Beyond the ‘Hot Takes’

Mamdani, DSA, and the June NYC Primaries

In the wake of the New York’s June 2026 Democratic primaries, it seems that everybody has a ‘hot take’ on the election results, on Zohran Mamdani, and on DSA. If I wasn’t aware of all of the hullabaloo, the invitation showing up in my email to appear on the show of a former Fox News, right wing journalist to discuss DSA would have told me something was up. (Sorry to disappoint, but that ain’t happening.)

I have a pretty good idea why I received this invitation. Among the many ‘hot takes’ on these subjects, Jonathan Chait wrote an Atlantic Magazine essay “There’s Nothing Democratic About These Socialists”, which cites as supporting evidence three different documents I had a hand in writing. There’s some history here: I was one of DSA’s founders in 1982, I served as one of its first full time leaders, and I worked closely with the man whose name is now invoked by Chait and others, Michael Harrington. I was one of the original organizers of the North Star group that was founded in 2019 to oppose the trend toward ultra-left politics in parts of DSA, and I was one of the DSA veterans who expressed concerns about undemocratic entryist factions in the organization in 2021. After fifty years of membership in DSA and one of its predecessor organizations, I publicly resigned from DSA in November 2023, together with twenty-three other comrades of many years, in protest of the DSA’s unprincipled response to the crimes of October 7^th and of the increasingly sectarian and ultra-left tilt of the national organization. That’s all a matter of public record.

Chait, with whom I have publicly disagreed for many years over his frequent attacks on public schools and teacher unions, cites these three documents out of context, ignoring the fullness of their political meaning to make one-sided, half-truth arguments. For example, he quotes a passage I wrote which appears in the North Star Statement of Principles:

Principles of liberty and equality are indispensable to the self-government of a free people. Denial of them renders a government a tyranny. While authoritarians on the Left dismiss this foundation of democracy as bourgeois, we defend it.

Those words are absolutely right, and I wouldn’t change a single one of them. But there’s also more: despite the absence of an ellipsis in Chait’s essay, the last sentence is truncated. It continues:

as the product of hard-fought struggles that working people (especially African-Americans and other people of color, women, and other popular forces) have waged and are still waging against the powerful and wealthy who seek to limit democracy.

For democratic socialists, the part of that sentence elided by Chait is not a minor addendum: we believe that concentrated economic power is the greatest threat to and limit on democracy, and that to survive and thrive, political democracy must be extended to the economy. That’s why we, in contrast to Chait, are the greatest advocates of the common good and of public goods in education, health care, housing, transportation, and community safety, and it’s why we, again in opposition to Chait, are the strongest defenders of the unions which provide working people with voice and the power of organization and collective action. While Chait has run interference for the denizens of Wall Street seeking to privatize our public schools, democratic socialists have been on the frontline of their defense, because we understand that a vibrant public school system which educates students for active democratic citizenship is essential to the endurance of democratic government. There’s nothing democratic about an anti-public school and anti-union agenda, in service of the powerful and wealthy.

A complete and fair rendering of our views – my views and the views of others whose names are on the documents cited by Chait and with whom I have recently communicated – is that we supported and campaigned for Mamdani’s election as Mayor, and have great hopes for his mayoralty. In the course of that election campaign, I wrote a widely circulated short essay on why members of my union, founded and led for generations by democratic socialists, had nothing to fear and everything to gain from the election of a democratic socialist as mayor. As democratic socialists, we want Mamdani’s mayoralty to demonstrate that government can make tangible differences for the better in the lives of working people, that government can deliver on the affordability agenda that is so important in the U.S., given how wealth inequality has mushroomed in recent decades.

My friend Nathan Newman, who was one of the DSA members who resigned with me in 2023, has written a Substack “guide for the perplexed,” which lays out some stark differences between Mamdani, AOC, and the bulk of NYC DSA, on the one hand, and a national DSA that is currently dominated by politically marginal and unserious forces cosplaying as revolutionaries, on the other hand. In this vein, it is telling that Chait makes a point of how DSA’s International Committee has issued statements of support for ‘Left’ dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, while neglecting to note where Mamdani and AOC stand on the question. Here’s a Mamdani statement which appears at the top of a Google search:

I believe both (then Venezuelan President) Nicolas Maduro and (Cuban President) Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators. Their administrations have stifled free and fair elections, jailed political opponents, and suppressed the free and fair press. And yet, our federal government’s long history of punitive policies toward both countries, including extrajudicial killings of Venezuelans and the continuation of a decades long blockade of Cuba, have only worsened these conditions.

I do not take the question of democracy and dictatorship in Venezuela and Cuba lightly. I represented my national union, the American Federation of Teachers, at a November 2009 meeting of the Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes, an independent teachers union in Cuba. Our gathering in Havana was broken up by political state police who threatened us with arrest. I wrote about that chilling experience, and about the Cuban regime’s continued repression of independent unionists, journalists, librarians, and human rights activists, in Dissent Magazine.

Part of what it means to be a democratic socialist is to stand in solidarity with the working people of Venezuela and Cuba as they fight for fundamental human rights and democracy. But it also means being a forthright critic of Trump’s extrajudicial strikes against Venezuelan ships and his illegal seizure of Maduro, and an unyielding opponent of Trump’s economic blockade of oil against Cuba, which has created a humanitarian crisis while doing nothing to advance human rights and democracy. What distinguishes democratic socialists from many other political perspectives, including Chait’s insipid neo-liberalism, with its market supremacy, is our insistence that it is necessary to do both. That’s why Chait’s cherry picking of what we write, with out of context selections and half-truths, is unprincipled journalism.

Tomorrow, what should concern us about the June primaries.