The Question Before Los Angeles Isn’t Whether to Have a Socialist Mayor

The media coverage of the contest between incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, is in one respect surprising. That a mayoral contest, which may result in Bass’s ouster, in America’s second-largest metropolis has drawn widespread coverage is no surprise, particularly since Raman’s membership in the Democratic Socialists of America appears to make the election one more test of the extent of socialism’s rise, particularly in urban America. But that the coverage has often focused on the internal divisions within DSA between those locals that prioritize the kinds of mass outreach inherent in electoral politics, and other locals and the organization’s national committee, which have a more sectarian focus on ideological purity, is indeed surprising, at least in publications that hardly qualify as “left.” That this rift is discussed (rather brilliantly) in the current issue of Catalyst, the quarterly theoretical journal established by the socialist magazine Jacobin, is a matter of course. That this rift has also been covered by our national newspapers, The New Yorker, and last week, even Vanity Fair gives some indication that the stakes in this battle go beyond the left’s internal disputes.

The current round of this fight may be the most contentious yet. DSA’s national committee, dominated by sectarian leftists plainly uncomfortable with the messiness of interactions with electorates, made clear some time ago that elected officials who are DSA members shouldn’t stray from their version of the party line. They declined to endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for re-election in 2024 because, even though she had led the congressional fight to stop the sale of offensive weapons to Israel, she voted for supplying it with the defenses of the Iron Dome. (She has since reversed that position.) New York’s DSA local, by contrast, supported AOC, and complemented its extensive and crucial support for the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani by also stating that it understood he’d be compelled to take some positions once in office that might run counter to their preferences. They understood, in other words, that politicians, once elected, are accountable to a wide range of supporters and constituents, not just the minority who belong to DSA. (They may have noticed that the figure who did the most to revive American socialism—Sen. Bernie Sanders—has never even belonged to DSA.)

In a membership vote this summer, Los Angeles DSA members voted to endorse Rahman, who’s been a paper member of the organization since before she first ran for the L.A. City Council in 2020. She joined, she’s since said, because, as a city planner working as a tenants’ rights activist, she was impressed by the local’s campaign to defend and advance the interests and power of tenants, in a city and a time of rising rents and stagnating wages.

The local campaigned for her that year, and she became the first socialist elected to the 15-member city council. Since then, three other members have also won council seats. In 2024, the local endorsed her for re-election to the council, though it also censured her for accepting the endorsement of the L.A. chapter of Democrats for Israel. L.A. DSA has been phone-banking and precinct walking for her mayoral campaign since it endorsed her this summer—but the effort isn’t, and can’t be, comparable to the one NYC DSA waged for Mamdani, since its numbers are smaller and its involvement came far later in the campaign year than New York’s.

Read: California Democrats back the billionaire wealth tax

Earlier this month, DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) ruled that the local’s endorsement violated national DSA’s rule that all endorsed candidates must support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions policy toward Israel (the local didn’t ask her about that) and that she was insufficiently pro-Palestinian generally, though Raman has long termed Israel’s war on Gaza a “genocide.” The NPC may yet vote to rescind the local’s endorsement and even expel Rahman from the organization—a move longtime DSA observers see less as a slap at Rahman per se than a pushback against the organization’s major locals that invest their resources in the campaigns of political figures who may now and then deviate from one or two of the national organization’s platform planks. (As some of those more utopian planks have been emerging from obscurity lately, a number of DSA’s endorsed candidates and elected officials have severed their memberships with the group.)

As a longtime democratic socialist—and as someone who helped lead the L.A. local of DSOC and then DSA in the late 1970s and ’80s—I think the sectarians on the NPC are working hard to destroy the prospects of democratic socialism or social democracy becoming a force in American politics. Their vision of a tightly controlled organization where members, and most especially elected officials, must follow every national policy is incompatible with the ebbs and flows of democratic practice and life. Revoking the decision of the L.A. local would be a sure way to disenchant thousands of members and push many of them to leave. That, in fact, may well be the goal of some of the sectarians on the NPC, who come close to being agents provocateurs out to blow up the group.

