You Can Fear Zohran Mamdani but Also Hate Andrew Cuomo
For many New Yorkers, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not an exciting prospect. The likely winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary—the votes aren’t all counted yet, though the outcome is now a foregone conclusion—is a democratic socialist who subscribes to a whole host of city-ruining political positions. He would like to dismantle New York City’s selective school system in favor of increased equity (a surefire recipe for making schools worse for everyone), is in favor of a rent freeze that will almost certainly make affordable housing scarcer, and thinks government-run grocery stores are a good idea. And while his views on the conflict between Israel and Hamas are not terribly relevant to the position he’s running for, his failure to condemn the slogan globalize the intifada is probably not an encouraging sign from the standpoint of New York City’s Jewish population.
Moreover, socialism is very bad. Everywhere it is tried, it clearly fails as an economic system, leading to greater government centralization and control and less prosperity. And while democratic socialists usually insist that they also object to the sort of political repression that was characteristic of actually existing socialist regimes throughout the 20th century, their rhetoric often revolves around relentless demonization of wealthy, productive people. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the country’s foremost elected democratic socialist, was on Joe Rogan’s podcast just this week, attacking Elon Musk for spending millions of dollars to help reelect Donald Trump—taking specific umbrage at the idea that rich people might want to spend money advocating for policies that Sanders dislikes.
This is a long way of saying that the concerns expressed by Reason‘s Liz Wolfe in her lament, “My City Just Voted for Socialism,” are entirely justified.
“The socialist project is fundamentally wrong, both morally and in its understanding of human nature,” writes Wolfe. “Mamdani won’t get us quite there, but he sure is
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