Socialism Wins Its American Normandy

Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary opens a new era in American crazy

Et voila! New York City’s mayoral race has been won by Zohran Mamdani, no Bernie Sanders-style imitator but the real thing — son of a famed socialist scholar and Marvel superhero to every Jacobin-reading, keffiyeh-wearing student activist huddled in Judean People’s Front-type confabs, between bell hooks readings and visits to Mom and Dad on the Upper West Side. In this country, it’s the most significant movement victory in a century, almost certainly presaging in the near future an epic clash at the summit of American politics between socialism and, well, anything else. As Michael Buffer would say, “Let’s get ready to rum-m-m-ble!”

In a comet-like ascent Mamdani has become a bête noire for conservatives, many Jewish New Yorkers, and moderates thanks to a list of controversial statements, including a quasi-defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada” (in fairness, after a gotcha question), not signing a State Assembly resolution recognizing the Holocaust, and leading efforts to boycott Israel and slow Israeli charities. If it’s your thing, feel free to flip out over those, but the true red flag is Mamdani’s economic platform.

It’s a yummy pu-pu platter of rent freezes, free bus rides, free child care, and subsidized city-owned grocery stores that will “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution,” clamping down on those evil bodega owners and private supermarkets that force overpriced Fritos and soda on the poor. This will be the AOC theory of inflation caused by “price gouging” deployed in life, via a program to reverse ongoing harms of colonialism by liberating humans and non-human food animals from industry-driven food myths that compel us to harm our bodies, and — have you stabbed yourself in the face yet? ¡Viva la revolución!

Colleges used to subtly pull students back from this ledge before graduation so as not to freak out actual tuition-payers, but now the parents are socialists, leading here. Anyone tempted to laugh shouldn’t. This is the flip side of Trumpism, inevitable for similar reasons, and absent full catastrophe in coming Mamdani-ruled Gotham (not impossible), the electoral mainstreaming of dingbat campus socialism has only begun: