Astoria, NY, is Becoming the American Center of Democratic Socialism

Astoria, NY, is Becoming the American Center of Democratic Socialism

The New Yorker attempts to explain how this happened. One of the key aspects is the importation of lots of radical, left-wing immigrants:

How did this happen? Recently, I spoke to a half-dozen activists, campaigners, and longtime Astoria residents. “The short answer is extreme demographic change,” Akrivos told me. Astoria doesn’t have a particularly extensive history of socialism. Katya Nicolaou, another resident and left-wing organizer, said that there had been an influx of radical Greek students, like her and Akrivos, in the seventies and eighties. And Akrivos told me that in the late nineteenth century, pockets of socialist German immigrants settled in the area. (Also in the nineteenth century, a company town set up around the Steinway piano factory had elements of utopian-socialism.) But generally, in recent decades, the residents were conservative Democrats. Astoria is the fictional home of Archie Bunker, the bigoted, blue-collar guy from the nineteen-seventies sitcom “All in the Family,” who perpetually bickered with his more progressive relatives. (Bunker’s son-in-law, Mike, was a bit more woke, but probably not D.S.A.-level.) It used to be represented in Congress by Joe Crowley, an establishment Democrat, and at the State Assembly level for ten years by Aravella Simotas, a progressive but not socialist Greek American. Simotas narrowly lost a primary in 2020 to Mamdani, by around four hundred votes. Simotas told me recently that she had noticed the electorate had started to change more than fifteen years ago, even before Ocasio-Cortez’s initial victory.

What changed? Astoria, which was relatively affordable at that point, started to attract people who cared about the cost of living. Young families moved in. New immigrants continued to come, too, increasingly from the Middle East and South Asia. Stylianos Karolidis, a thirty-one-year-old D.S.A. member who grew up in Astoria, told me that new arrivals tend to be more open to D.S.A. candidates because they didn’t have a preëxisting loyalty to New York’s Democratic machine. “That makes people more open to change,” he explained. Georgia Lignou, who moved to the neighborhood in 1987, ventured that Astoria’s immigrant mix is also a bit less scared of the word “socialist.” “We come from parts of the world where socialism isn’t a curse,” she told me. Karolidis agreed. Even some of the newer Greek migrants, who are still coming to Astoria, he said, are pretty radical, thanks to the eurozone crisis.

It’s not just who arrived. Around the same time, Astoria’s conservative Democrats—the Archie Bunkers—started leaving the Party and becoming Republicans. Michael Lange, a New York elections analyst who is often credited with coining the term “Commie Corridor,” described it to me as a “perfect storm.” Astoria isn’t actually the most left-leaning neighborhood in New York. (That would be parts of Williamsburg and Bushwick, in Brooklyn, and parts of Ridgewood, in Queens.) In the general mayoral election, Lange pointed out, some parts of Astoria voted more than forty per cent for Andrew Cuomo. But those voters aren’t dominant in Astoria’s Democratic primaries anymore.

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