Should New York Fear a Socialist Mayor?

Should the Democratic Party?

I was born in a Milwaukee hospital about 15 months after Wisconsin’s junior senator, Republican Joe McCarthy, died while in office. Having been censured by the Senate two-and-a-half years before he died, McCarthy had already fallen from grace as a lead architect of the Red Scare and his eponymous “-ism.” He was replaced by a candidate from the opposition party, Democrat William Proxmire, who served with honor for the next 31-plus years.

[Proxmire, in fact, was a benign, preternatural DOGEmaster who “honored” such overbloated military contracts like the C-5 aircraft and F-16 fighter plane some 40-50 years ago with his Golden Fleece Awards.]

For my first few days in that Milwaukee hospital, before my parents took me home to a working class suburb off Lake Michigan, my mayor was Frank Zeidler. A Socialist. As in, a member of that party.

Alice Cooper knew his stuff when he impressed Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World, the 1992 movie, when he told them about Milwaukee’s three socialist mayors.

First was Emil Seidel, who became the first Socialist mayor of a major American city in 1910 but served just two years before Democrats and Republicans conspired to defeat him, according to Dan Kaufman’s fascinating and illuminating book The Fall of Wisconsin.

The party’s success was tied to its reputation for incorruptibility, Kaufman writes, quoting progressive Republican (remember them?) legislator William Evjue who said at the time, “They were never approached by the lobbyists, because the lobbyists knew it was not possible to influence these men.”

Milwaukee’s second Socialist mayor was Daniel Hoan, who held the office from 1916 to 1940. Hoan was succeeded by Frank Zeidler’s brother, Carl, a Democrat who served just two years before enlisting in the US Navy Reserve to fight in World War II, where he died in 1942 (hat tip to Wikipedia).

Frank Zeidler was the third Socialist mayor of Wisconsin’s largest city from 1948 to 1960, overlapping McCarthy’s time in the US Senate, which was 1947-57. During Zeidler’s three terms, Milwaukee grew “industrially” according to Wikipedia and never had to borrow money to repay loans. Zeidler annexed inner-ring suburbs to double the city’s size and expanded its park system, working to assure they were open equally to Black residents, whose population in the city tripled during the 1950s.

That first Socialist mayor, Seidel, wrote in his memoir that East Coast elites referred to him and his party leaders in Milwaukee as “sewer Socialists.”

While political opponents, particularly Republicans, strive to conflate Socialists and socialists with communists, Zeidler fervently rejected communism and the Soviet Union, according to Kaufman’s book.

Zeidler chose not to run for a fourth term in 1960 after a “race-baiting whisper campaign” that suggested that the “unapologetic advocate for civil rights” had “paid for billboards across the South encouraging African Americans to move to Milwaukee,” Kaufman writes in The Fall of Wisconsin.

To this day, Milwaukee often is said to be the most segregated city in the US.

How does this relate to New York City in 2025?

Small “s” socialist Zohran Mamdani upset former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the rank-choice Democratic primary in New York City last month.

“Most of the party and the city’s elite had backed Cuomo, if reluctantly given his personality,” according to New York magazine’s Intelligencer.

As the Democratic candidate, Mamdani is not a Socialist like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), but is a socialist, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

The Democratic elite are scared out of their wits that Mamdani’s socialist wing of their party will emerge as the only faction with potential to beat President Trump’s MAGA successor in 2028. The Democratic Party – the one that has suffered disorganization since at least the days of Will Rogers – could do far worse from a competitive perspective.

Consider that Socialist Sanders and socialist AOC have been holding popular Trump-style rallies in otherwise red communities to warn voters what the president is doing to the Constitution and our democracy. This as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has taken the “bold” step of introducing legislation to change the name of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to “The Act.”

Mamdani’s platform isn’t quite sewer Socialism, but it does offer policy proposals similar to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act tax cuts on tips and overtime pay. The Democratic candidate’s populist-left agenda leads with a rent freeze on rent-controlled apartments and construction of 200,000 new “union-built, rent-stabilized” affordable apartment units over 10 years, according to USA Today, plus free and faster city buses, city-owned grocery stores, free childcare for every New Yorker aged six months to 5 years and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.

New York’s Big Real Estate has banded together to make sure Mamdani will lose in November. Marc Holliday, CEO of real estate investment firm SL Green quickly set up a fundraiser, The Wall Street Journal reports, to host incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is running for re-election as a third-party (decidedly not as a Socialist) candidate after the Justice Department under Trump’s direction dropped charges of bribery, wire fraud and illegal campaign contributions against him.

Holliday and the rest of the New York real estate community are ignoring perennial Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, and Cuomo, who reportedly is considering a third-party run of his own.

No Democrat wants to see a populist-left politician like Mamdani take the party to levels of extremism opposite the Orbän-adoring populist-right. But the Democratic Party of Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has been ineffectual in pushing back against the Trump White House’s most authoritarian impulses.

Democrats who want a fighting chance over the next two to four years might find that grocery store socialism is their best answer.

Lassa is founding editor of The Hustings.