When Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor of New York on Thursday, the city will become the largest local government in the United States led by a Democratic Socialist.
Till then, Montgomery County holds the title.
County Executive Marc Elrich has been a socialist since college. He’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Party — separate groups with ideas that sometimes align but do not match.
The distinction isn’t so much with the parties as it is in economic theories, socialism and capitalism.
“Capitalism is all about capital. It’s about ‘he with the capital gets to make the rules,’ and socialism is about society focused around the social element — how people live and what people experience at the community level,” Elrich said.
You hear other words for those ideas these days — words such as affordability and abundance.
Mamdami won as a socialist in New York by convincing voters in a city grown too expensive for ordinary people that he would make their lives the priority of government, rather than a hoped-for outcome of government designed to advance business.
“What is the end result?” Elrich asked. “Making sure that wealthy people can get wealthier? Or is the end result making sure that most people are allowed to have decent lives and opportunity?”
The unique thing about Elrich’s role as chief executive is that it reverses how the word socialism is used in Maryland politics. Most of the time, it is a political insult hurled by conservatives.
He doesn’t wear the label on his sleeve, but socialism has been part of his career as a teacher and community organizer, a Takoma Park city councilman and Montgomery County Council member. As his term ends next year, he’ll ask voters to keep him on as an at-large council member.
“We have rent stabilization now in the county. Not a great law because the conservatives on the council weakened it, but better than what we had,” Elrich said.
The county built a record amount of affordable housing during Elrich’s tenure, created an agency to work on food insecurity during COVID, has its own minimum wage law and operates 11 public health clinics.
“It’s a real, legitimate, actual health care system in Montgomery County, and without that, you’d have tens of thousands of people with no access to medical care,” he said.
Socialism in American government stretches back to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, even if he didn’t call it that. It’s what built the middle class.
Social Security, the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and paid vacation are all ideas from the political left. They’re all in response to capitalism.
“Roosevelt was afraid of going down the European path of revolution,” Elrich said. “They understood, if you don’t take care of the working class, there will come a point when they rebel, and when they rebel, you will lose everything. And that’s not what he wanted to have happen.”
If this sounds an awful lot like what’s happening today, there’s good reason. Republicans have been working for 15 years to undo the Affordable Care Act, characterizing it as socialized medicine. It’s the same thing they said about Medicare.
President Donald Trump won his second term by posing as the champion of the middle and working class, although it sure looks like he’s working for a billionaire constituency.
Just as the blue-collar electorate abandoned President Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2024, public opinion polls show they may do the same to Trump and the Republicans in 2026.
“I don’t think you can have a robust safety net unless there’s some redistribution of wealth,” Elrich said.
Democrats lost that knowledge. Instead of relying on the working class, they chased billionaires with a social conscience.
And billionaires want what billionaires always want.
It’s not just Elrich who put these programs and ideals into place in Montgomery County. It is the state’s biggest jurisdiction, with more than 1 million residents.
It has a highly educated, affluent populace based on the stability of federal employment — a foundation shaken by Trump’s antipathy to government.
Some of the initiatives Elrich attributes to socialism probably would have happened in some shape without him.
You’ve started to see them in purple areas such as Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, where spending has increased on human services, affordable housing and transportation because it’s what the public demands.
Elrich has long advocated for treating residential and commercial property taxes differently, raising the latter to pay for improvements. He believes businesses are willing to pay higher taxes, as long as the money isn’t used for social programs.
That’s how Northern Virginia, part of a state that often beats Maryland on rankings of tax burden, paid for the foundation of its economic growth.
Yet Elrich failed to convince his council or the General Assembly to let him tax businesses for improvements to the always-congested Capital Beltway.
“I think it’s the most important thing for the county to do, because there’s no money at the state,” he said. “It’s unrealistic.”
The only way to get around limits on local taxing authority today is with a tax increment financing agreement, a kind of hyper-local tax district created almost 50 years ago.
The county will issue its first TIF for the $2.8 billion Viva White Oak project. Tax revenue from the mixed-use project will help pay for the infrastructure, creating more housing and jobs in an underserved part of the county.
Just don’t call it socialism.
When congressional Republicans put forward a resolution condemning socialism before Mamdani visited Trump in November, two Maryland lawmakers voted for it.
Andy Harris, the state’s lone Republican in Congress, voted yes — as did Democrat April McLain Delany.
She lives in Montgomery County, making her a constituent of Maryland’s top socialist.
Elrich says he doesn’t care about the label, just solutions.
“If you were to go out there and say, this is a socialist platform, these are all socialist ideas, you all should adopt them,” Elrich said. “I don’t think half of them would ever get discussed.”
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