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The word is having a moment. Trump said “communism” eighty-one times in a two-week period. J. D. Vance spent a genial half hour on Joe Rogan's show worrying aloud about why young Americans keep drifting toward socialism. The Secretary of State convened sixty countries to discuss the menace of the left. And on the other side of it, socialists keep winning primaries — in New York, in Colorado, in Wisconsin — which is presumably the reason for all the noise.

Openings like this do not come often. For most of my life the word was simply unavailable: a conversation-ender, a thing you were accused of rather than a thing you could be. Now it is being argued about in public, by people who are not socialists, in front of audiences who have never given it five minutes' thought. That is worth something. But an opening is only as good as what gets carried through it, and what is being carried through this one is, I think, too small.

Consider how the case for socialism is currently being made by its friends. Liza Featherstone, in Jacobin, argues that the right is panicking because socialism is popular — and her evidence is that the policy agenda polls well. Affordable housing, higher wages, Medicare for All. She then has to deal with an inconvenience she raises herself: Trump also ran on the cost of living. Her answer is sincerity. He never meant it; the socialists do.

That is true, and it is not nothing. But look at what the argument has conceded. Socialism is being defended as a list of programs, plus the intention to actually enact them. Which means socialism is competent, sincere liberalism — and if that is what it is, then it is one honest Democrat away from being redundant.

Jon Stewart put the same reduction (sympathetically) to Zohran Mamdani a few days ago. He noted, admiringly, that the mayor hadn't seized anything or nationalized anything; he had found revenue, negotiated with the governor, extended child care, frozen rents, filled potholes. “It doesn't seem radical,” Stewart said. “It seems workmanlike.” He asked, more than once, whether democratic socialism was a genuinely different politics or just different nomenclature for the same one — and, in his most serious version of the question, whether it wasn't in fact a reform movement for capitalism, in the way the New Deal drained the revolutionary pressure of the 1930s.

The attackers and the sympathizers, it turns out, are working from the same dictionary. Both parties assume that socialism is a claim about economic arrangements: who owns what, who is taxed, what the state provides. They disagree only about whether the claim is good. So the defense is conducted entirely on the ground of outputs — is the program popular, is it affordable, is it more or less radical than the New Deal — and the movement's actual distinctiveness never comes up, because that vocabulary has nowhere to put it.

Which brings me to what I think is worth carrying through this opening.

Some twenty years ago the philosopher G. A. Cohen wrote a short book called Why Not Socialism? It begins with a camping trip. On a camping trip, people simply do not behave the way the market says people behave. Nobody charges his friends for the use of his pot. Nobody who finds the good fishing spot demands a toll. Tasks get divided by ability and need and inclination, facilities are shared, and if someone insisted on his property rights in the corkscrew we would think there was something wrong with him. Everyone recognizes this arrangement. Everyone has lived some version of it. Cohen's question is why we accept, for a whole society, principles we would find monstrous over the course of a week in the woods.

The part of his answer that matters here is that he identifies two principles at work, not one. The first is a kind of equality, and it is the one everybody expects. The second he calls community, and it is a separate requirement — not implied by equality, and capable of being violated even where equality is satisfied. Community, in his sense, means that people care for one another and care that they care; that I serve you because you need serving, and not because of what I can extract in return. Market relations run on the opposite motives. Cohen names them plainly: greed and fear. The other person appears as a source of gain or a threat of loss, which is a strange thing to be to your neighbor, however efficient it turns out to be.

I raise Cohen because he was making, from inside the analytic tradition, a point the founders of socialism did not have to make. The great nineteenth-century theorists could take an enormous amount of community for granted. Extended families, guilds, congregations, mutual aid societies, sick funds, burial clubs, neighbors who knew each other for forty years — the fabric of ordinary reciprocity was still thick enough that no one thought to write it into the program. It did not need defending because it had not yet been taken.

