Some in the Democratic party are joining the media in symbolically pulling their hair in outrage after Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the Democratic party’s primary election to be the party’s nominee in the mayoral race this fall.
During the election process, Mamdani’s campaign helped produce the highest turnout in a Democratic mayoral primary since 1989, attracting tens of thousands of new voters. That should be a good thing. However, “He’s a socialist!” is the cry.
As a democratic socialist, Mamdani is in good company.
Mamdani declares, “I am a democratic socialist, yes. I started to call myself that after Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president, when I finally had a language that described how I saw the world, and the way that I believe the world should be – which is one where every person has the dignity they need to live a decent life.”
The Nation columnist John Nichols places Mamdani in the company of such revered figures as Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, 1963 March on Washington organizers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, as well as Pledge of Allegiance author Francis Bellamy, in having a socialist vision for achieving economic, social, and racial justice in the United States.
Mamdani defines his democratic socialism as Martin Luther King advocated, saying “Ultimately, the definition for me of why I call myself a democratic socialist is found in the words of Dr. King decades ago, when he said: call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, there must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.
Mamdani is also in good company among current leaders, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Bernie Sanders, a leader of CORE and SNCC as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and arrested for his activism, carries the torch for democratic socialism as a legacy of MLK. For him, democratic socialism is the fight for economic freedom that ensures health care, a living wage, education, housing, and a clean environment.
In a major speech in 2020, Sanders said, “We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by democratic socialism…as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children.’”
In1968, King told journalist David Halberstam, “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
In 1966, King told his staff:
“You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
While he did not tend to use the term “democratic socialism” publicly, MLK did propose changes to society as informed by that orientation. As Michael Eric Dyson put it in his book, I May Not Get There with You, published in 2000, King’s “demands for a ‘revolution of values’ and society-wide economic change were driven in part by his democratic socialist principles.”
King’s Poor People’s Campaign, in which I was involved, was an expression of democratic socialism. Complaining that poverty was too high in this the wealthiest nation in the world, Dr. King announced the Poor People’s Campaign on December 4, 1967, “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, D. C., next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”
An essential aspect of the campaign was petitioning the government to pass an Economic Bill of Rights, aimed at easing the poverty burden. This was democratic socialism.
