Ugandan-born, socialism-loving New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has emerged as a “kingmaker” in the Democrat party, says Phillip Elliot of TIME.
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Two prominent House Democrats lost their primaries to insurgent rivals while a third left-wing candidate defeated the Brooklyn Borough chief,” he writes. “All together, the results demonstrated the fragility of an Establishment imprimatur, the power of the New York Mayor’s blessing, and the ascendancy of socialism.
Elliott then goes on to do this silly thing that Democrats have done for a few decades now, and suggests that this “ascendancy of socialism” is not, as Donald Trump and some others have recently observed, tantamount to an ideological embrace of communism. “There is a difference between socialists and communists,” he says, while scoffing that this “distinction does not matter to Trump or other Republicans.”
In truth, that “distinction” exists only in the minds of Democrats who are hopeful that the party is not currently being swallowed by communism in the same way that Eastern Europe and much of Asia was swallowed by communism during the Cold War.
Let’s first consider that Karl Marx and his millions of his ideological offspring have often employed the words “communism” and “socialism” interchangeably. The mechanism to reach “communism” or “socialism,” whether it be democracy or violent revolution, is incidental.
And neither approach to reaching communism is mutually exclusive. After all, the murderous, revolutionary communist regime of North Vietnam went by the official name of the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” back when it was trying to convince the world that its ambitions to subjugate the South Vietnamese via violence were a “democratic” effort. To this day, the backward, famine-inducing leadership of communist North Korea is officially known as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
In short, “democracy” is often more window dressing than a political ethos, and we have no reason to believe that “democratic socialists” believe in the “democracy” part more than the “socialism” part.
Next, consider that whatever “distinction” Phillip Elliott imagines to exist between some benign form of modern “democratic” socialism and the scourge of Marxism that the world witnessed during the twentieth century appears to be as obscure to Zohran Mamdani as it is to “Trump or other Republicans.”
Take this excerpt from a speech in 2021 at a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, where Mamdani said:
[W]hen our position starts to change, when we start to accumulate power, when we start to elect individuals such as myself and my other slate mates into local office… it is very critical for all of us to remember what it is that we are fighting for, and to remember that our agenda is an agenda that must not be dictated by calculus, but by conviction…
Right now, if we’re talking about the cancelation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all, you know, these are issues which have the groundswell of popular support across this country. But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS, right? Or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment. [emphasis added]
Mamdani is openly suggesting that redistributive government programs, like cancelling student debt at taxpayer expense or the coerced participation in government-run health care, represents a hidden path for “socialists” to eventually “seize the means of production” from private citizens engaged in free market enterprise.
You can call that socialism, or you can call it communism, and Marx would have agreed with either framing. What is clear is that there’s little ideological daylight between Zohran Mamdani and Karl Marx, right down to the precise language about the “end goal of seizing the means of production.”
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in fact, prescribed this very method to institute communism, slowly and methodically over time, and in such a way that the non-compliant populace would be either silenced or ideologically supplanted.
As Ludwig von Mises observes in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (1956), Marx and Engels argued openly, as does Zohran Mamdani and many other Democrats today, that interventionist and redistributive policies (such as rent control, cancelling student debt, and single-payer health care) eventually necessitate the implementation of full communism. He writes:
When Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto advocated definite interventionist measures, they did not mean to recommend a compromise between socialism and capitalism. They considered these measures – incidentally, the same measures which are today the essence of the New Deal and Fair Deal policies – as the first steps toward the establishment of full communism. They themselves described these measures as “economically insufficient and untenable,” and they asked for them only because they “in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads on the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of revolutionizing the mode of production.”
You see, most Democrats don’t think that the pleasant-sounding policies they’ve supported over their lifetimes, like instituting the most heavily progressive income tax in the developed world, constructing a robust and redistributive welfare state, and allowing a heavy tolerance for illegal immigration, have provided the framework for communists like Zohran Mamdani to seize power in America.
But they have. Now, the dominoes have begun to fall, and the scourge of socialism appears to be sweeping across the Democrat party at breakneck speed.
From Denver to Seattle to Washington to New York, socialists are unseating the mere “liberals” who are less titillating for the legions of young, thoroughly indoctrinated leftist radicals. And some power brokers among the Democrats are rightfully concerned about the speed at which socialist influence is castrating the Democrat establishment.
For those paying attention, the marked shift toward socialism within the Democrat party isn’t news. In fact, if there were honest Democrat primaries that didn’t involve suspicious coin flips or establishment shenanigans or outright avoidance of a primary altogether, a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders might have won the presidential nomination in 2016, 2020, or 2024.
Democrats have been able to avoid having an open socialist at the top of the ticket. But in down-ballot races across the country, seated Democrats are being overthrown by proud socialists who openly despise not only the country in which we live, but the Party that they are running to represent.
And finally, fault lines are becoming clearly discernable as the host is making a desperate and belated effort to extract the parasites. Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison desperately begged voters and potential usurpers in an X post to not run for the Party’s nomination if they “hate the Democratic Party.” Former Clinton strategist James Carville said that he “can’t be in the same tent” as these radical socialists who are creating a schism in the party.
In a moment which must send shivers up the spine of moderate Democrats everywhere, Bill Maher recently declared that the Jew-hatred and anti-capitalism of the socialist scourge within the Democrat party has him seriously considering a vote for J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio in 2028.
There is a battle for the soul of the Democrat party, and it has long been underway. How Democrats respond to the threat will be vital to their future as a party, and the future of our entire republic.
Democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani and potential presidential candidate AOC are well aware of the stakes. Whether moderate Democrats are aware is yet to be seen.
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Image: Karamccurdy, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed