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Mamdani, Debs, and the Rise of Democratic Socialism
By A.F. Cronin
Nov. 15, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City, quoted Eugene Debs in his acceptance speech last week. “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”
The Debs quote is, to most people, obscure. It is deliberately so. Most Democrat voters have no idea who Eugene V. Debs was, what he did, or the ideology he espoused—but that ignorance is paving the way for hardcore socialism.
Debs was the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for President of the United States during the early years of the 20th Century. He ran five times: 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. A vocal opponent of the First World War, Debs had publicly called for resistance to the draft. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s administration arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned him for sedition. Debs had to run his 1920 campaign from his cell in a federal prison. He didn’t win, but he was hailed as a socialist hero by fellow socialists the world over.
The quote Mamdani used was lifted from Debs’s statement to the court upon his conviction, excerpted in part below:
I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice. I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
It is interesting to note that Debs used the term social justice—remember, this is 1918. He also used the words “greed” and “exploitation”; words currently (and continuously) used as bludgeons by contemporary leftists.
Unsurprisingly, Debs’s statement is archived at Marxists.org, a site which includes additional links to all of Debs’s writings. It seems that Marxists.org holds Debs’s work in high esteem.
Mamdani is a long-standing member of Democratic Socialists of America, the organization Eugene V. Debs led for many years. The Democratic Socialists of America is “the largest socialist organization in the United States” and, in their words, “a political and activist organization, not a party”.
It should be noted that on October 25th of this year Bernie Sanders was awarded the 60th Eugene V. Debs Award by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation. While Mr. Sanders, is not a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), he has described himself as a democratic socialist for years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the DSA. And, unsurprisingly, Rashida Tlaib is as well. In fact Tlaib’s and Mamdani’s smiling faces grace the home page of the Democratic Socialist of America.
According to Wikipedia there are 212 office holders in America who are either members of the Democratic Socialists of America or have been endorsed by DSA. Most of them run as Democrats.
It bears mentioning that Karl Marx espoused socialism as the necessary transitional step between capitalism and communism in both The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. And don’t forget, the formal name of the Soviet Union was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apparently the central committee didn’t think they’d reached full communist status yet.
Back to Mamdani.
The 34-year-old Mamdani was on the ballot as the candidate for both the Democrat party and the Working Families Party, a political party with the motto “Making our Nation Work for the many, not the few”.
One would assume that since different political parties have different platforms they would field different candidates. But this is not always the case. The phenomenon where parties “share” candidates is called “fusion voting”. And it’s not just Democrats who “fusion vote”. Curtis Sliwa was a candidate for two parties as well: the Republican Party and the Protect Animals Party. Sliwa rescues stray cats. Lots of them. So New York City Republicans had to “share” Sliwa with the city’s cat people, and the Democrat party “shared” Mamdani with the Working Families Party. “Fusion voting” awards votes to the candidate, not the party. This means a candidate’s total vote count is the combination of votes he or she received regardless of the differing parties voters may have supported. For example, Sliwa’s vote total was the sum of the Republican and the Protect Animals Party votes. Mamdani’s total was the sum of Democrat and Working Families Party votes.
Mamdani garnered a mere 50.4% of the overall vote and approximately 15% of his vote came from Working Family Party voters. Long-time Democrat Andrew Cuomo ran as an independent and received 41.6 % of the vote. Curtis Sliwa received a mere 7.1%. The combined total of Cuomo and Sliwa votes would not have bested Mamdani’s 50.4%. However, if Mamdani didn’t get the 15% from the Working Family Party, Cuomo would have won.
By comparing his unimpressive victory — a single mayoral race won with just 50.4% of the vote — with “the dawn of a better day for humanity”, Mamdani exhibits the typical leftist god-complex, and the extraordinary arrogance that comes with it. Like Obama’s self-aggrandizing “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…” Mamdani’s assertion that his victory will reset the human race, and the implication that he is the one to lead humanity to the “better day”, is hyperbolic to say the least.
New York City is, and has been, a Democrat town for a long time. If voters understood what Mamdani’s socialism will mean in reality, I suspect many would have voted for a different candidate. Promises of “free” buses, government run grocery stores, and a “de-commodified” housing market don’t exactly translate to freedom and prosperity for the people—and Mamdani’s fiery acceptance speech reminded us of his true nature with his nod to socialist icon Eugene Debs being an ominous sign. “The dawn of a better day” for New York City will not be what they imagined.
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Source: American Thinker
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