Mamdani Is Actually a Social Democrat. Here’s Why That Matters.

Hizzoner wants instead to make transportation, childcare, and housing more “affordable” for every New Yorker. That makes him not a democratic socialist but a social democrat. What’s the difference?

The latter term has never caught on in the United States, but its adherents have a long and successful history in Europe and in developed nations on other continents. Social democrats seek to create a more egalitarian order within a capitalist market society. They build welfare states that provide health care, family leave, and union protection to their citizens and reject the tyrannical one-party states created by the likes of Lenin, Mao, and Castro. There have been many full or partial social democracies; the most successful ones exist throughout Scandinavia. But democratic socialism, aside from the utopian colonies that existed rather briefly in the nineteenth century in the United States and Great Britain, has always been an unrealized vision.

The good news for Mamdani, and the models for him to follow, come from the last century, when practical socialists governed, for a time, dozens of small and midsize American cities where the gap between the wealthy elite and wage earners had widened alarmingly, much as in New York City today. In St. Mary’s, Ohio, they expanded sewer lines, provided gas and electric service to all neighborhoods for the first time, and made sure working-class children felt welcome in the newly opened high school. In Milwaukee, socialist mayors erected the nation’s first public housing project, won an eight-hour workday for municipal workers, and developed an extensive system of public parks.