Tackling disorder and making streets welcoming for families should be a no-brainer — the very foundation of good government at the local level. Yet over the past decade, many blue jurisdictions abandoned these basics in the name of racial justice and “equity.” This had the predictable result of associating such places, in the public mind, with open drug use, needle-strewn sidewalks, tent cities, and rampant antisocial behavior. 

Conservatives made political hay of these failures, and who could blame them? Now, however, Mamdani — one of the most popular Democratic politicians in America — is reclaiming social order for the Left and implicitly questioning the ultra-libertarian social ethos that earlier captured the movement. If he succeeds, it could mark a sea change in progressive thinking. But where is Mamdani getting these ideas?

The answer is, in part, a person: Bhaskar Sunkara. The founder of Jacobin magazine, the president of The Nation, and a contributor to these pages, Sunkara counts Mamdani as a friend and ally. Sunkara has also been quietly but steadily injecting a healthy dose of social realism — some might even say conservatism — into a progressive movement that has been besotted with ideas like defunding the police, legalizing all drugs, and abolishing the family.

“It’s about making sure that these citizens, regularly using hard drugs, living in tents, who are even gambling on their phones, are able to reach their potential and contribute to society,” Sunkara tells me recently, as we sit down for an interview at Jacobin’s downtown-Brooklyn offices.

Sunkara, who rails against vices from porn to sports betting to even alcohol, strenuously avoids coming across as a Right-wing culture warrior. One senses in his tone that he doesn’t want his more culturally conservative positions to come across too strongly or, as he puts it, in “authoritarian” fashion: “As a society, [we] should have a normative vision of a good life, but also leave room for minority preferences.” 

But even that is an astonishing statement for a figure who used to be the vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and who remains arguably the single biggest intellectual force behind it. As the DSA makes dramatic gains among young voters nationwide, it’s notable that one of its most important theorists believes that we “should have a normative vision of a good life.”

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On the core economic issues, he’s in broad alignment with many of his DSA comrades: Medicare for All and, on a grander scale, a “constitutional socialism” that would work within America’s existing framework to infuse socialism into the republic and its market economy. Crucially, Sunkara’s vision of socialism wouldn’t get rid of the market, but rely on market mechanisms to price and allocate goods efficiently. (He lays out this vision in his new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-authored with fellow Leftist intellectuals Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs.)

When it comes to culture, though, Sunkara in some ways easily meets the definition of “conservative” as it’s understood by most in 21st-century America. This, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for his being a “man of the Right.” There is a long tradition of Leftists — George Orwell, Dorothy Day, and Christopher Lasch among them — who opposed the excesses of capitalism not only when it came to market activity, but also in the social and private realms. Moreover, “actually existing socialism” from China to Cuba has often been socially conservative in many respects — and in the “authoritarian” fashion from which, to be clear, Sunkara shrinks.

But ask your average DSAer today on an American college campus about how, or even whether, to address crises like porn addiction or cannabis-use disorder, and you will be mistaken for a Republican and simply brushed aside. I would know. I attend the uber-activistic Columbia University, and this has happened to me too many times to count. Sunkara acknowledges this, as well, but he doesn’t place the blame on socialism or Leftism. Instead, per Sunkara, this way of thinking is “more common just among young people in general,” whereas you’ll find less of it among the Bernie bros and old-school socialists.

In acknowledging this reality, Sunkara puts it charitably: “I think the common response on the Left is, like, ‘Let’s just focus on Medicare for All’” and put the cultural debates to the side. There is also, he suggests, a class dimension to Left tolerance for social vice and disorder. “I think you often find this thing — upper-middle-class people will have lifestyles for their own children and themselves that are quite conventional, low tech, etc., but kind of not want it for other kids.” 

He doesn’t see why socialism should necessarily equate to American-style socially liberal policy prescriptions. Though he warns of the dangers of going too far in the other direction. He tells me he would have “probably” supported gay marriage back when that debate was happening, as opposed to civil unions, but he explains that “even in socialist countries, on the gay and lesbian question, it was considered kind of a bourgeois decadence in places like Cuba, until Cuba opened up, I guess, really, in the ’90s on this issue.”

