No Excuses for Zohran Mamdani and Radical SocialismThe new mayor's buddy, Hasan Piker, wishes the Soviet Union had won the Cold War.
Robby Soave | 11.6.2025
New York City's next mayor will be Zohran Mamdani, who is not merely an extreme left progressive but an actual democratic socialist. It would be a mistake to underemphasize the radical nature of this ideology.
And yet, that's precisely what some in the media are doing. The BBC, for instance, featured an infographic that described Mamdani's democratic socialism as an ideology "which has no clear definition but essentially means giving a voice to workers, not corporations."
https://x.com/s8mb/status/1986057877426156027/photo/1That's an extremely evasive way of describing a radical political vision. No one would say that national socialism—the ideology of the German Nazi Party—had no clear definition and implied only good things about the empowerment of the working class.
It is not difficult to understand what is meant by the term democratic socialism. Plain-old socialism is a revolutionary economic and political system that involves the workers seizing the means of production from the capitalist class. In practice, this necessitates a strong centralized state exerting significant control over and management of the economy: confiscation of private property, nationalization of various industries, and redistribution. Since such a system inevitably produces shortages, suffering, and eventually public discontent, actually existing socialist regimes throughout history have tended toward authoritarianism. The Soviet Union, for example, brutally suppressed internal dissent. In a 2021 story for Reason titled "Yes, It was an Evil Empire," the writer Cathy Young, who was born in Moscow prior to the Soviet Union's collapse, provided examples of Soviet tyranny:
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Source:
https://reason.com/2025/11/06/no-excuses-for-zohran-mamdani-and-radical-socialism/
