I & I Editorial BoardIt has been amusing to watch Democrats struggle to cope with the success of 33-year-old socialist Zohran Mamdani’s decisive win in the New York mayoral primaries. Why all the handwringing? Mamdani is now the mainstream of the once great Democratic Party.
The only difference is that Mamdani isn’t afraid to say what other Democratic politicians try to hide.
Think about what Mamdani has proposed or supported:
- A yearlong freeze on rent
- A $30 minimum wage
- Free bus service
- City-owned grocery stores
- Defunding the police
- Calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
“Mainstream Democrats” support every one of these positions in one way or another.
Consider, first, the label “socialist.” While Democratic politicians try to pretend that they aren’t that, 57% of self-identified Democrats have a positive view of socialism, according to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center. Just 46% had a positive view of capitalism.
A 2021 Fox News poll found that 59% of registered Democrats had a positive view of socialism, compared to just 49% who felt that way about capitalism.
Democrats voted for a Castro-loving leftist, Karen Bass, to run the nation’s second-largest city, Illinois Democrats elected far-left leftist Brandon Johnson to run Chicago, and a “trust fund billionaire extremist” to run the state. Minnesota Democrats did the same when they tapped Tim Walz as governor.
In other words, socialism is the beating heart of today’s Democratic Party.
Mamdani’s proposal of a rent freeze is also right in line with the Democratic Party’s endless push for rent control. It was Biden, after all, who ran for reelection promising to impose a nationwide 5% cap on rent increases for the next two years, an idea Kamala Harris later endorsed.
On the minimum wage, Mamdani is in synch with many other Democrats. In Los Angeles, for example, Democrats approved a plan to raise the minimum wage for workers in hotels with more than 60 rooms to $30 by 2028. California already has a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee has proposed a $50 minimum wage.
How about free bus service? That’s hardly radical for today’s Democrat. In fact, there were 40 cities – mostly in blue states such as Colorado, Massachusetts, California, and Oregon – that offered free bus service in 2022. Liberal Montgomery County – which is just outside Washington, D.C. – joined the list last week. All they are doing is creating a network of rolling homeless shelters.
And how is the idea of city-owned grocery stores any more radical than other long-held Democratic ideas, such as government-run health care? Harris ran on the promise of nationwide price controls for grocery stores, an idea far more radical than Hamdani’s. (Never mind that government-run grocery stores, like virtually every other government-run enterprise, have a terrible track record. See “There’s No Such Thing As A Free Grocery Store.”)
Defunding the police was a mainstream Democratic position in the wake of the George Floyd riots – which Democrats also supported. Party officials reluctantly stepped away from this only after crime rates skyrocketed in “defund” cities.
Likewise, calling Israel’s attempt to neutralize Hamas terrorists “genocide” is hardly out of step with today’s Democrats.
Fellow socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now considered a legitimate presidential candidate, called Israel’s war against Hamas “genocide,” a view that the last Democratic presidential candidate, Harris, essentially endorsed when she responded to a heckler screaming “genocide” by saying “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. It’s real.”
Most Democrats (56%) agree with Mamdani that Israel is committing genocide. (Only 36% of independents felt that way.) Plus, Mamdani is a Muslim, the only religion Democrats are willing to defend, probably because of the shared hatred of the West.
Democrats are worried about Mamdani not because of what he stands for, but because they know that saying these things out loud will turn off too many independent voters that they need to win elections.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
These people are not socialists…that’s a benign sounding word. Call them what they are.
STOP VOTING CRAPOCRAT. EVERYTHING THEY TOUCH TURNS TO…CRAP.
The flaw with Mamdani and with today’s variety of Democrats, AOC and her ilk, too, is their lack of understanding of human nature.
If you remove police, thousands of low-life people will rob and steal since no one is stopping them, as we have seen across the USA.
If you raise the minimum wage for no added benefit to the business, far fewer people will be hired so that employers can afford to pay the government mandated high wages.
If you create government run food markets, there will be far more theft and corruption because no one is in charge, only the government.
Free bus service, rent control and all the other socialist concepts have failed all over the globe harming millions of people. If Mamdani and our own Democrats believe in these policies, move to Havana to live under them, but do not destroy NYC and the USA with sophomoric and moronic ideas which have failed everywhere.
They think they know better even though they are wrong, human nature can be oppressed but never beaten the will to be free is ours for eternity
Mamdani does not want to defund the police, nor is he an anti-Semite. Many of his supporters are Jewish. He proposes just 5 grocery stores, a 2% surcharge on incomes over one million dollars and raise the corporate tax rate from 7.35% to 11.5%. These are modest and sensible proposals, not radical. Mamdani is a reformer not a revolutionary.
You’re what’s known as a useful idiot.
“Clueless fools” are what I used to refer to Democrat voters, now I call them “evil scumbags”.
I’m almost glad Mamdani will win, so Democrats can see what an utter disaster his policies will bring…but they didn’t learn from the “frying pan” of Frisco…so I’m not sure jumping into the “fire” of NYC will teach them any better.
So what is the writer saying we have a war on our hands or just give up the country like italy did to Mussolini?
The dims are 1,000% behind ALL of these positions. I’ve been calling on DWS et all to stop the charade and just join hamas. Who cares if Mamdani’s temple won’t permit gay marriages? Not dims!! Who cares if they want socialism/communism? Not dims. They embrace it. They have so much money they know they won’t be affected. We need to recognize and accept the dims for who they really are. He’s coming. He’s unstoppable. Give him the rope.
Pause to consider, enjoy, the phonic resemblance between dem, short for Democrat, and dhim, short of dhimmi, who are the not-Muslims that Muslim societies by religion oppress.
Maga
Again
Trump 2.0
I perceive a couple of flavors of ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’. I think it necessary, when we say that Democrats (members of and voters for the party) are socialist, to describe briefly what we mean by their sort of ‘socialism’.
My guess is that Democrats favor the people receive economic goods and services from either government agencies or private firms that are so heavily regulated that they might as well be government agencies. That Democrats favor the workers of such economic providers, with the consequence that the workers are probably overpaid, and overstaffed. That Democrats prefer that economic activity be financed by taxation, rather than prices at the counter for goods and services received. There quite a degree of corruption inherent in the above, and Democrats luxuriate in that.
— To be seen the degree that America comes to resemble the America of Head-of-State Mr. Thompson, as described by Ayn Rand in ‘Atlas Shrugged’.