How Did Astoria Become So Socialist?

Earlier in the day, I had also met Shawna Morlock, who had been one of the very first volunteers for Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign. Morlock, who was a hairdresser, had moved to Astoria a few years earlier with her husband, a restaurant manager, because it was “a place you could afford on two blue-collar salaries.” She had never worked on a political campaign. On her very first canvassing mission, near Astoria Park, she met Ocasio-Cortez, who, in a role play, pretended to be a voter and asked Morlock to practice introducing her. (“I was so awkward and terrible, but she was so nice,” Morlock said.) Morlock joined the DSA and eventually became a full-time staffer for Gonzalez, the state senator.

“I don’t think I joined DSA thinking I was a socialist,” Morlock told me. “I joined because they believe the same thing I believe in.” The year after Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Morlock campaigned for Cabán, who was running for Queens district attorney. (Cabán lost the Democratic nomination by only fifty-five votes and was later elected to the city council.) One day, Morlock recalls, “I was picking up my literature to knock on doors, and a volunteer said to me, ‘Thank you, comrade.’ “I was like, ‘Okay? Comrade. . . I guess.’ As Morlock says, it took a few campaigns to “dis-McCarthyize” his mind. “After organizing for a few years, I’m, like, I’m a socialist.”

Astoria can look a bit like an island. It’s nice, a little isolated, and has good seafood. Is there something about this place that has made it more open to socialist politics? “Astoria is very accessible,” Nicolaou, the left-wing Greek organizer, told me. “People are accessible to each other. » “It’s walkable, it’s beautiful, it’s a good place to run political campaigns,” Lange told me. There’s an argument that Astoria is the ideal location for one of the DSA’s signature New York tactics: canvassing. “I basically destroyed all of Astoria,” Morlock told me. When she rings the doorbell, people come to talk to her. “I keep coming back again and again, cycle after cycle, to the same people who remember me,” she said.

In 1932, Morris Hillquit, one of the founders of the Socialist Party of America, coined the term “sewer socialism” to describe a kind of socialism focused on everyday municipal problems. Nicolaou said many older residents in the area were impressed by young DSA members who were running errands for vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic. Karolidis told me the story of Mamdani, when he was an MP, helping elderly people in an affordable housing complex near Ditmars. “Now there are dozens of Greek seniors in this complex who love Zohran because he helped them,” he said. The Cabán City Council office, he added, has a reputation for being very responsive. “It’s little things over and over again,” Morlock said. Some people “probably don’t know about DSA and what it means to be a socialist,” Karolidis said, “but they see our candidates and think, ‘Oh, yeah, I had a good experience, I like these people.’ »

The DSA’s local outpost in Astoria, the Queens branch, is also known for being results-oriented and consistent, several people told me. (“Nobody’s like, ‘Oh, man, this candidate doesn’t know this Marxist theory,'” Lange said.) Years of election victories have reinforced this approach and helped members create connections outside of politics. The New York chapter of DSA has a running club and a thriving parent group called Comrades with Kids. (Diana Moreno, who was recently endorsed by Mamdani to fill her state Assembly seat, is a loyal member of the parents’ focus group.) In Astoria, normie Democrats are eventually converting. Morlock told me about a friend of his from the neighborhood. “When we first met, I remember her saying, ‘Oh, I like Kamala Harris or Cory Booker,'” she said. Now this friend is sending Morlock communist memes. “Really, really harsh anti-capitalist stuff,” Morlock said. Why did this happen? “This mom…she has a hard time affording things that used to be easy,” Morlock said. “Our children are considered an afterthought. Our elected leaders don’t care. Everyone is pissed!” Lignou, one of Astoria’s longtime residents, told me: “Astoria attracted a lot of people because it was very humane. You can save and raise a family. Then everything became very expensive. It was a very good example of what capitalism does.”

Recently, I visited Syllogos Kreton Minos, a community club for the Cretan diaspora in northern Astoria, to attend an evening of Greek music organized by Nicolaou. I was eager to ask longtime Astoria residents about the recent left shift. “The Greek left loves this kind of music,” Nicolaou told me, referring to a genre called rebetikowhich she described as a Greek version of the blues. Inside there were a few Christmas decorations and some older Cretans were playing endless card tricks in one corner. I was early, so I started eating a big plate of pork kleftikoa dish of meat and red and green peppers, braised with oregano and olive oil. Little by little, the musicians settled in and the tables around me began to fill up. Akrivos, the Athenian from a political family, was picking at a plate of fried whiting, and Barbara Lambrakis, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria since she was thirteen, handed me a glass of grappa mixed with honey. Lambrakis was very happy to tell me that she owned a building near Mamdani’s house. “Even though I own rent-stabilized apartments, I support it, believe it or not,” she said.

I sat next to Maria Lymberopoulos, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria for fifty years. Lymberopoulos told me she considers herself more of a liberal, but since 2019 she has consistently voted for DSA candidates. She is not interested in the label “socialist.” (Mamdani, she said, reminded her of a young Barack Obama.) “I believe in the social problems that we have — everything costs money. They care about the things that the average person needs.” There wasn’t much difference between her idea of ​​liberalism and Astoria’s idea of ​​socialism, she said. “Maybe as you get older your mind opens up more,” she told me. “And you are willing to accept what your grandson or your young neighbor does.”

In the meantime, Nicolaou and a friend had started dancing. Akrivos was eating noodles on a bouzouki. As the music played, Lymberopoulos made sure to tell me that most of the Greeks in Astoria were not that left-wing. Earlier, I had also spoken to a man in his sixties named Dimitris, who someone had described to me as an “old-school Greek communist.” (Dimitris declined to give his last name. “They have memories of McCarthy,” Nicolaou said.) Dimitris told me proudly that in the early 1990s, the former general secretary of the Greek Communist Party visited Astoria and met him; his friend showed me a photo on his phone. Dimitris was grateful to the socialist wave, but he was not entirely impressed. “I wouldn’t call them socialists,” he said of Astoria’s young residents. “As Marx said, all crucial sectors of the economy are supposed to belong to the people. I haven’t heard any of these candidates propose anything like that.” Of Ocasio-Cortez, he told me: “She’s not a Marxist. Anyone can say, ‘I’m a socialist.'” It’s become fashionable.