The degree to which such speech is wholly verboten on the Left — including among the somewhat-less-woke new crop of DSA politicians — can’t be overstated. And yet Sunkara doesn’t blink in saying so, speaking to me in a calm and elevated cadence, matter-of-factly. He may well be one of the minds behind Zohran Mamdani, but one could simply not imagine the same sentence issuing from the mouth of the New York mayor. 

I ask Sunkara about Taylor Lorenz, the Leftist tech blogger, who mocks “‘Leftists’ arguing that porn addiction and social media addiction is real.” Sunkara would be one such Leftist. Indeed, one of a very few. “You get the dopamine hits. It just seems fairly obvious,” Sunkara replies. “I’m one of the few people [who] doesn’t have a beef with Taylor in part because I just have muted her.” 

“Prohibition [of alcohol] was, in fact, a success,” he adds later, unprompted by me. “Prohibition actually led to a decrease in crime, a decrease in domestic violence, a decrease in certain fights and other sorts of public disturbances. Yes, there was an increase in organized crime. That increase, I think, pales in comparison to other advantages.” Though “it’s too late now” to have Prohibition policies reinstated, he laments, Sunkara has previously spoken in support of Utah liquor laws, which limit the sale of high alcohol-by-volume drinks to state stores, impose drink limits at bars, deploy state-mandated devices for measuring the volume of alcohol in a single drink, and proscribe happy hour. 

What, then, does Sunkara have in mind when he urges resistance against the “authoritarian” impulse in fortifying restraints against vice? 

He wouldn’t jail people for marijuana use but would get rid of omnipresent dispensaries (there’s one right outside the Jacobin office). While “porn is very difficult to regulate,” he concedes, he maintains that age-verification is a good “barrier to entry,” particularly for those most vulnerable to its dark and addictive side: “You’re just creating a little bit more friction for like a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old. But by the time someone’s 16 or 17, they can navigate around it and access porn if they want, which I don’t think is a huge problem.” Sunkara believes it’s possible for a man who regularly consumes porn to have positive relationships with women, but that it’s just “common sense” that younger exposure will lead to “pathological outcomes.” We “really need to hold the line” on things like sports betting and, in general, “see how we could regulate and roll back elsewhere.”

Put another way: Sunkara may not be rushing to absolutely prevent everyone from consuming booze, ingesting marijuana, watching porn, and gambling. Yet he sees all of these things as inherently bad — stuff we would be much better off without — and instead seeks maximum moderation within our current societal constraints. That, needless to say, is a far cry from the “porn-good” and “marijuana-good” libertarian orthodoxy on much of the Left. 

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Unlike many DSA comrades, Sunkara is also unapologetically patriotic. “America was the most racist country in the history of the world, and I think the Left actually does a great discredit to its own history when it pretends like it still is,” he said, to much subsequent internet virality, on what would turn out to be one of Ross Douthat’s last podcast episodes for The New York Times. Sunkara elaborates this point in our interview: “We live in communities, and we have to draw where the level of fellowship [is]. I’m a New Yorker. I’m an American. I also am broadly a man of the Northeast, so I feel fellowship with Ontario, a greater fellowship than I do with Alberta.” This, he cautions me, does not take away from his universalism, but is the reality of how our political organization works. 

It’s an outlook in stark opposition to the DSA’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, the pro-Palestine hard-liner who delivered a June upset to the five-term, establishment incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th District. Chevalier’s X history includes tweets such as: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” On the case of Chevalier, Sunkara says, “I think Darializa came out of a campus radical background,” and that we should wait and “see what she does in office,” because “you could find equal examples of people coming out of the religious Right and having certain rhetoric before they’re in public office.” 

