Everyone likes to win. It’s not just that people hate to lose; that rush of triumphing over an opponent is an irresistible thrill. This is certainly true for socialists in an electoral contest, where our opponents are either the liberal dupes of capital or its reactionary thugs. Against such unquestionably villainous opponents, victory can be a heady brew indeed. Such Manichean thinking, however noble, can leave socialist projects abjectly stumbling from contest to contest, seeking victories that turn to ash, leaving the movement seeking for more. For socialists to obtain solid, lasting victories under an electoral democracy, there must be a party unequivocally prepared to critically leverage their position and a mass movement capable of driving forward the challenges of elected socialists to the bourgeois state. These requirements become heightened even further when that elected position is one of executive power within the bourgeois state: the potential for agitation, the pressures of capitalist interests, and the costs of failure for the socialist movement are all magnified enormously when a socialist official becomes a challenger for an executive role. This is true for offices at both the municipal and federal levels, though the challenges at the federal level of the Presidency are certainly more intensive. Recent experiences with executive office have shown the limits of unprepared socialist formations when handed the reins of governing power: an executive trap laid to ensnare unready socialist movements and halt them in their tracks.

Cause Célèbre, or the Socialist Cause

It is undeniable that American elections operate on a highly personalist plane. With both bourgeois parties representing less a coherent, principled party platform and more a loose amalgamation of various interests, the force of personality that a candidate brings to the contest is often a deciding factor between Democratic or Republican victories. At most, individual politicians will offer packaged policies tailored to advance the desires of specific interest groups within the confines of the liberal state. As socialists, however, our politics should expand far beyond those boundaries; our goal is not to contest narrow interests within the confines of the bourgeois state, but to replace the entire edifice of liberal capitalist democracy with a socialist democracy which represents and meets the needs of the working class as a society-spanning whole.

Against this dream of emancipatory politics, the current stance of the DSA is somewhat lacking. Workers Deserve More, while a collection of good objectives to campaign behind, lacks the comprehensive challenge to capitalism required to meet the task of being that higher platform by which socialism can present the working class with a comprehensive alternative to capitalist power. Without that wholesale challenge to liberal democracy, DSA campaigns fall back on high-powered personalist candidates with the charm and charisma to sell voters on politically plausible reforms. This is something we have seen most apparently with recent campaigns for municipal executive offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. In both races, the DSA has been part (though a critical part) of the campaign coalition. However, both Zohran Mamdani and Janeese Lewis George’s campaigns have been highly centered around the candidate and their individual policies. In such personalist contests, the excitement each candidate generates is as important to electoral triumph as it is for any capitalist candidate. The DSA, only ever part of the victory, becomes another group of interests whose votes can be marketed to, causing the party to lose much of the strength of its platform for revolutionary messaging as a consequence. Once in office, these personalist elected officials surround themselves with their own teams of advisers and operators, further detaching from the democratic mechanisms of the DSA as a whole and becoming mere affiliates with the party rather than representatives thereof. Rather than putting socialism on the ballot to stir revolutionary consciousness into the mass of voters, the DSA is left with merely electing individual socialists, a decision that leaves the success or failure of the endeavor down to the capabilities of each candidate for executive office.

The divide between legislative and executive offices may not be clear to observers without fully understanding the relation of socialists to the functioning of the state under capitalism. The bourgeois state exists to manage the affairs of capital, its smooth and continued operations of expropriation, and furthermore to ensure the class position of capitalists over the working class. As socialism exists to challenge this political and economic arrangement, socialists should always be in opposition within the liberal state, regardless of the size or level of the jurisdiction. The historical commonality of Social Democratic parties as opposition parties within their respective legislatures is no accident. As a vocal presence within the legislature, socialists could highlight the inadequacies of the liberal state and agitate the masses in favor of a genuine socialist democracy which could best represent the interests of the working class. Such an opposition is plainly not possible from an executive office. Despite being enshrined in the forms of democracy, the executive office in many bourgeois governments is something far closer to a monarchy^[1], and this is most certainly true in how executive positions at every level are regarded in common discourse. The personage of the executive is portrayed as a personal representation of the entirety of the polity they rule over; although put in that position of power by a class-conscious party, once in office, they are expected to operate in the interests of all classes. Once placed upon such a throne, socialist executives are not just cut off from their party, but saddled with the weighty expectations of governing the capitalist state and meeting the needs of all its citizens-and those with the most power will undoubtedly have an outsized capacity to influence such an executive.

