A few days after Zohran Mamdani’s upstart victory in the Democratic mayoral primary, in June, a podcast called “The Dig” released an episode titled “How Zohran Won.” “Socialists are on the precipice of controlling one of the most powerful posts in the country,” the host, Daniel Denvir, said. “And this isn’t just about New York. Liberal voters are shifting left—and fast.”
Had it been on CBS News or “Morning Joe,” this line might have been delivered with skepticism or ambivalence. On Fox News, it would have been a call to arms. But on “The Dig,” a socialist podcast affiliated with Jacobin magazine, it was cause for celebration. The election, Denvir said, had put him “in a more profound state of political ecstasy than I can recall being in since I first joined the American left, as a teen-ager in the late nineties.” He called Mamdani “truly a generational political talent—an Obama-tier political communicator, but with good politics, unlike Obama.”
Denvir is forty-two years old and lives in Providence, where he co-chairs a leftist political organization and records “The Dig” from his garage. The other day, he took an Amtrak to Penn Station and a subway up to Washington Heights, for a Mamdani rally in the ornate United Palace theatre. Denvir wore a Henley and a graying beard and had a wheeled suitcase in tow, which was causing a problem with security. Jack Gross, a friend of Denvir’s and the editor of a leftist publication called Phenomenal World, offered to stash the bag in the trunk of his Camry.
“I’m mortified that you’re doing this for me,” Denvir said, passing him the suitcase.
Gross, with a grin, said, “Hey, this is solidarity in action.”
Denvir wasn’t on the press list, but he talked to a volunteer behind a folding table (“ ‘The Dig’? D-I-G?”) and was waved in. He stopped at the bar to buy an overpriced Modelo, then made his way through the lobby. A few people recognized him, and a few more recognized him after they heard his voice. “ ‘Thawra’ was so amazing,” a woman in a hijab said, referring to a “mini-series on Arab radicalisms” that Denvir released last year.
“I tried to keep it to one or two episodes, I swear,” Denvir replied. It ended up being sixteen, plus three epilogues—more than forty hours in total.
“The Dig” is not mass entertainment. Episodes are long and unapologetically academic—for listeners who want to “jump into the deep end of left politics,” as Denvir puts it. (The Guardian once called him “a socialist Terry Gross.”) He has interviewed nearly every star intellectual on the left, as well as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (twice each). The politicians may or may not have time to listen, but their staffers certainly do. “Within my world—leftist organizers, lapsed academics, or political-campaign staff, all of which I am—the show is incredibly influential,” Andrew Epstein, Mamdani’s creative director, said.
Denvir is friendly with the podcasters of the so-called dirtbag left, but unlike them, he said, “I don’t crack a lot of jokes on the show. I keep it pretty structured.” Even “How Zohran Won,” a relatively loose episode featuring two organizers from the Democratic Socialists of America, started with a characteristically nerdy question about how the “social-democratic order” of post-LaGuardia New York was “smashed by neoliberalism” in the seventies. One of the guests from that episode, Gustavo Gordillo, approached Denvir in the theatre lobby, and they hugged. Gordillo wore a D.S.A. button, and he carried a rally sign bearing the slogan of the evening: “Our Time Has Come.”
Denvir found his seat, and the lights dimmed. Ever the commentator, he whispered live assessments of each speaker; he gave higher marks to the city councilman Chi Ossé (“He’s talking in terms of a ‘we,’ broadly conceived”) than to Representative Nydia Velázquez, who spoke about Mamdani’s personal narrative. (Even in his chitchat, Denvir uses words like “conjuncture” and “effectuate.”) When Natasha Cloud, a player for the New York Liberty, said “Free Palestine,” Denvir gave her a standing ovation. He also applauded the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who has been targeted for political prosecution by the Trump Administration. Compared with himself, he said between sips of beer, “she’s a centrist liberal, but we have to figure out how to work with liberals if we want to wield any real power.”
After the rally, Denvir, Gordillo, and a few other D.S.A. organizers headed to a friend’s nearby rooftop. “As soon as Zohran does literally anything as mayor, the left is going to be furious at him,” Denvir said, pulling his retrieved suitcase. “A socialist running the N.Y.P.D.? That’s a dilemma we’ve never faced before. We have to criticize him, but we also can’t just say, ‘He’s a sellout for not immediately abolishing the police.’ Actually dealing with these contradictions—that’s the left growing up.” ♦
