So far, Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year old who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, is still just a candidate. But in heavily Democratic New York, the Republican, radio host Curtis Sliwa, has little chance of winning. A recent poll puts Mamdani at 36.4% compared to Sliwa’s 16.3%.
That means the only man standing between Mamdani and the mayor’s office is Eric Adams, a Democrat who last year was charged with bribery and campaign finance violations. He has also angered his own party by failing to oppose immigration enforcement as much as other “sanctuary city” mayors like Chicago’s Brandon Johnson or Los Angeles’s Karen Bass.
New Yorkers have heard some of Mamdani’s proposals: rent control, free buses, higher taxes on higher earners, city-owned grocery stores, freeing criminal suspects without bail, legalizing prostitution, and replacing some police with social workers.
If one is unfamiliar with history, these promises might sound good. As the Babylon Bee put it, “Democrats Discover Innovative Strategy of Promising Free Stuff to Stupid People.” This is funny, but unfair. There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. New Yorkers aren’t stupid. And plenty of smart people are ignorant – meaning they just don’t know certain things.
Like how New York was back in the 1980s. Those of us who remember the city when Times Square was a den of squalor will know that Sliwa also founded the Guardian Angels, the red-beret sporting extended neighborhood watch that rode the subway to fight crime.
But that was 40 years ago. Most New Yorkers today have no direct experience with that era. At least half of them weren’t educated in New York; they came from abroad or from other states. Nationally, only 13% of U.S. eighth graders are proficient in American history. I doubt they know much more about world history, or how “true socialism” worked when tried.
Those who were raised in New York mostly went through a public school system where, a researcher found, students could pass a math exam by just guessing answer “C” every time.
Some New Yorkers may not know what Mamdani means by “socialism,” “Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS),” and “owning the means of production,” which he talked about in this short clip posted to X by @EndWokeness. Let me briefly explain.
“Socialism” is how communists describe themselves. Look at the now-defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the current communist countries, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Republic of Cuba, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and the Lao People’s Republic – none of them mentions “communism” in its name or its official description of itself.
The only thing that makes the American version “Democratic,” as in the “Democratic Socialists of America” organization that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Summer Lee belong to, is that they seek to come to power through elections, rather than violent revolution.
The “BDS” Mamdani wants is about Israel. The BDS movement is a “Palestinian-led movement” that seeks to force Israel to accept a Palestinian state on dictated terms by pressuring governments and private companies to boycott (meaning not buy) Israeli goods and services; divest (meaning pull out all investments in Israel and Israeli companies); and sanction (meaning bans on business, finance, travel, etc.).
When he says he wants to “raise class consciousness,” Mamdani is talking about Karl Marx’s vision for how capitalist societies turn communist. Once the worker masses realize they are being exploited, Marxist theory goes, they will overthrow capitalism, take over the government, and “establish a more equitable society.” (Yes, that’s the same “equity” as in DEI, the ideology that captured Western governments, education, NGOs, and companies).
Mamdani said the “end goal” of socialism is “seizing the means of production,” by which he means the government taking over factories, companies, mines, energy producers, farms, restaurants, service providers, your aunt’s Etsy page – anything or anyone that creates value, from a Barbie doll to an F-150 truck. The core idea of socialism is that all of it should be taken from private ownership and given to the government to run.
The government will then decide what each of us needs to live on – “from each, according to his abilities; to each, according to his needs.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because it has been tried before – first in the USSR, then in China, Cuba, North Korea, and in various countries in between in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. And with a 100% failure rate.
Every time, once the coveted “means of production” got into the hands of government functionaries — who inevitably grew corrupt — they ceased to produce efficiently and were run into the ground. Under socialism, instead of markets efficiently allocating capital to industry to produce what people need and want, bureaucrats do it through central planning, resulting in starvation, poverty, and misery.
China might be seen as a slight exception to the rule, but that’s only because it ditched much of communism’s economic orthodoxy and let favored people make money, while keeping the corrupt, nepotistic structure of the Communist Party and its social control machinery.
Mamdani reminds us “we need to remember what the stakes are.” He’s right. He’s smart, charming, and media savvy, which makes it all the more important that New Yorkers closely scrutinize his past and current comments and policy positions.
If Mamdani makes it to Gracie Mansion and keeps his promises, he will bring socialism to New York City, good and hard. It will work just as well as it ever did. And some of Manhattan’s wealthy residents will react just like Havana’s did in 1959 – they’ll go to Miami.
* * *
Simon Hankinson is a Senior Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, and author of the forthcoming book “The Woke Ten Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Press.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