It has since been taken. That is the difference between their circumstances and ours, and it is why a socialism specified purely as an economic arrangement now leaves out the thing people most acutely lack. Vance, on Rogan, made the diagnosis better than most Democrats do: young people own nothing, the game is rigged, and this is why they turn to socialism. But his remedy was that we must give them a stake, give them ownership. Even the cure arrives as a smaller private share, handed down. Within that frame there is nothing else security could be made of. The possibility that the missing thing might be held in common rather than distributed individually — that the answer to having nothing might be having something together — is not a position he rejects. It is one he cannot form.

So the argument is not really about whether things are bad. Everybody now agrees things are bad. The argument is entirely about what kind of remedy is even thinkable, and that is where a wider understanding of socialism would do its work.

None of this is new to me; I have been circling it for a while, though not always in a form I would call broadly accessible. I have argued that socialism is a way of doing things together rather than a policy list, that independence is a myth and interdependence is the real question, and — under a coinage I am still not sure anyone will forgive me for — that what we need is an ethos before it is a program.

But the moment is not mine, and it is not going to last. While the word is briefly in everyone's mouth, it would be a shame if the only thing we managed to say about it was that our programs poll well and we mean them.

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Antisemitism isn't history – it's happening now

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Vive la France

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Danmark har et enormt problem. I flere årtier har masseindvandringen gjort enorm skade på Europa i form af kriminalitet, parallelsamfund, islamisering og et væld af andre udfordringer

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Something strange is happening in the way the Democratic Socialists of America are being described. A Republican president calls the group Communist. Anxious Democratic officials call it a spoiler — a faction dragging the party toward an electoral cliff. And the political press, reaching for something more neutral, tends to describe a demographic wave: young, largely white newcomers sweeping through changing neighborhoods and displacing established Black and Latino leaders.

These are people who agree on almost nothing. Yet each has reached for the same kind of description. And the sameness is more revealing than any of the descriptions, because it points to something the three of them share underneath their disagreements — a picture of what politics is.

In that picture, politics is a contest among groups that already exist. Blocs, factions, ideologies, constituencies: each is assumed to arrive with its interests already formed, and the game is the negotiation among them for control of offices. Voters come pre-sorted. Leaders speak for the sorted. Elections settle, for a while, who speaks for whom. It is a serviceable picture, and most of our political vocabulary is built from it.

The trouble is that DSA is doing something the picture has no slot for. So each observer, needing to file it somewhere, files it under the nearest category the picture already keeps. For the president, the slot marked foreign enemy ideology is closest, so: Communist. For the party establishment, the slot marked faction miscalculating its coalition is closest, so: spoiler. For the press, the slot marked one bloc displacing another is closest, so: demographic tsunami. Three different labels, one operation — take the unfamiliar thing and assimilate it to a familiar one, so you never quite have to notice that what is unfamiliar about it is not its content but its form.

Here is the form they are missing. DSA's candidates do not generally appear as talented individuals with good positions, marketed to a waiting electorate. They come out of an organization — with members, chapters, dues, internal arguments, political education, and a program the members vote on. Thousands of people knock on doors not because they were hired to but because they have entered something. And the people they talk to are not only being asked for a vote; some of them are being drawn, door by door, into the same activity. What is new is not a bloc with a sharper message. It is the attempt to organize people into a political force that did not exist before the organizing — to make a constituency through participation rather than to locate one that was already there.

That is the distinction worth carrying, because once you have it you can answer most of what is being thrown at the movement without answering on the frame's terms. A bloc is a standing thing you can count. A movement is an activity people are doing. The observers keep mistaking the second for the first — and every specific charge is a version of that one mistake.

