Learning from Milwaukee's "Sewer Socialists"

The only way to succeed as mayor is to do a good job with the boring stuff

The 1910 midterm elections aren’t widely discussed nowadays, but in addition to Republicans losing their House majority and a staggering nine Senate seats in a backlash election, the Socialist Party of America won a seat in the Milwaukee area. That same year, the Socialists won a mayoral race in Milwaukee and also scored majorities on the city council and the county commission.

Both Representative Victor Berger and Mayor Emil Seidel lost their races in 1912, but Milwaukee-area socialism proved to be more than a flash in the pan.

Berger came back and won the seat in 1918, only for the House to refuse to seat him. But he won again in 1922 and this time was seated and secured re-election twice. In 1916, a second socialist mayor was elected, and he stayed in office until 1940. The socialists never fully dominated the city council or county commission again, but they had strong representation there. A bunch of socialists also won seats in the Wisconsin state legislature and played a meaningful role in statewide politics.

The key to all of that influence, though, was the second socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, who served 24 years. We don’t have detailed polling from that period, but clearly he was popular and seen as doing a good job. The population of Milwaukee increased 26 percent between 1930 and 1940, which is in part a reflection of the rapid pace of midwestern urbanization in the first half of the 20th century, but also confirms that people and businesses were not fleeing from Red Terror or whatever else you might worry about. Hoan was obviously running the city well — making tradeoffs about taxes and spending that were defensible, appointing good people to run city services, and generally speaking, making people feel like living in Milwaukee and voting for his re-election was a good idea.

Interestingly, Hoan broke early with the Socialist Party on the question of World War I. The official party line was opposed to American participation. It doesn’t seem to me that Hoan was a huge war hawk or anything, but he did not engage in anti-war activities and wanted to be seen as patriotic and helpful, making sure to personally lead the Milwaukee County Council of Defense. Hoan implemented the first public bus system in America, he built the country’s first public housing project, and he spearheaded municipal ownership of the sewer and water system. The Milwaukee socialists were proud of this work and talked a lot about their concrete achievements.

For their trouble, Morris Hillquit, a New York-based Socialist Party leader who ran for mayor and for Congress many times without ever winning, dubbed the Milwaukee group “Sewer Socialists,” which was intended as a term of derision. In Hillquit’s view, they should have been trying to battle capitalism, not bragging about cost-effective public services.

Zohran Mamdani’s upside potential

Derek Thompson asked Zohran Mamdani about sewer socialism shortly before his primary win against Andrew Cuomo, and Mamdani delivered what I think is a pretty good answer:

It comes back to exactly what you're saying, which is reclaiming the language of quality of life as a left-wing concern because it is often described as if it is somehow conservative. If we want to fight for the dignity of each and every person, and especially the working-class New Yorkers that are often forgotten. And so much of that comes back to the efficacy of the public services that they engage with. Too often we've refused to even admit to inefficiencies or critiques or waste within the public sector, thinking that by doing so we open the critique from the right. But in actuality, our refusal to admit it is even more ammunition for the right.

I think sewer socialism [means] that we want to showcase our ideals, not by lecturing people about how correct we are, but rather by delivering and letting that delivery be the argument itself. There are just far too few examples in New York City politics of any large scale interventions of city government. I think that the few that come to mind are congestion pricing and universal pre-K. They are examples of interventions that fundamentally transformed life in our city and should be used as a model for what more we can do.

The Mamdani/Cuomo election choice was a depressing one. What I said before the election and would say again is that if I’d lived in New York, I would have ranked Cuomo ahead of Mamdani on the basis of risk aversion and the belief that Mamdani is more likely to screw up catastrophically. But as an external observer, the inverse is also true — Mamdani has more upside.

We know that Andrew Cuomo won’t tackle the stationary bandits of New York, that he has bad personal character, and that an administration he runs would be dominated by loyalists and a quest for revenge.

Mamdani… I just don’t know. Part of what I find vexing about his campaign is that much like with Donald Trump, all his smartest supporters assure me that the stuff he ran on isn’t going to happen. That there won’t actually be an effort to significantly scale back policing or a major investment in government-run grocery stores. They tell me that he’s a smart, ambitious guy who wants to be seen as a success and thereby build power for his movement, so he’ll hire smart people and try to do a good job. To me, “he probably won’t do what he says he will” isn’t a great case for voting for somebody. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

The office of Mayor of New York is a strong office as far as mayorships go. The mayor is not subordinated to a county government, they command a lot of bureaucratic capacity, and they don’t have an independently elected school board or other critical services operating outside of their purview.

But city government is still inherently pretty weak. Whatever you think of Mamdani’s tax proposals, you literally cannot enact those as mayor, even if the city council agrees. And because you can’t do that, you also can’t deliver on the various forms of promised spending unless you find efficiencies elsewhere in the budget. Sewer socialism isn’t just a whim — it’s a formula the Milwaukee socialists hit upon because unlike their New York brethren, they actually won office and wanted to be reelected.

I think it would be foolish to assume that Mamdani will do a good job, be popular, and get reelected. And I’m not dismissive of the concerns that he’ll make bad choices and the city will experience capital flight, declining schools, and rising crime. But clearly if that happens, he won’t be popular and successful. Ideology just doesn’t get you very far in city government. As Fiorello LaGuardia famously said, there’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.

