Exit Stage Left: On Movements, Mayors, and the Musical Logic of Insurgent Politics
from Seize the Means of Community
There are moments in political life when the whole thing begins to take on the texture of a Broadway revival — not the noble kind, mind you, but the self-aware sort where the actors and the audience share a wink each time the orchestra swells. New York City, never shy of drama, now finds itself in just such a production.
The curtain has risen on the Mamdani Era, and everyone, including the ushers, wants a piece of the script. And the whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to Gypsy, that great musical about ambition, rehearsal, overreach, and the perilous art of letting go
I. The DSA Parent-Teacher Association Convenes
Inside the venerable halls of the Democratic Socialists of America, a great debate rages. It is conducted in a tone ranging from “quiet disappointment” to “full Mama Rose.”
After all, it was DSA that plucked young Mamdani from the chorus, taught him his lines, drilled him in socialist theory, and sent him, starched and scrubbed, into the spotlight.
There is a certain pride in having raised a political child who not only survives the primary but grows up to run the city. But there is also the unmistakable anxiety of parents whose kid has just moved to Manhattan and refuses to answer texts during dinner.
Hence the question: Now that the boy is mayor, must he still call home nightly?
One internal faction insists, with the moral confidence of a playwright (eyeing a Pulitzer) who won’t change a word, that of course he must. They point out — not incorrectly — that they packed his ideological lunchbox, stitched his policy worldview from scratch, and sent him into the world with a perfectly fine pair of socialist training wheels.
The argument goes something like this:
We raised him, and therefore he should be fully accountable to us. Not just consultative accountability — full-on clean-your-room, take-out-the-trash, and don’t-roll-your-eyes-at-us accountability.
It’s touching, in a way, but it’s also deeply impractical. More on that later.
II. The View from the Mayor’s Mansion
From inside City Hall, things look rather different.
- One cannot run a $100 billion municipal apparatus using only the Stanislavski Method learned in Acting School.
- The Department of Education isn’t organized to perform a script submitted by a conflicted Drama Department still arguing over the second act.
- And the NYPD cannot be expected to fall into a crisp chorus line just because a working group has tapped out the rhythm.
A mayor is many things — negotiator, bureaucratic whisperer, hostage to Albany, occasional therapist to agencies in crisis — but one thing he is not is a fully supervised movement intern.
When DSA members say, “Why isn’t he doing exactly what we want?” City Hall might reply, “Because he is busy attempting to govern New York City — a task occasionally compared to teaching a herd of caffeinated rhinoceroses to ride the subway.”
Governance introduces new interpretive frameworks — legal, institutional, fiscal, electoral — that do not politely step aside for socialist purity. The music changes tempo, the lighting shifts, and the choreography becomes more complicated.
And yet, the movement expects him to dance the same steps.
III. Enter Mama Rose, Stage Left
This is where Gypsy becomes uncomfortably relevant.
Mama Rose, that indomitable engine of ambition, spent years shaping her daughters into stars: the costumes, the routines, the forced smiles, the relentless rehearsals. But when the daughters finally become stars, they insist on inhabiting their own lives.
The pathos, the comedy, and the tragedy all reside in that conflict. So too with DSA and Mamdani. DSA is caught in the Mama Rose dilemma: having created a star, it must figure out how to stop being the choreographer.
This is not as easy as it sounds. Movements are emotional organisms; they do not simply “transition” because the situation demands it. They feel things — pride, fear, protectiveness, suspicion, hope, and occasionally the sharp sting of abandonment when their rising star stops showing up to chapter socials.
And yet, if the movement cannot release its electeds into autonomy, the entire strategy collapses into a kind of ideological helicopter parenting.
IV. A Mayor Is Not a Puppet (Even If the Strings Are Organic, Recycled, Collectively Owned)
The idea that a socialist mayor should function as a wholly owned subsidiary of his political origin story is charming, in the same way that the idea of a toddler balancing the city budget is charming — but disastrous.
Movements produce leaders precisely so those leaders can expand the sphere of action — not so they can remain trapped in an eternal adolescence.
What Mamdani needs from DSA is not custody but agonistic companionship. He needs a movement that argues, pressures, critiques, mobilizes, and refuses to be placated — but also understands the difference between guiding and governing.
If DSA tries to rule his mayoralty like a parent monitoring screen time, it will stunt both the movement and the administration — and eventually alienate the very public Mamdani needs to radicalize.
A movement that cannot let its children grow up ends up talking only to itself.
V. The Final Number: “Let Me Entertain You, But Not Obey You”
There is a version of this story in which everyone gets what they want:
- The mayor retains his socialist backbone.
- DSA maintains its moral vigilance.
- The administration makes real gains for working people.
- The movement grows stronger rather than subordinate.
- And the audience — the public — remains dazzled.
But this demands something DSA has never fully had to face: the need to redefine its relationship to the very political figures it helped bring into being — a shift many of its members now insist is overdue. Not obedience, not distance, but a new kind of relationship; loving the leaders it has nurtured without assuming they remain forever in its house, eating from its fridge and texting for permission before making plans.
DSA must cultivate the wisdom to recognize that the point of nurturing political talent is not to create obedient children — but to create adults who can take the movement’s values into places the movement itself could never reach.
Rose learns this lesson late, kneeling in a spotlight, realizing she was never meant to live through her daughter’s success.
One can only hope DSA learns it earlier.
