There has justifiably been much concern over Mamdani winning the NYC mayoral Democratic primary. The concern is over the fact that he is an ardent, avowed socialist.
Let’s think about this. All of those within both major parties engage in socialism. They all do this via incrementalism– i.e., adopting socialism in step-wise fashion.
The Republicans do this.
The “traditional Democrats” certainly do this– yes, folks like Clinton and Obama and Carter and Roy Cooper and Josh Stein.
And the Mamdani Democrats do this.
What is the difference among them? The speed with which they adopt socialism.
The Mamdani Democrats do this faster than the traditional Democrats.
The traditional Democrats do it faster than the Republicans.
But they all do it, at various speeds, at various rates of adoption of socialism. Let’s understand what is happening here.
We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.
If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.
I agree with you on one level, Fred, although I think people ought to understand what has been taking place. I think it will take a major crisis to reverse this situation– and there is no guarantee that it WOULD reverse it.