Take the question, asked earnestly by reporters, of whether a well-paid tech worker can really be working class. Inside the bloc picture the question is about sorting: which income category does this person belong to, and does DSA's answer stretch the category past honesty? But the movement is not sorting people by income. It is asking whether someone who depends on an institution he does not control — who can be laid off, outsourced, automated out of a career he thought was secure — shares a situation with the home-care worker who is far poorer and far more exposed. The salary is real and the difference in exposure is real, and neither settles the question, because the question was never about the bracket. It was about whether people in different positions can be organized to act together. The honest answer declines the sorting and describes the activity.

Or take the sharpest version, the one that deserves the most care: that some of these victories came in neighborhoods reshaped by displacement, where the movement may be winning fair elections among the people who remain precisely because poorer, longer-tenured residents could no longer afford to stay. That worry should not be waved off. The Black and Latino political institutions now being challenged were not handed down by a generous system; they were won, through lawsuits and organizing and decades of work, by communities the system was built to exclude. Those institutions carry the accumulated legitimacy of real struggle.

But an institution cannot stay representative merely because it once emerged from representation. Its authority has to be renewed by the living activity that first produced it — by continuing to organize, involve, and answer to the people it claims. Representation, you might say, is what participation leaves behind, and it stays democratic only as long as fresh participation keeps renewing it. So the test of a socialist victory in a changing neighborhood is not the winner's race, and not the election result, and not the demographic chart the coverage leads with. It is whether the movement is organizing the public-housing tenant, the immigrant, the family facing eviction — whether longtime residents help set its program or are merely counted among its intended beneficiaries. Winning the district does not answer that. Only what gets built afterward does. And that is a question about activity, which the bloc picture cannot even pose, because it is busy reading the demographic chart.

None of this means the observers are lying, and it is important not to treat them as if they were. The frame is a genuine blindness, not a pose. The president's label is a weapon, but it does the same work a sincere reporter's does: it reaches for the nearest known category because the frame supplies no other. People standing inside the bloc picture are not being stupid when they cannot see the form. They are standing where the form cannot be seen from. The useful response is not to score against them but to describe what they are missing plainly enough that a reader can step outside the frame and look.

And stepping outside it cuts both ways, which is the part a movement's own supporters should keep. If what is new about DSA is an activity rather than a category, then the activity has to actually continue, or the new thing collapses back into an old one. A campaign can become a machine for winning and nothing more. An organization can harden into another faction that treats defeated rivals as territory to be seized. New leaders can drift as far from the organized public as the ones they replaced. The distinction that lets you answer the movement's critics is the same distinction the movement is answerable to. It is not a trophy. It is a standard, and it has not yet been met — it has only been made visible.

So when you next hear that DSA is Communist, or a spoiler, or a demographic wave washing over someone else's neighborhood, you now have something to notice before you answer. Each of those descriptions has already made the same move: it has mistaken a living activity for a standing thing. You do not have to argue on its terms. You can decline the translation, and describe what is actually happening — people trying, and not yet finished, to become an organized force that governs the conditions of its own life. Whether they succeed is an open question. But you cannot even ask it from inside the picture that keeps calling a verb a noun.

The Myth of Independence

We begin with a simple correction.

Human beings are not simply independent creatures who occasionally decide to cooperate, nor are we merely absorbed into one another. We are interdependent creatures who require workable forms of independence in order to participate in shared life. The trouble begins when that necessary, partial independence is hardened into a mythology of self-sufficiency.

This matters because the fantasy of independence has become one of the central myths of our political life. We are told, in a thousand different ways, that freedom means standing on our own, needing as little as possible, owing as little as possible, asking for as little as possible, and treating dependence on others as a kind of personal failure.

We are told that a free person is a self-sufficient person.

But no such person exists.

Every one of us depends, every day, on other people, inherited knowledge, roads, cables, pipes, teachers, caregivers, food systems, language, neighbors, strangers, workers we will never meet, forms of trust we did not create, and institutions we usually notice only when they break.

The question is not whether we depend on others.

The question is what kind of dependence we live under.

The Dependence We Already Live Inside

At present, much of our dependence is hidden, privatized, humiliating, and difficult to govern.