The Deep Blue State

The division between personalist executive politicians and the socialist party they originate from becomes most exposed when confronting the mechanisms of discipline and repression within the state. Even in a city under military occupation such as Washington, D.C., the municipal police force (D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department) remains the primary armed body used to discipline the working class and subject them to the legitimized violence of the liberal state. These municipal institutions have responded to the forces impacting labor broadly in the past few decades by walling themselves off from political accountability and embracing even more reactionary politics among rank-and-file officers.^[2] These armed bodies have become institutions less like their liberal ideal of crime-stoppers (though we know how ‘crime’ is often a weapon of that state), and more openly resemble the tsarist Okhrana in their function: explicitly political defenders of a particular reactionary vision of the state and nation against social agitation. Such a force is far less beholden to the accountability of the ruling government, and is more actively willing to engage against socialist forces of unrest. A socialist taking local executive office with nominal authority over such a municipal jurisdiction will struggle to dismantle it, but such a task is necessary to remove the first bulwark of the state against growing socialist power.

The current struggles we see between NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the NYPD-or, one might say, the concerning alignment between them regarding the “needs” of the police force to “maintain order”-show the weakness of the DSA’s ambitions to advance socialism through the personalist frame of executive power. To fight effectively for socialism within the structures of the bourgeois state, socialist electeds must be unified with a socialist mass movement capable of making its democratic program into its own political force capable of flanking the reactionary pressures of liberal governance. As Holden Taylor notes in a letter to Cosmonaut,

[I]f our politicians succumb to the immense pressures of elected office, of managing the capitalist state and negotiating with the vultures and lackeys, of constantly staring down the barrel of a tax-funded terrorist organization, if they feel this pressure and flinch–that is on us. That is the party’s responsibility.^[3]

The personalist approach to campaigns for executive office run by the DSA breaks that responsibility between Socialists in Office (SiOs) and the party in two interrelated ways. One, the operational governance of these mayors becomes a matter of the officials surrounding the executive office (as mentioned in the previous section), turning their focus towards the effective management of the bourgeois democratic state. Two, the democratic mechanisms of the party are detached from the elected official, weakening the claim that these executives are truly representatives of the party while in office. When attacked both ways, even the best-intentioned socialist mayors are cut off from the mass movements they came from, weakening their ability to advance authentic socialist changes that could well move the city towards socialist democracy. So it should not be a surprise to anyone that Zohran has made decisions to horse-trade with bourgeois liberals like Hochul and Lander in order to pass reforms and build an independent base of support within the political jungle of New York City. Such disappointments are simply the consequences of claiming an executive office without the prepared presence of a mass movement necessary to discipline that officeholder against the seemingly overwhelming power of capital expressed through the liberal state. By not providing that social pressure from outside the political landscape of the state, the DSA has left Mamdani with no choice but to make such compromises in order to deliver on the popular standard-of-living policies he built his campaign around. Despite the protestations of great and authentic socialists caught in the executive trap, the economist fruits of such compromises will not grow the socialist presence in New York City into the future mass movement which is required here and now. In the eyes of disinterested workers, the continuance of the ‘acceptable’ violence of the police state^[4] provides plenty of reason to disbelieve in the ability of socialist promises to deliver real change from their current conditions under the capitalist order.

