, provided examples of Soviet tyranny:
Among my parents’ friends and coworkers, few did not have a story (if they were candid about it) of a family member or relative imprisoned in the Stalin era for some absurd reason: Someone’s aunt was branded a subversive because a neighbor heard her playing a funeral march on the piano the day a notorious “enemy of the people” was executed; someone’s father was charged with fomenting “defeatist attitudes” during the war for remarking that Stalin “sounded sad” in his radio address to the people.
