A Democratic Socialist Spreads the Word, Even in Hostile Territory

The democratic socialist and his Fox News interrogator circled each other for almost 15 minutes, disagreeing on everything from homeless encampments to whether the U.S. Senate is truly democratic.

But it was a question about city-owned grocery stores in New York that left the host speechless.

Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, declared that if city-owned stores brought down prices enough to drum people out of business, “then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

The Fox host, Martha MacCallum, paused for a couple of beats. “Interesting,” she muttered, and moved on.

Many democratic socialist leaders have long been wary of engaging with news media beyond outlets friendly to their cause. But as socialist candidates from New York, Michigan, Colorado and elsewhere rack up primary victories, Mr. Gordillo and other young socialist leaders are taking their budding insurgency inside hostile territory.

Mr. Gordillo, like Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, represents the rising generation of young socialists who say their breakout moment should not be squandered.

Mr. Gordillo’s interview — one of eight last month on Fox News by a D.S.A. leader or candidate — ricocheted around right-wing quarters of the internet. Conservative pundits and politicians picked apart Mr. Gordillo’s every word about landlords, the Constitution and the American dream.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that Mr. Gordillo’s evasiveness about a D.S.A. proposal to eliminate the Senate was proof that socialists want “to get rid of the entire Constitution.” The New York Post editorial page called his ideas “garbage” that would “bankrupt businesspeople.”

The backlash “was kind of shocking,” recalled Mr. Gordillo, a youthful-looking 38-year-old who wears his hair pulled into a bun. He said he and his colleagues had prepped for the Fox interview by posing mock questions.

In addition to Fox, democratic socialists have sat for interviews over the last few weeks with prominent conservative hosts and columnists including Katie Pavlich of NewsNation and Ross Douthat of The New York Times. (Mr. Mamdani sat down for an interview with Fox News during his campaign last year.)

The glare can be harsh and unflattering on an ideology that has languished on the fringes of the American left for decades. Democratic socialists have been scorned as faux populists and elitists, catering to mostly humanities graduates who know little of the working-cl*** struggles they decry.

The democratic socialists’ own 2021 survey of their membership found the party was overwhelmingly young, white and highly educated.

Mr. Gordillo graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in 2010 and then enrolled in its fine arts masters program, studying sculpture and video.

He does not see the liberal-elite stereotype as particularly relevant. He believes enough voters — including those who get their information from conservative sources — will not care either, he said, given how extreme economic disparities have become.

Mr. Gordillo saw the news media differently after Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns. “They did want Fox to cover the rallies,” he recalled.

That represents a maturing of the movement, said David Griscom, an author and host of the podcast “The Jacobin Show,” from the socialist magazine of the same name. “People were engaged in debating left-wing theory as a kind of talk shop,” he said.

“That was a trap the left found itself in,” Mr. Griscom added. “It kept us from talking about a material program of housing affordability, Medicare for all, free buses.”

Many socialists today say their ideas should be debated in front of large audiences. And they haven’t had a moment in recent memory when so many people were watching. Fox News said Ms. MacCallum’s interview was seen at least 4.3 million times, counting people who watched it live and later online.

At its convention last weekend, the national D.S.A. said that it credentialed 17 reporters and that 13 attended. In 2023, only one or two attended.

Socialists tend to see the mainstream media as dismissive of their cause and corrupted by corporate influence. And some argue that appearing on an outlet with pro-Trump, right-wing points of view validates an ideology they loathe.

“I am sympathetic to that,” Mr. Gordillo said. “But I don’t agree that we shouldn’t engage.”

Mr. Gordillo represents an American success story. He was 3 when his family emigrated from Peru to South Florida. His parents worked low-wage jobs before establishing themselves. His father founded a successful company that installs wireless communications systems.

But his family’s success is exceedingly rare for immigrants today, he said.

“My parents came here, they had nothing,” he said. “Their first jobs were in fast food and cleaning houses. They built success in this country. And they’re absolutely the exception.”

The democratic socialist project, he said, is to “build a world where that’s not exceptional.”

At the time his family left Peru, the country was deeply and violently divided. On Fox News, Ms. MacCallum reminded Mr. Gordillo of the Shining Path, a Mao-Zedong-inspired communist militia that had seized large swaths of the country and carried out ******inations.

He dismissed the Shining Path as irrelevant to D.S.A.’s political goals.

In an interview, he said another socialist movement in Latin America had much more resonance: Catholic liberation theology, which he learned about from his grandmother. Developed from the writings of a Peruvian priest, it says the church is duty bound to help overturn social and political systems that perpetuate poverty and inequality.

“I think that’s probably why I was more open to socialist beliefs,” he said.

When he moved to New York after art school, he said, his political views started shifting harder to the left. He found work in a high-end art gallery in Chelsea, but the job left him deeply conflicted. He said he had seen billionaires buy artwork that cost more than most average families make in a year.

And his work, he said, was “low paid, precarious and supported by the people I was opposing politically.”

Donald Trump’s 2016 victory led Mr. Gordillo to join the city’s chapter of the D.S.A. He lobbied in Albany for the successful campaign to increase funding for publicly owned renewable energy projects. Seeing how that investment could create jobs for skilled manual laborers, he became an electrician and joined the union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

It wasn’t that different from being a sculptor, he explained: “It’s kind of a transferable set of skills.”

Many in Mr. Gordillo’s circle define working cl*** broadly and do not see dissonance with the idea that people who grew up in privilege can represent those who grew up struggling. The cost of living has risen so high, they argue, that even tech workers and lawyers making $200,000 a year have tight budgets.

The D.S.A.’s tent is getting bigger, said Grace Mausser, the other co-chair of the New York chapter. She is 31, has a master’s degree in public policy and said she did not start identifying as a socialist until President Trump’s first term. Last month, she sat for an interview on “Fox and Friends.”

The chapter has doubled in size, to almost 15,000 members, since Mr. Mamdani announced his mayoral campaign in October 2024. Of those members, 40 percent are nonwhite, she said.

But the best evidence that the D.S.A. message is penetrating, Ms. Mausser and Mr. Gordillo agreed, is Mr. Trump, who keeps attacking them as “communists.”

“Democratic socialism is just not the scary word it used to be,” Mr. Gordillo said. “That’s why Trump has to say ‘communism.’”