To many electorally minded socialists, the most recent round of victories in the New York City-focused primaries provides proof positive of the value behind holding the executive office of the mayor as a means to sway voters for other local elections. These victories, T.E. Moon crows in Geese^[5], have “repossessed the political infrastructure from the Vichy Democrats”. According to him, these electoral victories represent a “Party of a New Type” (invoked without a shred of sardonicness), “a new organizational formula: the organic class leader coupled with decentralized internet infrastructure.” Basking in the heady glow of electoral triumph, Moon gives brief acknowledgement to the impact that mobilized socialists had on these victories before completely inverting the mass movement’s position within the growth of the socialist movement:

[C]apacity is not a prerequisite for conflict; capacity is an ecosystem that expands precisely through the act of aggression. The masses will not join a movement that promises to politely negotiate terms of surrender. They will join a vehicle that demonstrates a ruthless will to power.

This personalist conception of building mass power from the flashy victories of individual politicians is a profound misrepresentation of what the collective support of the working class is to the socialist movement. A socialist movement without the “capacity” of a mass movement is a collection of bourgeois intellectuals and professional electioneers, detached from the working class and their democratic will. To have working-class people energized just to vote for a celebrity candidate is, ironically, to further wall them off from those elected socialists and from the exercise of democracy itself (more on this later). The difference in the relative utility of candidates and mass movements emerges in the political struggles between elections-a space Moon seems to ignore. As discussed, an elected executive socialist will be put in a position where they will be forced to moderate, limiting their ability to discipline other elected socialists (particularly those operating at the state and federal levels of government). No such moderating force exists to dampen the revolutionary energy of the working class, which can sustain its own mechanisms of party discipline upon electeds far more effectively. Though socialist executives may have a role in bringing other socialists into power, it is the mass movement that makes those elected socialists effective.

Without that mass movement, no amount of executive power will be able to compensate against the reactionary tendencies of the bourgeois state. Another recent article in Geese by T.E. Moon^[6] highlights the flawed thinking around the importance of the executive institution that has led DSA chapters to repeatedly fall into the executive trap. Apart from tactical mistakes such as vastly overestimating the militancy of the District government’s comfortably unionized and politically un-engaged workforce, the strategic vision that leads him to proclaim “Washington D.C. Must Have a Socialist Mayor” sees the gaining of that municipal executive as simply another step of escalatory agitation, with little regard for what it means within the context of the District for a socialist to hold that office. Little is made even in the promises of what a socialist executive might be able to deliver to the working-class residents of the District; her promise as an imagined leader of a civil insurgency against a hypothetical 2029 federal takeover (one that seems increasingly unnecessary as the fascist movement continues to consolidate power) is the main focus of discussion. Still, the article assumes that a socialist executive, once voted into power, will be able to lay hold of the “ready-made state apparatus” to the same effect as a bourgeoisie-backed executive officeholder. It seems rather more likely that the oppressive mechanisms of the District will resist any moves towards reform, particularly in the absence of a mass movement to counterveil their pressure. Inasmuch as the article addresses the coalition that has brought Janeese Lewis George to victory (a coalition of which DSA is only a component), it sees them as a bloc of voters aligned by their state-defined interests, not a mass movement needed to countervail the forces of capital power. Again, Moon puts the cart before the horse by having elected politicians as the driving force pulling along a working class that requires those triumphant elected officials to be mobilized, fundamentally reversing the process of democratic socialism into something that resembles neither term. Ironically, this first-and-foremost emphasis on electoral victories is what drives socialist formations into the executive trap, leaving socialist executives in office to manage the affairs of the bourgeois state without a driving mass movement behind them.

