In June, amid ongoing unrest following George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis, members of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took to the streets to pressure Gotham officials to slash the New York Police Department budget. Protesters rallied at the homes of several powerful council members, banging on doors and demanding to speak to the officials. One Queens councilman, Daniel Dromm, described by a neighborhood paper as “clearly resentful that his progressive credentials were being challenged,” dismissed the protesters as “Brooklyn trust fund babies”—a reference to the reputation of the DSA as a party of young, well-to-do neighborhood newcomers, sometimes dubbed gentrifiers. Laurie Cumbo, the city council’s majority leader, was even more incensed, threatening the protesters, who included Cumbo’s opponent in a previous election, in a tweet: “you come to my home again or anyplace where I am with my son with a bullhorn & you too will be met with a group of protesters & they won’t be gentrifiers.”
Yet the socialists’ aggressiveness had a clear purpose. The city’s main socialist party is looking to use the momentum generated by the stunning success of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 election in New York’s 14th Congressional District to build a larger movement, and it has targeted New York’s 2021 municipal elections as potentially winnable for its candidates. Party members have already begun directing withering criticism at local Democrats and progressives, painting them as insufficiently leftist.
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