All that said, I also have to state what I guess is my third-camp position: I don’t think Nithya Raman is much of a socialist. She strikes me as being more of an opportunist.

Her record on the city council is actually to the right of her three other DSA colleagues. All three of them voted to oppose Bass’s nomination of a standard-issue police officer for LAPD chief in 2024; Raman voted with the majority to confirm him. (As a candidate, she now criticizes the choice.) She voted along with a majority of her colleagues to enact a $30 municipal minimum wage by 2028, and a year later joined with her fellow DSA members in opposing a measure to delay the raise by 18 months, for which businesses lobbied heavily. One week later, when that delay came up for a second vote, she switched sides and voted for it.

Some of her other walked-back positions—defunding the police, eventual prison abolition—have proved to be the standard walking-back positions of most DSA candidates; I don’t begrudge her those switches at all. But her weather-vane proclivities go well beyond abandoning theoretical ideals for the demands of realism.

For one close-up look at Rahman’s pliability, I suggest contrasting the answers that Bass and Rahman gave to the Los Angeles Times when, in separate interviews, it asked them which former L.A. elected official they most admired. Bass, not surprisingly, cited Tom Bradley, who was elected to five successive four-year terms from 1973 through 1993, and changed the city’s governing regime and policies from white Republican to multiracial Democratic. Bradley also won election as the first African American to win the mayor’s office in any major American city whose electorate was overwhelmingly white.

Here’s Raman’s answer, which in certain details I’ll annotate for readers who aren’t L.A.-ologists:

There’s pieces of different people that I take a lot of lessons from. Tom LaBonge’s love for L.A. His obvious joy and enjoyment of being a representative of the city is something I aspire to, and I want people to feel that from me. [LaBonge was a cheerleader type with no real political orientation save to support the local establishment, chiefly small businesses and the police.] Tom Bradley was a visionary in so many ways and I look to him for leadership on bridging different parts of the city together. I thought [Richard] Riordan’s efforts at charter reform were really masterful. [The Republican Riordan vetoed the city’s groundbreaking living-wage ordinance, but the council unanimously overrode him.] I think [James K.] Hahn did an incredible job in keeping the city together during secessionary movements in ways that undermined his own success in the job. I think [Antonio] Villaraigosa was, oh my God, a champion of the city: enthusiastic, out there, just loved being the mayor, loved L.A., loved every aspect, every neighborhood of the city, and that was just infectious, and I absolutely love that. Garcetti’s vision for transportation. He came in, two years in, passed Measure M, had a vision for how to transform L.A., and we’re seeing the fruits of that today. All of these are things that I really admire.

In other words, every mayor since 1973, with Councilman LaBonge thrown in for good measure. Not much political guidance in that answer, and she somehow omitted Frank Shaw, without whose 1930s tenure as mayor Raymond Chandler would have had to invent the level of corruption that Shaw brought to new heights, which provided the background for those great Philip Marlowe novels.

L.A. DSA may have endorsed Raman, but her three DSA council colleagues endorsed Karen Bass, in part, doubtless, due to the fact that Raman was not only an unreliable vote but an unreliable presence during council deliberations. I’ll note, too, that while Bass followed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lead in opposing the billionaires’ wealth tax on the November ballot, Raman has failed to endorse it, as (pardon my presumption here) any socialist should.

Bass has a socialist background, too, which is understandably longer than Raman’s as she’s a quarter-century older. It includes her youthful tenure on a Venceremos Brigade and decades as a community organizer in the city’s South Central district. My guess is that if Raman defeats Bass in November, which polling shows to be a likely outcome, her tenure would be more a continuation than a break with Bass’s. My guess is also that any presentable Democrat would be favored to defeat the fire-cursed Bass in this year’s election. Neither due to nor despite her DSA membership and endorsement, neither due to nor despite the possible revocation of that membership and endorsement, Rahman is that presentable Democrat.