His comfort with patriotism also allows him to reach audiences that would otherwise never hear a socialist message. “I would speak to anyone as long as they also have an audience that’s worth my time,” he says. “So Fox News, you know, three out of four times that Fox News reaches out to me, I’ll say yes.” The only exceptions are when outlets are “openly fascist, openly nativist in the sense that they don’t respect my right to be a part of the American polity, even though I was born here.” 

Would he go on Tucker Carlson? “I could never beat Tucker Carlson in a debate,” he says, “and I don’t necessarily want to agree with him because I do think there [are] undertones to his work that are not only nativist, but I also think that his criticism of Israel is something we should be very wary of.” He adds: “I don’t think a Leftist should necessarily go on Tucker because also then you’re blurring the line between your critique of Israel as a Leftist and his critique of Israel, or your critique of Trump and his critique of Trump.” 

Some of Sunkara’s social prescriptions may seem excessive, and not only to socialists. But he’s trending in the right direction at a time when America is racked by deleterious forms of antisociality that line corporate pockets, whether Big Weed’s or Big Porn’s. To be sure, it’s hard to imagine the DSA embracing Sunkara’s practical, socially moderate, pro-American model of democratic socialism. Then again, a year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Zohran Mamdani, a onetime champion of defunding the NYPD, urging the Left to stop coddling disorder.

Yet the woman who introduced modern democratic socialism to America, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, may find this outcome more discomfiting than thrilling — at first blush, at least. Though AOC entered Congress as a disruptor railing against the party’s leadership, she has become, quietly, far more accommodating in Washington. Will the incoming socialists follow the same pattern — or adopt a more radical line, forcing her to choose between fidelity to the Left and her mainstream aspirations?

AOC is friendly with top Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who might well end up the next House speaker. She has climbed the ranks of key committees. She has been, when needed, a good soldier. In 2024, at the Democratic National Convention, she delivered a forceful speech in favor of Kamala Harris, hailing the then-vice president for working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement — progressives who refused to commit to the Harris-Walz ticket over Palestine — were all but barred from the convention. This irked Leftists to no end, leading them to question AOC’s progressive credentials and to wonder out loud whether she was a sell-out.

Yet beyond the hard-Left rank-and-file, AOC is unlikely to face an immediate battle with the new socialist electeds. She didn’t endorse all the primary challengers who won — in deference to her House colleagues, she stayed away from those challenging incumbents or the preferred candidates of incumbents. Even so, she has made overtures to the victors, praising Valdez and Avila Chevalier in New York. The winners all express a fondness for her — publicly, at least. In short, comity will likely reign within The Squad.

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There’s a larger question, though, over how these relationships might fare if some of the new Leftists decide to behave in a more confrontational manner. Ocasio-Cortez may run for president and wants to make a bid for a broader national audience. A lawmaker like Avila Chevalier won’t have the same incentives. Within the DSA itself, there are also going to be fresh tensions. It isn’t hard to find online gripes from Leftists wondering if AOC is too soft on Israel, too willing to accept the Democratic status quo.

How things change.

It was in 2018 when AOC won her shock primary over Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, seen as a potential successor to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The organization that supported her, the DSA, was mostly a fringe curiosity, a legacy project of the famed political theorist and activist Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. As recently as a decade ago, the DSA boasted only a few thousand members nationally and had little impact on conventional electoral politics. When AOC won, she benefited from the first DSA boom, which followed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful but surprisingly robust battle against Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Fast forward to today, and there are around 120,000 DSA members across the country, per the organization’s own tally. 

At first, it looked like AOC would fulfill the expectations of her greatest fans and detractors alike. Before she was even sworn in, she stormed Pelosi’s office with 200 youth activists to demand Congress do more to combat climate change. Her nascent Squad seemed poised to disrupt the Democratic majority, with AOC leading the way. 

