This Ain't Your Father's Socialism

Only the billionaires are afraid of it.

New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani officially clinched the Democratic spot in New York City’s Mayoral race this week, after his surprising showing that all but wrapped up the victory when numbers first started coming in last week. The final election, against a slew of candidates, will take place later this year. Mamdani won 56% of the vote after the initial ranked-choice tabulation narrowed the race to Mamdani and Cuomo, who won 44% of the vote.

Mamdani’s campaign showed that the candidate was a tireless campaigner, savvy with social media and equipped himself well in the debates and public appearances. Mamdani also calls himself a democratic socialist, which has caused a bit of a stir in the world capital of capitalism. It may have ruffled the feathers of some masters of the universe in New York when he said that he didn’t think billionaires should exist. Who would say such a horrible thing?

Billionaire Bill Ackman pledged to bankroll any NYC mayoral candidate capable of defeating Zohran Mamdani. You know you must be doing something right when the billionaires start saying you must be stopped at all costs. I don’t think having billionaires’ line up against a candidate is going to help your case, Bill.

That’s a nice exploitative and destructive to human life capitalist system you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.

Scandal plagued current mayor, Eric Adams, who will be running as an independent against Mamdani in the fall has suddenly found the New York City business community poised to support him to keep Mamdani from winning.

Socialism ain’t what it used to be.

I’m just over 50 years old, so for most of my youth, I was told that the socialists in the former Soviet Union were my sworn enemy. I learned from the news, from movies, television and the politics that my young mind could understand, that there was nothing worse than a socialist. I was told that in a socialist society no one had any motivation to better themselves or get rich (these two things were understood to be the same thing) because the state owned all personal property, and the state controlled everything. Life in a socialist country was terrible, so terrible that we (the US) invested hundreds of billions of dollars through the years to destabilize any country foolish enough to flirt with socialism.

But Mamdani is not the same “socialists” that I was taught to fear.

Mamdani calls himself a socialist much in the way that Bernie Sanders does, in that he favors a more Scandanavian type of socialism in which we as a society spend more on healthcare, education, family leave and other policies that improve wellbeing. And he’s on to something. Those countries typically finish at the top of the table on wellbeing scores.

The young folks in the US know what's up. A survey from 2021 sums up the view of capitalism among the younger generation well. The poll by the news group Axios, asked people about their perceptions of capitalism. The results showed that 18–34-year-olds are closely split between those who view capitalism positively and those who view it negatively (49% vs. 46%). In 2019, just two years earlier, that favorability margin for capitalism was a wide 20 points (58% vs. 38%).

Among adults in Gen Z (ages 18-24), perceptions of capitalism were bad: 42% have a positive view and 54% have a negative view. Since 2021, when the survey was conducted, it has just gotten harder for young people to get a job, buy a house, and get ahead in society. They know capitalism isn’t working for them. They are open to alternatives and don’t have any of the baggage that I learned as a kid. They have not grown up with a socialist enemy that has been characterized as a threat to their existence.

If you take about 5 seconds on your search engine of choice you can find surveys from the last 10 years in which young people in the United States have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism.

Capitalism hasn’t delivered for them.

Maybe mass selfishness isn’t the best system.

If for generations you teach hundreds of millions of people that their selfish decisions lead to a virtuous result, they will believe you. But hundreds of millions of people putting their own interests above the society doesn’t lead to virtue, it leads to a country that doesn’t value society. That’s how we got here.

Someone who calls themselves a socialist is simply saying - I value society more than the other team. It’s right there in the name. To many people, especially young people, someone who calls themselves a socialist is simply saying they put society first. The capitalist responds by saying, “go out three and get rich,” - to which young people in America reply, “I tried that, I can’t.”

As I’m writing this the Republican backed “Big Beautiful Bill” is making its way through Congress. The bill is designed to give billionaires a tax cut so that poor and disabled people can have less healthcare and food. No one should be surprised when the average person picks the “socialist” over the politician who makes sure billionaires are more comfortable.

I am no expert on Mamdani. I know some of his ideas won’t work. He is appealing because he is charismatic, telegenic, well-spoken and he is telling people that he sees them and hears them.

If the “socialism” he is peddling does nothing more than that then a “socialist” wave may be about to roll over this country.

People like society. They know its value, and they want to belong to a healthy one. Good luck to the billionaires trying to keep convincing people that the system we have now is better than the one that puts we before the me.

What people want is a society where the fabulously well off see the country as their responsibility, not as their toy. Give them that and they will vote for you. If you take away their future prospects so that billionaires can be a little more comfortable for a little while longer, they will turn to anyone who sells them something different.