The two best analyses of Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory are this one, by Michael Thomas Carter, and this conversation that Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the Left, hosted with two organizers in New York City. Both analyses focus on the elephant in the room.

Virtually all of the commentariat have emphasized Mamdani’s videos, his undeniable charisma and political fluency, and Andrew Cuomo’s weaknesses. The latter were oddly invisible to most commentators up until the very night that Cuomo conceded; then it became obvious that he was a weak candidate and was always going to lose; there’s a lesson there about power, which people always treat as static, when it’s not.

But easily the most important factor in Zohran’s victory is the movement that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have built in New York City since the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. Carter and the two organizers Denvir talks to — Gustavo Gordillo and Grace Mauser — provide both historical perspective and immediate nuts and bolts commentary. Make sure you read and listen to them.

I want to stress two elements in what I heard.

First, DSA has seen a lot of failures along the way. Failure is always a hard thing for social movements to deal with, particularly in the United States, where failure is the ultimate sin. But as Eve Weinbaum pointed out years ago in her excellent book To Move a Mountain, which I highly recommend, every movement meets failure. The only question is how it deals with failure, and Weinbaum has a rich and reflective analysis of just that question. DSA has figured out not only how to deal with failure but also how to grow from it. We saw the fruits of their labor on election night.

Second, yesterday, my wife and I went to a massive outdoor DSA party celebrating Zohran’s victory. What struck me most about the celebration was that it showed how much DSA has built a movement culture. You could see it in the way everyone was talking to everyone. Usually, at most New York gatherings, everyone is looking over each other’s shoulders to see who is not talking to them, whom they want to be talking to but can’t, who is more important than the person in front of them. Here, as I said, I saw everyone talking to everyone, wanting to reach out to each other, to the person next to them, to bring people in to the conversation. There were all kinds of sign-ups everywhere: runners for DSA, trans people for DSA, parents for DSA, city workers for DSA, and so on. The diversity, in terms of race and age, was impressive. This was a group of people — many, many hundreds, way out in Queens — that wanted to be with each other and wanted more people to be with them.

In his unpublished Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Karl Marx actually made a point of this exact moment in the development of the workers’ movement in France, which he witnessed firsthand while in Paris. The moment when the immediate and more instrumental political needs of collective action take off into something more generative:

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them.

There’s always a danger, of course, in any movement, that that need for company and association becomes narrow and clique-ish. But when movements are on the rise, when they’re robust, they tend to be just the opposite. That’s what I saw yesterday. And hope to see more of in the future.

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