We depend on employers who can discard us, landlords who can price us out, insurers who can deny us, platforms that can manipulate us, bureaucracies that can ignore us, markets that can abandon us, and political institutions that often remember us only when they want money, votes, clicks, labor, or compliance.

Then, after arranging our lives in this way, the dominant order tells us we are independent.

This is not independence.

It is isolation inside systems of dependence we do not control.

Freedom as Democratic Interdependence

We declare, therefore, that real freedom requires a different starting point.

Freedom is not the absence of dependence. Freedom is the ability to live within relations of dependence that are visible, reciprocal, accountable, contestable, and shared.

Freedom requires the social power to say: here is what we need from one another; here is what we owe one another; here is how we will decide together; here is how we will repair what breaks; here is how we will resist being separated, exploited, and ruled through our separation.

We call this interdependence.

Not dependence as submission.

Not community as sentimental decoration.

Not togetherness as a slogan.

Interdependence means that our lives are materially, socially, emotionally, politically, and ecologically entangled, and that the only honest politics is one that begins from that fact.

Embodied Socialism

This is why socialism, if it is to mean enough, cannot remain only a theory of ownership, redistribution, public policy, or state power.

Those things matter. They matter greatly. But socialism also has to come down to the scale of ordinary life: how people meet, talk, deliberate, help, disagree, remember, organize, trust, repair, and build things together.

A socialism that does not reach that level remains too abstract.

We need embodied socialism.

By embodied socialism, we mean socialism as a lived practice of interdependence. Not merely a program to be enacted somewhere else by someone else, but a way of remaking the ordinary conditions under which people become available to one another as neighbors, comrades, collaborators, learners, caregivers, organizers, critics, and friends.

Some of us have jokingly, but not only jokingly, called this schmoozalism.

The word is homely on purpose. It points to the level at which politics often actually begins: in conversation, recognition, gossip, checking in, lending a hand, asking what happened, asking what can be done, noticing who has disappeared, remembering who knows how to fix something, arguing without severing the relationship, and creating enough shared life that collective action stops feeling like an emergency stunt and starts becoming a normal human possibility.

That is not a substitute for institutions.

It is the soil from which democratic institutions can grow.

The Missing Soil of Democratic Life

Modern politics often lacks that soil.

Campaigns mobilize people and then dissolve them back into private life. Platforms connect people while keeping them fragmented, surveilled, distracted, and monetized. Institutions ask for participation but rarely offer belonging. Organizations recruit volunteers for narrow tasks but often fail to build lasting shared capacity.

The result is a public made up of people who are constantly addressed, measured, activated, targeted, and managed, but rarely given the conditions in which they can become a durable “we.”

We need places where that “we” can be built.

Communitaria as Online Civic Campuses

This is the purpose of communitaria.

A communitarium is not just another online group, message board, social network, or campaign tool. It is better understood as an online civic campus: a small enough place for people to become meaningfully known to one another, but diverse enough to hold many kinds of activity at once.

A campus has rooms, paths, gathering places, working groups, libraries, notice boards, arguments, habits, memories, projects, and informal life. People do not all do the same thing there. They do not all know one another equally. They do not agree about everything. But they share enough space, enough history, and enough practical orientation that their activities can begin to add up.

That is the scale we need.

Not a total community that absorbs the whole person.

Not a faceless mass platform.

Not a town, not a party, not a school, not a church, not a commune, not a brand.

An online campus for democratic interdependence.

In such a campus, people might deliberate, learn, publish, archive, plan, organize, request help, offer help, form working groups, hold discussions, run polls, create shared documents, support local campaigns, host reading groups, build mutual-aid practices, document local knowledge, welcome newcomers, debate strategy, and develop the ordinary habits of collective life.

That sounds modest. In one sense, it is.

But modest practices become politically serious when they are durable, visible, repeatable, and federated.

Scattered Capacities, Shared Power

The dominant order fragments us at every scale.