The incentive is to try, and the historical literacy displayed in the sewer socialism answer reveals awareness of the basic dilemma.

A good team counts for a lot

I did not support Eric Adams in 2021, and he’s obviously a big clown, over and above questions of corruption and second order questions of whether his legal exposure has made him incapable of operating independently from the White House.

And yet, broadly speaking, he’s been an okay mayor. He was elected amidst a wave of tough on crime backlash politics and crime has fallen. The “city of yes” initiative does not solve the city’s housing problems, but it was a good step and he backed it. Putting trash in containers rather than piling the streets with huge masses of garbage bags seems like a pretty basic idea, but he’s the first NYC mayor to actually do it. The good results reflect the fact that he’s mostly had a pretty good team working for him. He had, from the outset, people like Meera Joshi as deputy mayor for operations and Jessica Tisch and Maria Torres-Springer in senior roles. He also had some other, worse people — cronies — working for him. But when he got indicted, this raised the prospect that Kathy Hochul would remove him from office, and to avoid that outcome, he basically agreed to purge the weakest members of his team and promote the strongest ones.

But it all fell apart in March after Adams made it clear that his top priority was cozying up to Trump. A lot of his best people quit (except for Tisch), and Randy Mastro — an old Rudy Giuliani guy who’s also a huge NIMBY — was brought in to replace Torres-Springer as first deputy mayor.

That’s all just to say that being mayor has a ceremonial component and then a component where you appoint an administrative team.

And this is what I think, in practice, will be the make or break factor for Mamdani. Does he bring back some of the people who quit on Adams and some veterans of the De Blasio administration, which he’s praised? Does he seek smart advice about how to avoid a de facto NYPD strike that would sabotage his administration? One of his big endorsements was State Senator John Liu, a prominent Chinese-American politician. Mamdani did very well with East Asian voters in the primary, and part of snagging the Liu endorsement was promising to maintain the status quo at New York’s exclusive exam entrance high schools, which is a priority for a lot of Asian families. But he’s also endorsed recommendations from the 2019 School District Advisory Group that are totally inconsistent with that and that would commit him to ending all kinds of tracking throughout the city.

It’s tempting to ask which is the real Mamdani, but I don’t think that’s the right way to think about politicians. It would be a good outcome if Mamdani recognized that strong Asian support was key to his victory, and that he should maintain his alliance with Liu and appoint people who are aligned with his approach to education.

Will he make smart choices?

I don’t know. I’ve heard some encouraging things. And I take heart in the fact that Mamdani’s base seems more interested in scoring a symbolic triumph over the establishment than they do in the content of his policy platform. The best way, by far, to own the mods is to do a good job.

The only way out is through

This is why on some level, I’m glad that he won.

A big problem with the current discourse is that everyone the progressive wing of the Democratic Party actually likes are powerless back-benchers in safe seats. This gives them strong incentives to do wild position-taking with zero accountability for whether their ideas work or whether they can manage to set priorities.

I’m not a utopian who believes that if Mamdani wields power ineffectually and fails, his supporters will suddenly see the light. But I do think that Mamdani will try to succeed. He can’t succeed if business and high-income individuals flee the city. He can’t succeed if Jewish New Yorkers suffer a surge in harassment or hate crimes. He can’t succeed if the schools get worse and crime goes up. The only way to succeed as a mayor is to succeed, which is objectively hard, but that does mean that your incentives are pretty clear. As mayor, he will have the opportunity to direct some spending to his pet ideas. But he won’t be able to direct all the spending that he’s promised. So he’s going to have to set priorities and make decisions in a way that AOC and Bernie Sanders don’t.

And we know that when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he was genuinely quite pragmatic, winning the support of the police union, cutting property taxes, and siding with a local defense contractor against antiwar protesters. I hope Sanders will give his protégé some frank advice about these kinds of choices (he got off to a good start here), and acknowledge that as mayor, he faced tougher tradeoffs than he does in the Senate. That’s not an ideological point, it’s just the nature of city government. It’s why the most politically successful socialist movement in American history was derided by intellectuals who never held office for being excessively focused on municipal utility management. As a writer and intellectual myself, I agree that the details of managing the sewer system do not sound that interesting. But this is literally what city government is. If you hold office, you either do it well or you don’t.

Compared to these endless debates where I point out that moderates do better electorally and leftists come up with increasingly implausible ways to deny it, the Mamdani model is a lot more constructive.

There’s no question whether Democrats can win elections in New York City, and not even a question of whether left-wing Democrats can win elections in New York City. The question is can left-wing Democrats do a good job of governing in the places where they clearly can win, and thereby secure more political power? I’m skeptical, but I don’t rule it out. I think it’s encouraging that Mamdani actively courted abundance and YIMBYs. I think it’s good that his message focused on the cost of living rather than ideological abstractions. And I think it’s good for left-wing people to tackle actual governance problems in the more liberal parts of the country instead of just making things up about electability.

Can he deliver on the promise of sewer socialism? The fact that over 100 years later, we’re still talking about a former mayor of Milwaukee is a reminder that left-wing executives who roll up their sleeves and focus on public service delivery are rare. But I’m glad Mamdani gets the reference, and I hope he can deliver on it.