After writing about the upset election win of socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a reader sent me an angry email, telling me that Mamdani was a “democratic socialist,” and that Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez were “social democrats.” The sender apparently wanted me to believe that all they wanted was to make New York and the United States into Denmark.
After all, isn’t Denmark one of the world’s happiest countries? Doesn’t it have a $22 minimum wage? (Actually, it has no federal minimum wage). Doesn’t it have wonderful welfare benefits along with lots of personal freedom? So, if we can just elect the kind of politicians that want to turn the US into Denmark, then we should do it.
There are some issues, of course. For one, Denmark is far from a socialist country and it certainly does not have a socialist planned economy. This is an important point, because AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani all have called for substantial government planning and ownership and Mamdani has gone even further. The socialist online magazine Jacobin recently praised Mamdani precisely because he does call for the full socialist economy:
No one should be surprised that Zohran Mamdani supports democratic control over the economy, the end goal of socialism. But he won because he combined socialist politics with practical solutions to the cost-of-living crisis facing working people.
At a 2021 conference of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), Zohran Mamdani discussed various short-term reforms favored by the organization. But alongside offering his thoughts on the groups’ immediate aims, he also had something to say about “end goal” of socialist politics: “seizing the means of production.”
In the last week, the clip resurfaced on right-wing social media, where it’s been treated as a damning discovery about Mamdani, who just won a primary to become the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City.
National Review ran a brief item on the clip under the headline “Uh, That’s Literal Communism!” On CNN, Scott Jennings concurred, saying that Mamdani was “using the language of the Bolsheviks.” Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said that this was “the scariest thing Mamdani has said” and that it was “straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist playbook.”
It’s unclear why these remarks about the end goal of socialist politics are supposed to be shocking.
There is much to process in this short passage, and it speaks volumes about so-called democratic socialists. For that matter, that socialists would want to identify with the Jacobins speaks volumes to their intentions, given that the Jacobins were the first political party to organize and carry out political terror complete with mass executions during the French Revolution. Second, by claiming that “democratic control over the economy” means the state “seizing the means of production,” they speak to the totalitarian and violent nature of their “democratic” beliefs. One does not “seize” anything without coercion. As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara bragged in a recent interview, “We were not trying to hide Marxism.”
Lest anyone doubt the coercive and violent nature of American socialists, the recent Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago featured speaker after speaker calling for outright totalitarian control of all of American life. Among the proposals from speakers and delegates (all of whom were required to wear N-95 or K95 masks as part of the uniform) were taken from “democratic” socialist movements like the Bolshevik Revolution and Pol Pot’s Cambodian terror, and included:
- Replacing the family unit with communes (reminiscent of a scene from “The Killing Fields” in which the Khmer Rouge overseers show their subjects a drawing with a family X’d out);
- Using public schools to “radicalize” young people before they get to college;
- Continue to use higher education as a tool to undermine the universities and society;
- Dismantle the current United States but replace it with a “democratic socialist,” centralized entity where the state has complete control over everything.
As David Sypher, Jr., writes:
The overarching belief is clear: America’s systems – capitalism, policing, meritocracy, marriage – are all inherently oppressive and must be torn down and replaced with something “equitable.”
Although Mamdani has not publicly commented on the recent Socialism conference, he himself has called for ending private home ownership and replacing private dwellings with communal living. He also claims that private ownership of housing and profit-seeking by home builders is the main cause of homelessness. (One is reminded of the scene in the 1965 film “Dr. Zhivago” where Yuri comes home from the war after the Revolution to a house that has been divided up for different families).
Since Mamdani has openly called for the state to seize the methods of production along with private housing, there is little if any difference between his worldview and that of the most radical collectivists. That Bernie Sanders and AOC have endorsed him also speaks volumes about their own beliefs. We are supposed to believe that all they want to do is to make the US a little more like Denmark. One should wonder if the people cheering at their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies understand just how their lives would change—and not for the better—if Sanders, Mamdani, and AOC get the “Democratic Socialism” that they want.
But what about the rest of the Democratic Party that doesn’t support Mamdani and so-called Democratic Socialism? To a certain extent, many of them are dependent upon a system of intervention that allows them to gain personal wealth from regulated capitalism and they realize that they would be left in the cold if the US really were to go fully socialist, as the left wing of the Democratic Party would like to do. Thus, we understand their resistance to the Mamdani campaign.
The Democrats were in this same place more than 90 years ago. The socialist writer Upton Sinclair in a huge electoral upset won the California Democratic Party primary for governor in 1934, running on a platform to “abolish poverty.” As Steven F. Hayward wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal:
Sinclair ran on a radical platform known by the acronym EPIC, for End Poverty in California. EPIC proposed universal old-age pensions (before Social Security), Soviet-style collective farms, state-run industries that would “produce for use, not for profit,” and perhaps property confiscation.
(Note that Mamdani has not called for the creation of collective farms in New York, which should not be surprising, given there are no farms in the city. However, in 1934, many Americans were enamored by the so-called Soviet Experiment in communism, which was much more highly regarded in the US than it would be later during the Cold War.)
President Franklin Roosevelt was not pleased with the result, as he worried that Sinclair’s radical campaign might turn people against his New Deal plans. While incumbent Republican Gov. Frank Merriam was unpopular, many Democrats and Republicans looked to run an “independent” candidate, Raymond Haight, as a foil to the other candidates.
Ultimately, Hollywood (which at that time had not been politically radicalized) turned up the rhetorical and broadcasting heat against Sinclair, and that proved to be the difference. Merriam won the election, and the socialists had to look elsewhere for electoral success.
Like the Mamdani platform and the socialist “vision” given in Chicago, Sinclair’s political promises could only be accomplished through coercion and propaganda. As Ludwig von Mises wrote more than a century ago in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, socialism cannot work the way its promoters claim. As we have seen from the Bolshevik Revolution to modern times, socialists had absolute power to direct both labor and resources to whatever purposes they wished, yet their attempts failed miserably.
However, socialists continue to press on and now they seem to be enjoying political success. And while they throw in the word “democratic” to soften the blow, one cannot implement socialism without violence and threats of violence, since it requires confiscation of the property of others and seizes resources to change economic outcomes. In the end, it becomes yet another form of totalitarianism.