Some of their number, such as Omar and Michigan’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, would prove to be lightning rods. Yet as the years wore on, Ocasio-Cortez gradually evolved into an institutionalist, a proud progressive who would nevertheless partner with Pelosi and try to climb the ranks of the body. She is one of the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and while she still supports policies like the Green New Deal — a massive stimulus program to fight climate change while putting millions to work on the scale of the original New Deal — she rarely talks about it anymore. In light of her rising stature in the Democratic caucus and her alliance with Jeffries, AOC didn’t endorse Avila Chevalier or Valdez in their primaries, though both are fellow Latina DSA members from New York City. 

Among a faction of the left, AOC skepticism persists. Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin founder (and a contributor to these pages), recently declared that Ocasio-Cortez is “more progressive than socialist.” Some in the DSA have grumbled that by upholding corporate-friendly Democrats like Jeffries, AOC has undercut her own seriousness about rebuilding the welfare state and union power. There’s a schism, too, between how New York City socialists view Ocasio-Cortez — they adore her — and a smaller slice of the national leadership that has always seen her as too moderate: AOC never forced a vote on Medicare for All, voted to support Iron Dome funding for the Jewish state, and seemed, at times, more concerned with placating colleagues in seniority than catering to the base. 

How will these factional tensions contour her future and that of the wider DSA-aligned Left in Congress?

Power, generally, tends to change those who obtain it. For the next wave of DSA members entering the House, the question is whether they’ll follow the current AOC example — or venture down a more radical path. The latter, given Ocasio-Cortez’s own entanglements with the Left, may be more likely. Neither Avila Chevalier nor Valdez have said they would support Jeffries for speaker. Kiros and Rabb haven’t committed, either. (Brad Lander, who is not a DSA member but would be one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress next year, has said he will back Jeffries.) 

This doesn’t mean, ultimately, that Jeffries won’t have the votes to win the speaker’s gavel. Nor does it imply that all of these DSAers won’t fall in line with the mainstream of the party. But it does offer a preview of what’s to come. 

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What was true was that Ocasio-Cortez never employed the tactics of hard-Right Republicans in Congress, many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, who were able to take down one speaker (Kevin McCarthy) and hold another hostage (Mike Johnson). If these conservatives took relatively little interest in governing — the nihilist anti-spending approach dated back to the Tea Party years — it was inarguable this faction could, at times, impose its will on the rest of the Republican Party.

The hard Left has never been able to do the same to the Democrats, whose party leadership disciplined members far more effectively and could, more often than not, tamp down insurgencies. Donald Trump thrice clinched the GOP nomination, while Sanders couldn’t do it even once. In 2026, though, the Democrats are running out of cards to play. A democratic socialist governs New York City, and Leftists are running roughshod over establishment Democrats in congressional primaries. Jeffries, for all his skill, lacks Pelosi’s stature and naked political talent. AOC and her allies couldn’t defenestrate Pelosi because she was, unlike McCarthy, one of the great backroom tacticians of the modern era, a legislative leader with few peers anywhere. And she was a historical figure, too, the first and so far only female speaker of the House. By the time AOC entered Congress, Pelosi had already completed a four-year stretch as speaker and spent many decades in politics; she was the preeminent power in San Francisco and Washington, DC.

What is Jeffries compared to that? Suddenly, the radicalism that the new DSA members might pursue almost reads like realpolitik. Why should Valdez or Avila Chevalier or Rabb fear Jeffries? What can he really do to them? Why not try to replicate the House Freedom Caucus model on the Democratic side? Jeffries’s staunch support for Israel is outmoded, and even ordinary Democratic voters alienated from the DSA don’t have an especially high opinion of him. They’re tired of their leaders and don’t feel they’re fighting Trump hard enough. 

This is where the DSA Leftists can appeal, to some degree, to the “normie” Democratic voter — both despise Trump and want to engage in political combat at his level. AOC, ultimately, will have to shift with them — she’ll need to be more pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, and more willing to spar with Jeffries. For her, this all might be liberating, anyway. The AOC of 2018 would probably be protesting the AOC of 2026. If she really wants to run for president, she’ll need every last activist in her corner. That primary will be a real war.