It fragments persons into consumers, workers, voters, patients, renters, users, followers, clients, applicants, profiles, and data points.

It fragments communities into markets, demographics, jurisdictions, audiences, and constituencies.

It fragments political action into campaigns, emergencies, donations, petitions, posts, and moments of outrage.

It fragments knowledge into specialties, credentials, paywalls, feeds, and proprietary systems.

It fragments responsibility so thoroughly that everyone can see something is wrong while almost no one can find a stable place from which to act with others.

Communitaria are an attempt to reverse that fragmentation.

They begin from the premise that people need organized places in which their partial capacities can meet. One person has time. Another has technical skill. Another has local memory. Another has legal knowledge. Another knows how to host a meeting. Another knows who is sick, who is isolated, who needs a ride, who has a spare room, who is being evicted, who can translate, who can cook, who can repair, who can write, who can listen, who can mediate, who can teach.

Alone, these capacities remain scattered.

Brought into relation, they become power.

This is the practical meaning of interdependence.

Resistant Independence

Interdependence is also the basis of a different kind of independence.

We do not reject independence. We reject the false independence of isolated individuals abandoned to systems they cannot control.

We seek instead a resistant independence: the capacity of interdependent people to reduce their dependence on the institutions that dominate, exploit, and fragment them.

A person standing alone is easy to discipline.

A community with memory, tools, trust, habits, and shared resources is harder to dominate.

A federation of such communities is harder still.

This is why interdependence is not the opposite of independence. Properly organized, interdependence is how people become independent from domination.

That independence will never be absolute. It should not be. Absolute independence is another name for fantasy. But relative independence matters. Shared capacity matters. Redundancy matters. Memory matters. Common infrastructure matters.

The ability to deliberate outside corporate platforms matters.

The ability to care for one another outside market relations matters.

The ability to organize before the emergency matters.

The ability to keep going after the election, the protest, the strike, the crisis, or the news cycle matters.

We are not declaring independence from one another.

We are declaring independence from the regime that makes us lonely, dependent, frightened, and governable, while calling that condition freedom.

Federation and Ecological Life

One isolated communitarium would be fragile.

Many communitaria, linked together while retaining their own character, could become something more powerful: a federation of interdependent campuses.

Each campus would have its own life, but none would need to stand alone. Knowledge could travel. Tools could be shared. Mistakes could be studied. Conflicts could be learned from. Local experiments could become common resources. People could belong somewhere without being trapped there.

This also means that interdependence must be ecological.

Every communitarium is an ecology of participation. It has conditions that make some forms of life easier and others harder. It has paths of entry, habits of speech, ways of noticing, methods of repair, forms of memory, distributions of attention, and patterns of power.

These things should not be left to accident, charisma, market design, or platform architecture. They should be shaped deliberately and democratically.

The same is true among communitaria. A federation should not be an empire, a command structure, or a brand family. It should be an ecology of mutual support among distinct campuses.

The goal is not sameness.

The goal is shared viability.

We need places where difference does not immediately become fragmentation.

We need places where conflict does not immediately become expulsion, humiliation, or collapse.

We need places where people can remain answerable to one another without being swallowed by the group.

We need places where individuality is not denied but rescued from isolation.

We need places where collective life can be practiced before it is demanded.

The Ordinary Work of Building Another Freedom

That is the work.

It will not be glamorous at first. Much of it will look like setting up tools, writing norms, welcoming people, hosting discussions, keeping calendars, documenting decisions, fixing technical problems, moderating disputes, explaining things twice, noticing silence, inviting participation, and learning from failure.

But this is what building a world looks like before it looks like a world.

The dominant order has spent generations building the infrastructure of separation. It has campuses of its own: malls, offices, platforms, bureaucracies, media systems, financial networks, and gated institutions where power learns how to reproduce itself.

We should not be surprised that resistance needs infrastructure too.