All or Nothing Politics

The challenges of executive power and governance more generally are not new to the cause of social democracy. As social democratic parties across Europe grew into larger and larger fractions of elected chambers (and even elected the occasional representative to the U.S. Congress), demands to use that voting bloc to achieve gains for the working class increased. One tendency that rose to prominence in the French and German Social-Democratic parties, best represented in theory by Eduard Bernstein and in practice by Alexandre Millerand, questioned the need for revolutionary changes to the structures and activities of the government; socialism and working-class power could be achieved, they argued, through proper socialist governance of the liberal state. Such an approach is antithetical to the basis of Marxist theory: in his 1872 preface to the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” From the lessons of the Paris Commune, Marx saw that the oppressive and reactionary systems must be confronted and dismantled from the outset of socialists taking power, or else those same systems will eject the working class from power to maintain the capitalist order. T.E Moon’s article on the New York City primary votes5 also highlights this fact about the bourgeois state, mentioning the Praireland protestors oppressed by the law enforcement machine of the current capitalist government (but only to place more urgency on the project of electing more socialists). We forget at our peril that the mechanisms of the bourgeois state do not exist only to facilitate the processes of capitalism economically, but to guarantee the rule of the capitalist class politically. Working-class power is antithetical to both the form and the function of liberal democracy, and socialists need to confront that reality when even beginning to consider the prospect of governance. Even postponing the discussion of that struggle for the sake of unity, as Karl Kautsky did, concedes to the opportunists who would leave such questions unanswered^[7]; the same concession can be said of Moon, who says nothing of the realities of aiming for control over this oppressive state. What the opportunists promise is the manifestation of socialism without needing to build a revolutionary mass movement, without needing to challenge the mechanisms of an oppressive capitalist state; a democratic socialism that is somehow neither in truth.

The need for answers to the problem of the oppressive state carries immense immediacy when we consider contending for an executive office. Operating as a legislative fraction, it is possible for socialists to engage in a struggle against these organs of the state as an opposition to the liberal capitalist order; it is plainly impossible to be in opposition while holding executive office. The compromises made by Mamdani’s mayorship reflect how unprepared the DSA appears to have been to take their oppositional struggle against the bourgeois state to its highest offices. As Mike Macnair wrote in Revolutionary Strategy, “To govern is to serve capital…[t]o fight for an opposition is to insist that we will not take responsibility for government without commitment to fundamental change in the political regime.”^[8] Without a clear and actionable strategy to engage and break the reactionary forces of the bourgeois state, socialists will be left with the supremely ironic task of managing them, defending the corporate state’s interests and facilitating the extractive work of capitalism.

There is also the issue of messaging and optics around accepting the theoretical power built into the executive office. By running for a position that guarantees governance of the bourgeois state, socialists may seem to flex the boundaries of what is politically acceptable and plausible within the capitalists’ state. But these shifts are only perceptual; the limits of what measures the ruling class will permit from the state to address its material contradictions will not change without significant changes to the state itself. Eventually (or even from the start, as we have seen with Mamdani’s approach to the NYPD), socialists will be pushed back into the limited confines of what is possible within the bourgeois state. Forcing socialists to operate within the bounds of political plausibility is to strip the very revolutionary nature out of our demands; so constrained, socialist movements would be seen as justifying the continuation of the overall system of capitalism, as proof positive that “the system” does not need to be done away with wholesale, only given minor reforms that do not compromise the class position of the bourgeoisie. Rather than demonstrating to the masses that true change must come from outside of the bounds of what the state determines is possible, a socialist executive (and perhaps even a socialist President) gives legitimacy to those who would argue for tolerance of the capitalist system’s weight upon the working class.

More Than Voters

One group that has barely achieved a mention here, despite their importance in the voting process itself, is the worker living in this democratic society. We forget, in our focus on the rise and fall of individual politicians, that they are only ever part of the democratic equation, a part and not the driving one at that! Working-class people should be considered even more vitally important for socialists running electoral campaigns than any bourgeois politician. The main (if not the entire) point of engaging in electoralism as socialists must be to connect with and activate class consciousness in members of the working class, asking them to be more than unconscious voters who only engage in politics every two or four years, as bourgeois politicians ask them to do. By putting reforms delivered by charismatic executives (or even just their electoral victories) over revolutionary change delivered by engaged socialist movements, socialists limit themselves to building just one more voting bloc in one individual’s contest within bourgeois democracy rather than a mass movement of collective power.

