The Sewer Socialists v. the Crony Capitalists: Who Can Drain the Swamp?
In this week’s Substack, American socialists take on the job of clean governance, followed by my imaginary clinical intervention with the President.
Democratic socialists won big in New York City races in the June primaries. Socialist candidates achieved impressive victories in local elections elsewhere in the country as well, many by enlisting the long legacy of “sewer socialism.” In 2022, union organizer Juan Miguel Martinez and city council member Ryan Clancy both cited the sewer socialists as part of an honorable Wisconsin tradition of good governance. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Milwaukie socialists fought to repair the city’s toxic industrial legacy, cleaning up neighborhoods and factories with new sanitation systems and city-owned water and power systems.
In marking his first 100 days as the newly elected Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani invokes this tradition in his administration’s program to clean up the city. “I know there are many who use ‘socialist’ as a dirty word, something to be ashamed of,” he proclaims. “They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for the many, not simply the few.” The mayor spoke about sewer socialism on the campaign trail, promising to build more public restrooms across the city and to improve garbage services across the boroughs.
In primary contests of 2026, we witness one of the many ironies of the Trump era. Here the drama unfolds around his MAGA promise to Drain the swamp! The sewer socialists seem the only politicians intent on taking the slogan seriously.
Dirty and Clean: Symbolic Boundaries in American Politics
The socialists entering Congress have a big job ahead of them, however. Swamp-dwellers proliferate at an alarming rate. The obscenely wealthy, Big Tech, military contractors and mega-donors devour everything within their reach. Corporate Democrats swim in the swamp as well, although they are not the most disgusting of the bottom-feeders.
In my last Substack post, I talk about how systems of power often enlist the categories of dirty and clean to mark social boundaries. Grassroots political campaigns enlist these same categories in subversive ways, however, whether in defending the dignity of “dirty work” to Mamdani’s “pothole politics.”
Trump and his crony capitalists offer a different vision for cleaning up America. They target government workers and people of color as sources of government waste.
The DOGE buzz saw attacks on protective services here and abroad was part of this so-called MAGA mandate. In his second term, Trump reflexively projects his swampy psyche onto an external world of “shit-hole countries” and perceived dirty outsiders. Obsessed with germs and cleanliness, Trump, according to authors of Regime Change, paradoxically has quite disgusting bathroom habits. Aides reportedly had to deal with unhygienic conditions, such as soaked carpets left outside his shower that risked mold and his practice of leaving fast-food snack wrappers around his bedroom.
Such reports might seem too petty for serious journalists to chronicle. But with this uniquely petty and emotionally incontinent president, anything goes.
The Reflecting Pool: A Psychoanalytic Picture of Power
One of my favorite Freud quotes: “Dirt is matter in the wrong place,” from his 1908 essay, Character and Anal Erotism.
As vivid case in point, observers find in Trump’s current reflection pool crisis a powerful symbol of his political and personal pathologies. Adding to the reams of commentary and “fake news,” I humbly offer my clinical services to sort through this problem. Imagine me as a therapist called in to Walter Reed to help the President gain insight into his problems. (After his MOCA tests, which always put him in a good mood.)
I start with what the Reflecting Pool represents to this notoriously defiant patient. First, we talk about his relationship with his cold and cruel father and the devouring envy of other men that he has nursed throughout his life. By killing off competitors, my patient imagines that he has finally secured the love of father Fred. The pool is a disturbing reminder of the impossibilities of this task, I gently suggest. There is the naming of honored fathers surrounding the pool itself—the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as well as the Washington Monument at its east. My patient recalls that this was the setting for the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. No matter how many executive orders declaring the Dream dead, the ghost of MLK continues to haunt my patient.
The Return of the Repressed
I also tentatively explore Mr. President’s anxieties around cleanliness. The COVID epidemic seemed to have intensified his anxieties, making them more tied to reality. But the pool problem exposes unconscious currents lurking in this defense. Extracting toxins and filling the pool with “pure, crystal clear water” represented an attempt to expel his own toxic family from his psyche. I gently offer an interpretation: May these anxieties around purity have created blind-spots around his efforts to repair the pool? Was he aware of the shady business profile of his Mar-A-Lago neighbor who he brought in to line the pool in “American flag blue”? Was this an instance where he had to confront, as a man of 80, the illusions behind his belief that he could magically control every situation? Realities in the material world of organisms had intruded. Here the blooming algae and the green swampy reflection pool represent what Freud might term the “return of the repressed.” I suggest to my patient that the disturbing matter surfacing here symbolizes horrifying aspects of his own unconscious—something that cannot be vanquished no matter how many chemicals and edicts are summoned in the effort.
The third session with the President was the most difficult. I commented on his pattern of blaming others for every disappointment or defeat in life. The Reflecting Pool problem had perhaps confronted him with the costs of this defense. Do you really believe that leftists snuck into this guarded area at night, violently attacking the blue liner with knives? Do you really believe that the few observers who touched the water or picked up floating pieces of the blue liner were actually vandals to be prosecuted? Or, perhaps, do you see these visitors as vandals because they represent an attack on defenses that now feel as precarious as that blue lining? (I may have been too aggressive here in anticipating the aggressiveness of his response.)
Like many people who suffer from personality disorders, the President’s reactions to my unwelcome interpretations were frightening: “You are either totally with me or totally against me, my ally or my enemy, and I use all of my powers to destroy my perceived enemies.”
I found the closest door to exit Walter Reed, heading as fast as I could to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is solace there in spite of the President’s desperate efforts.
💬 Share Your Thoughts
Who is really draining the swamp—and who is merely renaming it? Could the old tradition of sewer socialism offer a model for progressive politics today?
If only someone as narcissistic as your imagined psychoanalytic patient would be open to ANY interpretation of his many neuroses . As is true of many in his degree of narcissism, he doesn’t f…ing need it. Let’s hope the democratic socialists can be better pump for that swamp. At this stage it appears to pumping the wrong direction.