If we want people to act together, they need places to become people who can act together.

If we want democracy to be more than voting, people need places to practice democracy.

If we want socialism to be more than policy, people need places to live some part of its meaning.

If we want independence from domination, people need interdependence strong enough to sustain resistance.

We Declare

So we declare our interdependence.

We declare that no one is free alone.

We declare that dependence hidden by markets, platforms, bureaucracies, and myths is not freedom.

We declare that democratic interdependence is the material basis of real independence.

We declare that embodied socialism must be built at the scale of everyday life.

We declare that communitaria, as online civic campuses, are one way to begin.

Not the only way.

Not the final way.

A beginning.

A place to gather what has been scattered.

A place to make visible what has been hidden.

A place to practice what has too often been postponed.

A place to ask, not only “What can I do?” but “What can we do, now that we have found one another?”

And having found one another, we intend to become harder to isolate, harder to exploit, harder to frighten, harder to govern against our will, and more capable of building the forms of life on which freedom actually depends.

An Open Letter to Tascha Van Auken and the Office of Mass Engagement

Dear Commissioner Van Auken,

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Executive Order No. 7, establishing the Office of Mass Engagement, names a real democratic failure in New York City. The order recognizes that New Yorkers exercise agency when they build community with their neighbors, communicate their concerns and solutions, and engage with local government. It also recognizes that existing civic structures often privilege those with the most time and resources: meetings are long, applications are confusing, feedback is fragmented, and participation often seems disconnected from visible outcomes. The result is frustration, disenchantment, and disengagement.

That diagnosis is important. But the success of the Office of Mass Engagement will depend on how deeply the city interprets the phrase mass engagement. If it means only more surveys, more testimony drives, more public meetings, better feedback portals, and more coordinated outreach, the city may improve the existing system without transforming it. Those things matter, but they are not enough. Mass engagement should not mean mass intake: a more efficient process for collecting public input and routing it through City Hall. It should mean helping New Yorkers build the durable civic capacity to notice problems, share knowledge, deliberate, coordinate help, preserve memory, and act together over time.

Mass engagement should be the opening condition for a living civic ecology. By civic ecology, I mean the web of spaces, organizations, relationships, habits, records, tools, and conflicts through which people become able to participate meaningfully in the life of the city. That ecology includes government, but cannot be owned by government. It includes digital tools, but cannot be reduced to a platform. It includes formal meetings, but cannot depend mainly on people having the time, confidence, and procedural fluency to attend them. The question for the Office of Mass Engagement is therefore not only how to help more New Yorkers reach City Hall. It is how to help New Yorkers reach one another.

The Missing Layer: Civic Commons

The city needs engagement campaigns, accessible feedback venues, outreach to historically excluded communities, and feedback loops between residents and policy. Executive Order No. 7 assigns these duties to the Office of Mass Engagement, along with responsibilities involving community boards, district service cabinets, district managers, agency coordination, and training or technical assistance. But there is a missing layer between isolated residents and city government: the neighborhood or district civic commons.

A civic commons would not be merely a website, a city portal, a social-media group, a newsletter, or a meeting. It would be a locally rooted, digitally supported, cooperatively governed space where residents and local institutions can become more visible to one another and more capable of acting together. Its everyday value would come from ordinary civic life: water main breaks, train shutdowns, spare moving boxes, elder check-ins, accompaniment to appointments, community gardens, block parties, filming notices, local sports, tenant meetings, community-board agendas, recurring service failures, and the many small problems that now remain scattered across group chats, flyers, agency websites, social media, local newsletters, and word of mouth.

These examples may sound mundane, but they are not secondary to democracy. They are the practical life out of which democratic politics grows. People do not become civic actors only by attending hearings or submitting comments. They become civic actors through repeated experiences of mutual recognition, shared trouble, practical help, disagreement, memory, repair, and coordination. A tenant comparing landlord behavior with neighbors is already in civic life. A parent trying to understand a school policy is already in civic life. Residents documenting recurring elevator outages, transit disruptions, sanitation failures, or agency delays are already producing public knowledge.