In the minds of most voters, running for and winning executive office means a certain level of change from the previous government, which further reinforces the personalist nature of elections under bourgeois democracy. Workers called by a campaign only to act as mere voters will expect political solutions to be delivered unto them by the socialist-managed bourgeois state and will be deactivated in turn as the state compromises those socialist executives and curtails their ambitious promises. Campaigns must actively strive to educate the working class about the fullness of the political struggle beyond the ballot box and beyond what the liberal state can accomplish. Though the taste of defeat may be a bitter one, socialists may still win strategic victories even in defeat through building upon the growing class consciousness their campaigns can inspire in the working class for future political contests, both inside and outside of the electoral battleground.^[9]

This does not mean total ceding of the liberal-democratic battlefield to the parties of bourgeois interests. There are still advancements in the lives of working-class people and consciousness-raising rallying points to be won by marching into the halls of power. But the success of the socialist movement will not come from putting sufficiently charismatic butts in sufficiently powerful seats. Mobilizing masses of people to crown a singular personalist politician is the tactic of the capitalist parties-parties uninterested in universal, consciousness-raising, emancipatory politics that lie beyond what the current system can offer. To place politicians and their electoral wins ahead of building the capacity of the mass movement is to remove the working class from the focus of power - something that should be the very heart of the socialist goal! The socialist movement must avoid acclaiming an individual executive to lead us to triumph; the roar of the mass movement, our own voices lifted up together, must always take center stage.

Patience through the Storm

To call this tendency the “Executive Trap” may be totalizing to many readers. There certainly can be benefits to the socialist movement for a party candidate to make a challenge for executive office, as discussed immediately above. Although socialist parties may feel immense pressure to seize onto the machinery of the capitalist state, if for no other reason than to deny it to the bourgeoisie, the immediate results of electoral contests should not eclipse all other considerations. Even in the event of failure, the socialist movement can still advance in the electoral arena by coming out stronger as a movement and bringing the socialist party’s platform and politics to as many interested workers as possible. Governance of the bourgeois state, however, is something far more fraught with peril to the socialist movement, and an unavoidable question for any executive campaign. Any socialist campaign for an executive office must be prepared beyond the questions of how to achieve an electoral triumph and must be ready to meaningfully challenge the bourgeois state from within.

And what should socialist formations do if they find themselves caught in the “trap”? Dealing with being handed the reins of governance is certainly a challenge, even for a prepared socialist movement. This is a challenge that most of DSA might not be up to at the local or national level. First is establishing limits on the personalist nature of executive officeholders with regard to the party as a whole. Elected officials need to operate as representatives of the party and its platform, subject to all the critique and accountability of any other member. As the performance of elected socialists reflects on the movement as a whole, their actions need to be understood and undertaken as part of a broader strategy of the socialist movement (a strategy that takes place not just during elections, but embraces the constant struggle). The party must be ready not just to celebrate the successes of elected executives coming from its ranks, but to criticize them when they fall short of the party’s standards and, where such failures are made inevitable by the political limits of the bourgeois state, emphasize that fact to uplift the consciousness of the working class towards a new form of socialist democracy. Despite the all-or-nothing implications of contesting elections for executive office, such wins and losses cannot be the end-state of socialism; they are only one more part in the building of a better world.

1. Karl Kautsky, The Republic and Social Democracy in France, 1905, Chapter 6

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2. Julian Assele, “Abolish Blue Power”, Cosmonaut, June 4, 2026

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3. Holden Taylor, “Letter: Socialist Integrity and the Pigs”, Cosmonaut, June 5, 2026

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4. “NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani bringing back homeless encampment sweeps, but with some differences,” CBS News, last modified February 18, 2026.

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5. T.E. Moon, “Socialists Win Big in New York: Now is the Time for a Grand Offensive!”, geese., accessed 6/25/2026, https://www.geesemag.com/articles/socialists-win-big-in-new-york-now-is-the-time-for-the-offensive

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6. T.E. Moon, “Washington D.C. Must Have a Socialist Mayor”, geese., June 9, 2026, https://www.geesemag.com/articles/washington-dc-must-have-a-socialist-mayor.

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7. “Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Chapter VI,” marxists.org, accessed June 11, 2026, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch06.htm.

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8. Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy (November Publications, 2008), 170

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9. “Why Run Independents? A Response to Collective Power Network”, Cosmonaut, accessed June 11, 2026, https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/05/why-run-independents-a-response-to-collective-power-network/

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