Copyright Santa Clarita Valley Signal
On Tuesday it looks like the people of New York are going to elect a socialist. Unless there’s a last-minute miracle, the polls say Zohran Mamdani will defeat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and become the mayor of America’s most populated and most important city. Mamdani, 34, is a New York State representative and the wealthy son of an Indian Marxist scholar who was born in Uganda. He has deservedly gotten a fair amount of criticism from even the mainstream liberal media for his hardcore socialist beliefs and his pro-Palestinian rhetoric. He calls himself a “democratic socialist” and is a proud dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. But forget the Democratic part. Mamdani is 100% socialist – and far more radical than his hero, Bernie Sanders. The DSA is the country’s largest socialist organization with about 85,000 members. About 250 members hold low-level elected offices, usually passing themselves off as Democrats. The DSA is the real deal – anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-imperialist. But it really hates capitalism. Its stated mission is to reject capitalism’s “private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction and brutality” and replace it with a “humane international social order” created through democratic planning, worker control and equitable resource distribution. Ideally, the official party line goes, working people would democratically run the economy and society to meet human needs, not profits for the few, which means working people get universal access to food, housing, health care, child care, education and meaningful work. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan are the DSA’s biggest elected names so far, but Mamdani is about to eclipse them. Though he has done his best to resemble Bernie Sanders, not Karl Marx, he’s a true believer in socialism. He believes the government of New York City should own and operate a little or a lot of just about everything — housing, utilities and even grocery stores. All without earning the evilest fruit of capitalism – profits. Needless to say, he also favors dumb things like wider rent controls, $30-an-hour minimum wage laws and free-fare buses. Plus, he wants fewer police in minority communities, wants to fund gender-affirming health care and wants to make New York a LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city. Mamdani, unfortunately, is one of those blinded young ideologues who lives in a time warp without any history books. He and his generation don’t know what socialism’s ideas look like when they’re put into practice. They still want to enact the failed and coercive socialism that made the Soviet Union an economic basket case for decades and still keeps the people stuck in countries like Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea impoverished and in chains. Mamdani’s defenders insist he’s not a commie, of course. But my father would recognize him for the dangerous leftist he is behind his constant phony smile. My father started fighting against the communists in the 1940s when they were trying to take over Hollywood and he didn’t stop until the Berlin Wall started to crumble 40 years later. He and the other members of the “Greatest Generation” witnessed firsthand how terrible communism’s brutal brand of socialism was. They fought it and defeated it. Sadly, today’s naïve younger people are suckers for Mamdani’s communist-lite kind of socialism. They support politicians like him and AOC without knowing how poorly socialism compares to free-market capitalism in the real world, or how it conflicts with America’s founding values of individual and economic freedom. They also need to be reminded that millions of their grandparents escaped the so-called paradises of socialism and communism and came to America. In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev boasted “We will bury you,” he was making the prediction that communism will inevitably triumph over capitalism for economic and ideological reasons. On Tuesday, 70 years later, Mamdani will try to prove him right. Beware, 8 million New Yorkers, what you’re voting for. Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