The problem is that these civic activities are usually fragmented and fragile. The city should not try to absorb them into one official system. But it can help make them more visible, durable, accessible, privacy-respecting, and capable of informing public decisions.

Enable, Do Not Own

A civic commons controlled by City Hall would not be a commons. It would be an engagement apparatus. The distinction matters.

The city can convene, support, translate, train, fund, connect, and listen. It can help residents understand how to interact with agencies. It can help community-board processes become more legible. It can support pilots, technical assistance, accessibility, and public standards. But it should not own the civic spaces through which New Yorkers deliberate, remember, coordinate, and hold power accountable.

A real civic commons must be able to support City Hall when City Hall is right, inform it when it is incomplete, pressure it when it is slow, and oppose it when necessary. That is not a defect. It is what makes such a commons democratic. If the Office of Mass Engagement becomes only a more effective way to gather input for the administration, it will fall short of its promise. If it helps New Yorkers build civic capacity that does not belong to the administration, it could become one of the more important democratic experiments in city government.

Infrastructure Should Match the Politics

The form of this work matters. A city trying to build democratic civic capacity should not rely uncritically on the proprietary, centralized, extractive platforms that have helped weaken democratic life. Civic infrastructure should be open where possible, privacy-respecting, accessible, multilingual, interoperable, and governable by the people and institutions that depend on it.

New York would not be starting from zero. The open-source civic-technology world has already developed tools that address parts of this problem: participatory budgeting, structured deliberation, collaborative decision-making, shared files, calendars, transparent records, project coordination, and community governance. Decidim, Loomio, CONSUL Democracy, Nextcloud, openDesk, and related projects are not by themselves a civic ecology. They do not solve trust, moderation, language access, disability access, unequal time, digital exclusion, institutional power, or the labor needed to maintain a commons. But they show that public engagement need not depend entirely on proprietary platforms, scattered surveys, social-media fragments, commercial cloud systems, or consultant-designed portals.

The deeper lesson is that civic participation requires infrastructure, governance, continuity, and ecology. A citywide engagement office should not ask only how to collect more feedback. It should ask how to help residents and local organizations sustain the civic ecologies in which meaningful participation becomes possible.

A Federated City Needs Federated Civic Life

New York is not one community. It is a city of neighborhoods, languages, histories, buildings, schools, tenant associations, libraries, public housing developments, faith communities, immigrant networks, parks, workplaces, and informal local worlds. A single centralized engagement platform cannot adequately represent that reality.

A better model would be federated. By federated, I do not mean fragmented. I mean that different neighborhood, issue-based, institutional, tenant, school, library, mutual-aid, and cultural spaces should be able to remain distinct while becoming more discoverable, mutually aware, and capable of coordination. The goal should not be one massive official forum. The goal should be a civic ecology in which many local commons can connect without being absorbed into a single hierarchy.

This approach would also strengthen existing civic institutions rather than bypassing them. Community boards, for example, are important, but their meetings can be hard to follow, hard to attend, procedurally narrow, and disconnected from the everyday ways people encounter public problems. Local civic commons could help residents understand agendas, prepare testimony, document follow-up, compare experiences, track recurring issues, and turn isolated complaints into visible public patterns. They would not replace community boards. They would give them a stronger civic substrate.

Maintenance Is Civic Work

A living civic ecology requires labor: documentation, translation, moderation, calendar maintenance, meeting summaries, accessibility work, onboarding, technical repair, conflict handling, and preservation of public memory. This should not be treated only as a procurement problem. It should also be treated as civic education and public work.

