Every time I hear a Fox News host or a Republican pundit call New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a “communist” or “democratic socialist,” I wince in annoyance. Sometimes, I even yell at the TV — not that they can hear me, and even if they could, they’d probably ignore me.
In reality, however, Mamdani is not a would-be Lenin. He is, in fact, a practitioner of woke capitalism. He’s not about to nationalize the means of production or seize the assets of the wealthy progressives in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Manhattan’s Upper East Side — the very people bankrolling his campaign and voting for him.
The more we cling to outdated Cold War categories, the less attention we give to fighting the woke maniacs dismantling our constitutional order.
What Mamdani will do, most likely, is strip police protection from working-class neighborhoods, pour taxpayer money into gimmicks like city-owned grocery stores, and glorify Hamas terrorists.
Soviet-style central planning isn’t on his agenda for the Big Apple. Cultural revolution is.
Boomer nostalgia for the Cold War
Those calling Mamdani a “communist” are playing to Boomer-era Republican fixations. They’re appealing to people who still see politics through Cold War lenses — the bad guys are “commies,” and anyone unwilling to bury socialism is the enemy.
It’s an easy way to rally the troops: Invoke Ronald Reagan’s fight against “the evil empire,” and pretend that Mao and Brezhnev still represent the ultimate threat. For some Republicans, “democratic socialist” is simply a euphemism for “communist,” and that means we’re back in the glory days of battling the Soviets. It simply isn’t so.
I’ve been called a “right-wing Marxist” by people who should know better. But when communism was the threat, I was as anti-communist as anyone alive. I even admired Senator Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to expose Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government and military — to a point. But that’s not the danger in front of us now.
The real threat isn’t Marxism
The greatest danger today comes from woke maniacs embedded in media, education, and government — people dismantling our constitutional order in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.” The more we cling to outdated Cold War categories, the less attention we give to fighting them.
What’s more dangerous: Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky economic ideas, or his militant abortion politics, his zeal for performing gender-transition surgeries on minors, his rejection of biological sex, and his anti-white rhetoric? The “communist” label is the least of our concerns.
Mamdani is a woke zealot, and nearly half of New York’s voters embrace his politics. His biggest fans are young, college-educated progressives who love both his identity-based crusades and his promises of government giveaways.
Why the right keeps missing the point
Some Republican commentators may be too nostalgic for Boomer anti-communism — or too wary of alienating their own socially liberal supporters — to confront Mamdani’s cultural extremism head-on. It’s easier to rehash 1970s and ’80s rhetoric than to grapple with the ideological fight that’s actually in front of us.
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Photo by BRYAN DOZIER/AFP via Getty Images
The Manhattan Institute reports that Mamdani’s proposed budget includes $65 million for “gender-affirming care,” including surgery for minors, and the creation of a special City Hall office dedicated to LGBTQIA+ advocacy. In Minneapolis, the Democratic frontrunner — another African Muslim, though hardly devout — plans to turn the city into the nation’s hub for sex-change procedures and a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.
Yes, Mamdani wants to “promote the global intifada” and squander tax dollars on absurd programs. But his war on public safety and his hostility to traditional norms should alarm us most. None of this has anything to do with Marxism.
A warning to the GOP
Communist regimes, in fact, were more conservative than Mamdani on social policy and public order. Eastern European communist parties today oppose same-sex marriage and most of the LGBTQ agenda. Mamdani’s program is far more culturally radical than anything dreamed up in the Kremlin.
It may take time for Republicans stuck in Cold War mode to grasp this. But if we keep fighting yesterday’s ideological battles, we’ll keep losing today’s cultural war.
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