This article was originally published by William L. Anderson at The Mises Institute.
To the Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow travelers, The Moment has arrived. With the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election Tuesday night, the DSA has another attractive face to add to its advocates nationwide, someone to complement Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders as socialism marches to its inevitable triumph over the entire United States.
As one who believed that the U.S. was on its way to a real revolution of free markets and personal freedom with the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency in 1980, and later his sweeping re-election in 1984, I realize that the DSA supporters who presently are giddy and ready to roll will experience the inevitable disappointment just as the free market supporters of Reagan did 40 years ago. However, before that moment arrives – and it will arrive – the socialists are going to do a lot of damage.
Elections can be complicated things, but governments are not. As Murray Rothbard wrote:
If the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the State, if it were convinced that the State is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the State would soon collapse to take on no more status or breadth of existence than another Mafia gang.
Given current public attitudes, voters are not convinced that the state is illegitimate, but rather that it is just doing a bad job and that the DSA can fix it. People in the MAGA movement also see state power as the premier level of things, and their statist agenda reflects the belief that government intervention will result in a better economy and better life for them, even while Donald Trump continues to demand more inflation and pushes through tariffs that can only depress the economy further.
Socialists, of course, see the implementation of socialism as the highest order of society. Getting to that lofty place has been a different matter. It is a testament to our media age that American socialism now depends upon the young, good-looking faces of a Mamdani or an AOC. The one exception is the octogenarian Bernie Sanders, who still carries the look of the Brooklyn Trotskyite he was in his youth. It was once believed that only the most ruthless could make socialism work; thus, the mass murdering of a Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot was necessary to establish the ideal socialist state. Today, however, socialism comes with the buzzword of “democracy” and a pretty face.
For all the over-the-top celebrations and predictions that America’s future is democratic socialism, it is still an urban movement and will be centered around the large, wealthy cities, places that still depend heavily upon the very wealthy that the socialists claim they want to drive from their midst. Mamdani, AOC, and Sanders are all from New York City, and even for all the landslide talk, Mamdani only won slightly more than half the votes in an election in which his voters were by far the most enthusiastic.
The DSA will do well in cities like Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and half a dozen wealthy California cities, and Chicago. Democrats running those places have long tolerated the violence both from ordinary criminals that they refuse to jail and the black-clad protesters who claim to know everything about an economy but never have held a job. Both the protesters and the violent criminals are vital to the governing efforts of socialists, serving as the movement’s shock troops, given that the DSA’s governing philosophy is Anarcho-Tyranny.
Doing well, however, refers only to being elected and having some control of the city councils, as Democrats that govern like socialists inevitably lead their cities into states of decay and loss. For now, the socialists and their supporters are very good at making promises and using stirring rhetoric, but their belief that they can simply order a better state of things into existence is and always will be flawed. Not that more than a century of failure deters them, as socialism is not about a state of affairs but rather a state of mind, so to people like Mamdani, AOC, and their supporters, socialism’s success is proven because they have won elections.
As for the rest of the country, it remains to be seen how well the socialists will do in elections outside of New York and the Left Coast. The DSA does not want to be seen simply as the dominant political power in a few big cities, and its members are in the process of becoming the driving force of the Democratic Party itself. Olivia Reingold writes:
…this is just the beginning. The Free Press reviewed thousands of pages of internal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) documents, which show that the organization’s leaders view Mamdani as a tool in their agenda to abolish prisons and borders, and ultimately end in what they call the “barbaric order of capitalism.” The DSA, founded in 1982, is a political body dedicated to the doctrine of democratic socialism, which is a variety of socialism that simply specifies how it would like revolution to occur: peacefully, through the subversion of democracy. Mamdani, a dues-paying DSA member since 2017, is the tip of that spear.
She continues:
The DSA held its annual convention in August, with the theme “Rebirth and Beyond: Reflecting on a decade of DSA’s growth and preparing for a decade of party building.” There, delegates voted to adopt a resolution titled “Principles for Party-Building,” which stated that the purpose of the DSA is “to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.” The resolution stated that the goals go beyond the White House. “A socialist party in the United States,” the document said, “must be a part of the global political movement of the working class.”
Unfortunately for the DSA, that vaunted “working class” does not provide the base support for this movement any more than the “workers” drove the Bolsheviks a century ago. The political base of the DSA – like socialism everywhere – comes from economic and educational elites whose abstract views of what a society should be like dominate the political agenda. Of course, the so-called Utopia that these socialist elites create fails to resemble the world they have claimed to produce, but even a century of socialist failure in Europe and Asia has failed to dampen the elites’ enthusiasm. Certainly, the pictures of cheering Mamdani supporters after the election prove the latter point.
This situation will not change any time soon. Mamdani declared in his victory speech,
We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. For years, those in City Hall have only helped those who can help them. But on January 1st, we will usher in a city government that helps everyone.
However, given that he ran his campaign on the theme that so-called oligarchs are stealing from everyone else, and that “wealthy” people must face large tax increases in order to pay for the free goods and services he has promised to everyone else in the city, it would be impossible for the NYC government to help “everyone.” Socialists have often depended upon demonizing a minority of the population, and in some instances, murdering many of them and expropriating their property in the name of “equality.” While Mamdani and his followers have not yet called for anyone to be killed (although they did cheer on the murders of Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson), one doubts they will show any sympathy to the families of socialism’s victims, just as they demonized the families of Kirk and Thompson.
An Electoral Perspective
As noted earlier, Mamdani barely won half of the vote, and the two main candidates he beat – former disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo and political neophyte Curtis Sliwa – were hardly formidable opponents. For all the claims that Mamdani has toppled an oligarchy, the electoral results would hardly have been different had he run against two random people picked up from the street.
For that matter, while Mamdani was winning in NYC, another Muslim member of the DSA, Omar Fateh, was losing the mayoral election in Minneapolis to the progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, who has not exactly distinguished himself as a strong leader in the past five years. Although one must understand that the DSA supporters are not going away, they will have to win victories in competitive elections if they wish to complete their “hostile takeover” of the Democratic Party.
There are some things working in the DSA’s favor, the first being that as the U.S. economy slowly implodes in the face of inflation and the destruction of economic opportunities, socialists certainly will try to step into the void. The promises of lower rents, free food, free medical care, and employment for all can be enticing when one is unemployed and facing the loss of a home. Likewise, President Trump’s tariffs are inevitably shrinking the economy, and his bellicose rhetoric and the government shutdown are not presenting an attractive picture to potential voters.
But contra Robert Reich and others, Mamdani’s victory in a Democratic city is not proof that democratic socialism is about to sweep the country. Socialism might be popular with some people, but it is still a failed ideology that invariably implodes in economic failure. Nothing, not even young, attractive candidates, can change that hard fact. Unfortunately, while Mamdani’s election does not mean that the Hammer and Sickle are about to supplant the Stars and Stripes, neither does it mean we shouldn’t worry about socialists ruining our future. They will do so if the voters allow it.
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