Zohran Mamdani (guest)

So I wouldn't

describe those two identities as mutually exclusive.

I think that one can live within the other, meaning that I am both a democratic socialist and I'm also a Democrat.

One is a description of my political ideology, the other is a description of the party that I belong to.

DSA being the ideology.

Democratic socialism being the ideology, DSA being an organization, the Democratic Party being the party.

And it was Bernie Sanders' run in 2016

that gave me the language of democratic socialism to describe my own politics.

It took what I had thought were disparate ideas and cohered them and gave me an understanding of

What that politics was and also what a larger movement looked like of people who also were animated by that same focus on dignity on the unacceptable nature of income inequality across this country.

And to me, what democratic socialism means is a belief that.

It is government's job to ensure that every person is living a life of dignity.

And dignity is not the things that you'd like.

It's not the things that you'd want.

It's the things that you need.

And there's a general common sense around many of those things.

In New York City, in this country, we'd say that every child deserves public education.

That's a free point of service of K through 12.

But we also think that it's okay to be priced out of the education you need prior to that, child care.

And for some reason, there's a point at which you should deserve education, and there's a point before that at which it depends on your family's ability to pay.