The administration could encourage interdisciplinary projects among CUNY campuses, community colleges, public high schools, libraries, community boards, and local organizations. Students and faculty in technology, public administration, urban studies, journalism, design, social work, translation, history, library science, accessibility, and related fields could help design, research, build, document, evaluate, and maintain neighborhood civic commons. They could map local resources, summarize community-board meetings, translate and simplify agency materials, maintain public calendars, document recurring service failures, conduct oral-history projects, and support open-source tools.

Done properly, this would not be free labor for City Hall. It would need stipends, course credit, supervision, community accountability, and real educational value. But it could become civic education through civic maintenance. Students would not merely study government. They would help maintain the civic conditions under which democratic government becomes more possible.

Libraries, Hosting, and Connectivity

Public libraries may be among the natural institutional homes for this work. They already provide access to knowledge, technology, local history, meeting space, digital literacy, public trust, and non-commercial information infrastructure. A citywide civic-commons strategy could build on that role by supporting orientations, digital-literacy help, local archives, public documentation, meeting space, and access for people who cannot or do not want to participate only from personal devices.

Over time, this points toward something larger: public-interest civic hosting. New York might eventually help provide privacy-respecting, open-source digital capacity that local groups could use for websites, calendars, shared files, collaborative documents, archives, meeting spaces, and public records. This should not mean one City Hall-owned platform for civic life. It should mean a supported ecology of locally governed, interoperable tools that gives residents and community groups an alternative to dependence on corporate platforms.

This question does not stop at software. Civic participation also depends on access, connectivity, resilience, and local control. New York already has community-led efforts, such as NYC Mesh, that treat connectivity itself as a commons. OME would not need to run such networks, but a city serious about mass engagement should understand that participation depends not only on invitations, forms, and meetings, but on the material conditions that let people communicate at all.

Trust Requires Design

A civic commons is not automatically benign. A space where neighbors ask why an elder has not been seen recently can become a space of care, but it can also become intrusive. A space where people document landlord abuse, immigration fears, policing, benefits problems, or health needs can become empowering, but it can also expose people to risk. Privacy, consent, moderation, and safety cannot be afterthoughts. A civic commons should not become a surveillance commons.

This is especially important for immigrants, tenants, workers, unhoused people, people with disabilities, people navigating public benefits, people with precarious legal status, and anyone vulnerable to retaliation. Trust will not come from branding. It will come from design, governance, practice, and accountability.

The same is true of accessibility and language justice. Reaching people who have not historically participated in government decision-making cannot mean only inviting more people into existing formats. It means changing the formats: plain-language summaries, multilingual materials, interpretation, accessible design, offline access points, asynchronous participation, disability access, and help for people who do not already know how city processes work. The goal should not be to make more people behave like professional meeting-goers. The goal should be to make civic life more available to ordinary people.

A Modest Proposal

The Office of Mass Engagement does not need to build a citywide civic commons from scratch. It should not try. A better first step would be to convene a public conversation about how New York might support a federated ecology of neighborhood civic commons.

That conversation should include civic institutions, local organizations, residents not already embedded in formal politics, public-interest technologists, privacy advocates, accessibility advocates, educators, librarians, community-board participants, youth organizations, and people already maintaining local networks of care and information. OME could then explore a small number of pilots, publish public-interest principles for civic digital infrastructure, support open-source experiments, fund maintenance and translation, create directories of existing civic resources, and help local commons connect to community-board and agency processes.

I have begun a small and preliminary experiment in this general direction at Inwood Nexus: https://inwoodnexus.nyc. It is not a finished model, and I am not suggesting that the city adopt it. I mention it only to make clear that this proposal is not merely abstract. I have been thinking practically about what a local, online-first civic commons might look like and how such efforts might begin.

The creation of the Office of Mass Engagement is an opening. It can become a better way for City Hall to hear from New Yorkers. That would be useful. But it can become something more important: a way to help New Yorkers build durable civic capacity with one another.

That is the deeper promise. Mass engagement should be the beginning of a civic ecology broad enough, practical enough, and democratic enough to make participation part of ordinary city life.

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.