The evidence is becoming difficult to ignore. Last week, two Democratic Socialist of America members achieved electoral successes that underscore the movement’s growing ability to outcompete the party mainstream. In Maine, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a DSA member in online forums, clinched the nomination for the US Senate, besting the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the establishment-backed incumbent, Karen Bass. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, fewer than five months after becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani is using his newfound political capital not to unify the Democratic Party, but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. In a surprising escalation, he has endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier in her bid to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the progressive Brad Lander in his challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman. The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off these DSA primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in the battleground races it must win to retake Congress.

The national Democratic leadership seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge the scale of the challenge emerging from the DSA and broader Left-wing movement. 

Unlike previous iterations of the American hard Left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers, and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the older Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists, building donor networks, and developing local power. 

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The movement’s success isn’t measured only in the number of candidates it elects. It is also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across many cities, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and  successfully pressured moderate Democratic elected officials to slash police funding, ban ICE from city jurisdictions, and expand state and city funding for various social-welfare programs.

No organization has been more central to this effort than the Democratic Socialist of America. With more than 200 chapters nationwide, 100,000 members, thousands of highly motivated volunteers, and a growing roster of elected officials, the DSA has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is the organization’s willingness to adapt its tactics to local conditions, now touting its presence, now deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.

The rise of Graham Platner illustrates this point. It is now being revealed that his candidacy was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group, but that affiliation never became part of his public profile. Instead, the duo built a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and oysterman. 

The operatives also managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light before the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling his ex-girlfriends, and extramarital sexting. Now that Platner is the nominee, these DSA operatives have effectively saddled the Democratic Party with a nominee offering a socialist platform and enough personal baggage to sink its chances in Maine and damage the party’s broader brand heading into November.

If Platner’s campaign showcased the growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred picks in a primary, Raman’s challenge to Karen Bass reveals something more fundamental: the radical Left-wing movement will turn on Democratic incumbents — regardless of how much those incumbents have conceded to it. 

Bass wasn’t a moderate figure who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She and Raman had worked closely together on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s massive homelessness crisis. Bass also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council, who chose to endorse her over Raman. But none of that mattered. The moment Bass became politically vulnerable, as she did after her mishandling of the Palisades wildfires, Raman filed to run against her. This is not a movement that can be appeased into loyalty, it is an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories. 

Leading into the midterms, the Democratic Party faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while simultaneously resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. Nowhere is the cost of that takeover more visible for Democrats than in Maine. DSA operatives built Platner from scratch and hid his liabilities long enough to push Janet Mills out of the race. Now that Platner is in the hands of the Democratic Party as its official Senate nominee, party officials have no choice but to defend him. Senate Democratic leaders have been forced to publicly rationalize his fitness to the moderate voters they can’t afford to lose. 

And it was the decision by the broader progressive ecosystem to challenge Karen Bass through Raman that helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national headache for Democrats. It’s true that the DSA has thus far formally withheld its endorsement from Raman, in part over her tepid statements in support of Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Still, there’s hardly any doubt that she can be expected to push city politics closer to the group’s position.

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The entry of television personality Spencer Pratt further amplified scrutiny of blue governance in the city and state, drawing national attention to the party’s failure to deal with homelessness and public safety. Perhaps unexpectedly, the race has also brought attention to California’s unusually slow vote-counting process and permissive election rules, both of which have long raised Republican ire. In that respect, the Los Angeles race has provided Republicans with a highly visible example to cite as they continue pushing the SAVE Act and its proof-of-citizenship voter requirements.

As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control rather than direct confrontation in response to each of these power grabs. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. But that logic is flawed. It doesn’t account for the strength this movement has built at the local level, or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.

The tipping point may already be here. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the Democratic establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. Once that assumption disappears, every safe Democratic seat becomes a potential target. Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other Leftist organizations launching  primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard Left. The party’s performance in the midterms, as well as its viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend upon whether it can confront this threat.