{"id":48783,"date":"2026-06-20T13:07:44","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T20:07:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=48783"},"modified":"2026-06-20T13:07:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T20:07:45","slug":"why-cities-go-socialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/06\/20\/why-cities-go-socialist\/","title":{"rendered":"Why cities go socialist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

June 19, 2026 (Prospect.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MEYERSON ON TAP<\/strong>

Why cities go socialist<\/strong>

Here comes a generation of DSA big-city mayors.<\/em>In the course of my roughly three-quarters-of-a-century-long life, I\u2019ve lived in just three cities: Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. By year\u2019s end, there\u2019s a decent chance that all three of those cities will have a socialist mayor.

Just to be clear, despite the fact that I\u2019ve been an avowed democratic socialist in all three cities\u2014for all of my adult life, in fact\u2014I\u2019m claiming no credit for their new socialist proclivities.

Yesterday, the candidate running second in Tuesday\u2019s D.C. Democratic mayoral primary\u00a0conceded<\/u><\/a>\u00a0the race to the front-runner, city council and DSA member Janeese Lewis George. With three-quarters of the ballots counted, Lewis George has a 53 percent to 37 percent lead over the second-place finisher. (If she falls beneath 50 percent, the tabulators have to tally the results of the ranked-choice voting, but so far, she\u2019s held steady at 53 percent and is sure to win even if her first-choice votes drop below 50 percent.)

As at least 90 percent of D.C. voters invariably cast their ballots for Democrats in partisan November runoffs, Lewis George is assured of becoming D.C.\u2019s next mayor.
As such, she\u2019ll join New York\u2019s Zohran Mamdani as a socialist atop city government\u2014and as a candidate whose victory was made possible, in significant part, by the precinct walking and phone-banking of DSA members. That said, Lewis George\u2019s ability to govern effectively will lag Mamdani\u2019s, as D.C. is still under the sway of federal control, which Donald Trump will only intensify once a socialist is nominally in power. (For that matter, New York City was compelled to cede the power to enact taxes to New York state during its near-bankruptcy in the 1970s, an impediment to local control that Mamdani has been forced to navigate.)<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
In Los Angeles, the results of this month\u2019s mayoral jungle primary pit DSA and city council member Nithya Raman against incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the November runoff. It\u2019s not actually clear that Raman, if elected, would govern in a way that\u2019s any more socialistic than the way Bass has been governing. Bass has brought her left values and her long history as a progressive community organizer to her subsequent political career (Speaker of the State Assembly, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and four years as mayor), and Raman was one of her leading allies on the city council. Raman\u2019s three council colleagues who are also DSA members have endorsed Bass for re-election\u2014as did Raman until it became clear that Bass, though widely unpopular ever since she was out of the country when fires swept the Pacific Palisades, would run effectively unopposed for re-election unless Raman jumped in. Los Angeles DSA has yet to endorse Raman, as it\u2019s dissatisfied with her decisions to keep funding the police and limiting the scope of the city\u2019s tax on the sale of high-value properties.

But the only real reason why Raman is a DSA member and Bass is not is generational. Raman is 44; Bass is 72. When Bass was young, there was no viable socialist movement in the United States and most of the New Deal\u2019s guardrails against capitalism running amok were still in place. Raman came of age when capitalism\u2019s amok-ness was plain for all politically and economically sentient to see, and when Bernie Sanders had put democratic socialism on the American political map. When Bass was Raman\u2019s current age, DSA had roughly 5,000 members and didn\u2019t play in big-city elections. Today, it has about 100,000 members\u2014enough to make it a player in any number of cities.

But Mamdani\u2019s, Lewis George\u2019s, and Raman\u2019s political base isn\u2019t confined to DSA members. DSA had 10,000 members pounding the pavement for Mamdani in last year\u2019s mayoral election, but they comprised just 10 percent of the total number of Zohran\u2019s volunteers. In that sense, DSA is just the tip of the spear of urban Gen Z and millennial voters\u2014those young enough to be shelved in jobs for which they\u2019re both overqualified and underpaid, and to be locked out of homeowning. The two issues that both Mamdani and Lewis George most stressed were making child care and homes affordable: issues that all but define the politics of young city residents, issues that highlight the market failures of current American capitalism and the need for higher taxes on the wealthy to provide badly needed social necessities.
Which is why the future of most American big cities\u2014most certainly, those that attract younger residents\u2014is likely to be social democratic and often run by avowed socialists. The Bernies, Mamdanis, and AOCs won\u2019t be the Democratic Party\u2019s lonesome ends; they\u2019ll be the party\u2019s urban wing. The sooner the Democrats understand that\u2014and the sooner they embrace many of that wing\u2019s policies, however they choose to label them (and themselves)\u2014the better.
\"\"Harold Meyerson<\/strong>
Editor at Large<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 19, 2026 (Prospect.org) MEYERSON ON TAP Why cities go socialist Here comes a generation of DSA big-city mayors.In the course of my roughly three-quarters-of-a-century-long life, I\u2019ve lived in just three cities: Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. By year\u2019s end, there\u2019s a decent chance that all three of… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1968],"tags":[2074],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48783"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48784,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48783\/revisions\/48784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}