Earlier in the day, I’d also met with Shawna Morlock, who had been one of the very first volunteers on Ocasio-Cortez’s primary campaign. Morlock, who was a hair stylist, 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 first-ever canvassing shift, near Astoria Park, she met Ocasio-Cortez, who, in a role-play, pretended to be a voter, and had Morlock practice pitching her. (“I was so awkward and terrible, but she was so kind,” Morlock said.) Morlock joined the D.S.A. and eventually became a full-time staffer to Gonzalez, the state senator.
“I don’t think I joined D.S.A. thinking, I am a socialist,” Morlock told me. “I joined it because they believe the same thing I believe in.” The year after Ocasio-Cortez won, Morlock campaigned for Cabán, who was running for Queens District Attorney. (Cabán lost the Democratic nomination by just fifty-five votes, and was later elected to the City Council.) One day, Morlock recalled, “I was picking up my literature to knock doors, and one volunteer was, like, ‘Thank you, comrade.’ ” I was, like, ‘O.K.? Comrade . . . I guess.’ ” As Morlock puts it, it took a few campaigns to “dis-McCarthyize” her mind. “After organizing for a couple of years, I’m, like, I’m socialist.”
Astoria can feel a bit like an island. It’s nice, a little isolated, and has good seafood. Is there something about it as a place that has made it more amenable to socialist politics? “Astoria is very accessible,” Nicolaou, the Greek left-wing 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 is an argument that Astoria is the perfect place for one of the D.S.A.’s signature New York tactics—the canvass. “I’ve knocked all of Astoria, basically,” Morlock told me. When she rings a doorbell, people actually come to talk to her. “I’m coming back to the same people, over and over, cycle to cycle, who remember me,” she said.
In 1932, Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party of America, coined the term “sewer socialism” to describe a kind of socialism that focusses on everyday municipal problems. Nicolaou said that a lot of the neighborhood’s older residents were impressed by young D.S.A. members who went grocery shopping for vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic. Karolidis told me a story about Mamdani, when he was a state assemblyman, supporting seniors at an affordable-housing complex near Ditmars. “Now there are dozens of older Greek seniors in this complex who love Zohran because he helped them out,” he said. The City Council office of Cabán, he added, has a reputation for being very responsive. “It’s the little things over and over,” Morlock said. Some people are “probably not familiar with D.S.A. and what it means to be a socialist,” Karolidis said, “but they see our candidates and are, like, ‘Oh, yes, I had a good experience—I like these people.’ ”
Astoria’s local outpost of the D.S.A., the Queens branch, is also known for being results-focussed and cohesive, multiple people told me. (“There’s nobody who is, like, ‘Oh, man, this candidate doesn’t know this Marxist theory,’ ” Lange said.) Years of winning elections have reinforced that approach, and helped members bond outside politics. The New York City chapter of D.S.A. has a run club and a thriving parents’ group called Comrades with Kids. (Diana Moreno, who was recently endorsed by Mamdani to take over his State Assembly seat, is a loyal member of the parents’ group chat.) In Astoria, normie Democrats wind up getting converted. Morlock told me about a friend of hers from the neighborhood. “When we first met, I remember her being, like, ‘Oh, I love Kamala Harris or Cory Booker,’ ” she said. Now that friend sends Morlock communist memes. “Really, really hard-core anti-capitalist things,” Morlock said. Why did that happen? “This mom—she is struggling to afford the things that used to be easy,” Morlock said. “Our kids are seen as an afterthought. Our elected leaders don’t give a shit. Everybody’s fucking pissed!” Lignou, one of the longtime Astoria residents, told me, “Astoria attracted many 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.”
On a recent evening, I pushed open the door of the Syllogos Kreton Minos, a community club for the Cretan diaspora in northern Astoria, to attend a Greek music night, run by Nicolaou. I was looking forward to quizzing long-term Astoria residents about the recent leftward turn. “The Greek left loves this kind of music,” Nicolaou had told me, referring to a genre called rebetiko, which she described as a Greek version of the blues. Inside, there were a few Christmas decorations, and some older Cretan men played endless rounds of cards in the corner. I was early, so I started eating a large plate of pork kleftiko, a dish of meat and red and green peppers, braised with oregano and olive oil. Slowly, the musicians set up and the tables around me started filling. Akrivos, the Athenian from a political family, was picking at a plate of fried whiting, and I was handed a shot glass of grappa mixed with honey by Barbara Lambrakis, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria since she was thirteen. Lambrakis was very excited to tell me that she owned an apartment building near where Mamdani lived. “Even though I do own rent-stabilized apartments, I support him, believe it or not,” she said.
I was sitting next to Maria Lymberopoulos, a seventy-five-year-old woman who has lived in Astoria for fifty years. Lymberopoulos told me she thinks of herself more as a liberal, but since 2019 she had consistently voted for D.S.A. candidates. She’s not interested in the “socialist” label. (Mamdani, she said, reminded her of a young Barack Obama.) “I believe in the social issues we have—everything is expensive. They’re concerned about the things the average person needs.” There wasn’t much difference between her idea of liberalism and Astoria’s idea of socialism, she said. “Maybe, when you get older, your mind opens up more,” she told me. “And you’re ready to accept what your grandson or the young neighbor is doing.”
In the meantime, Nicolaou and a friend had started dancing. Akrivos was noodling on a bouzouki. Over the music, Lymberopoulos made sure to tell me that most Greek people in Astoria weren’t this leftist. Earlier, I’d also spoken to a man in his late sixties, named Dimitris, whom 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 nineties, the former general secretary of the Greek Communist Party had visited Astoria, and he’d met him; his friend showed me a photo on his phone. Dimitris was grateful for the socialist wave, but he wasn’t fully impressed. “I wouldn’t call them socialists,” he said of Astoria’s younger residents. “As Marx put it, all the crucial sectors of the economy—they are supposed to belong to the people. I didn’t hear any of those candidates proposing something like that.” Of Ocasio-Cortez, he told me, “She’s not a Marxist. Anybody can say ‘I’m a socialist.’ It’s become fashionable to.”
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