New York City Is About To Elect a Socialist Mayor in Zohran Mamdani. Why Won't This Failed Ideology Die?

The troubling rise of Zohran Mamdani is about more than policy. It's about culture.

A self-proclaimed socialist is on track to become New York City's next mayor. 

The rise of Zohran Mamdani represents a troubling moment in American politics. In some ways, his candidacy isn't a radical departure from the mainstream Democratic Party. He promises to "freeze the rent for millions," make buses "free" in part to prevent disgruntled riders from attacking bus drivers, and provide "universal" (i.e., government-sponsored) day care. When Kamala Harris ran for president, she pledged to "cap unfair rent increases" by suing corporate landlords. Elizabeth Warren regularly calls for universal childcare and wealth taxes. Like Mamdani, Democratic Congress member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders believe that "billionaires shouldn't exist." 

"Let's not pretend that [Mamdani's success] is from nowhere," says Inez Stepman, a New York writer and legal analyst. "He is radical for the Democratic Party, but he's also just being more honest about the policies that a particular wing of the Democratic Party have pushed for a long time."

Mamdani sees it this way too, telling Stephen Colbert in an interview that his election is "a referendum on where our party goes." 

That's concerning because Mamdani isn't the type of socialist who's content to say that the U.S. should just be a little more like Denmark. He's a "seize the means of production" kind of guy.

Mamdani, at the time a New York state assembly member, told a crowd at the 2021 Young Democratic Socialists of America conference that while it's important to lead with issues where he believes socialists have popular support—such as Medicare for All or student loan cancellation—that it's critical to never abandon "the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment." For that reason, Mamdani continues, "we have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism."

Mamdani's ambition is nothing less than leading the vanguard of the new American socialist movement. His message is resonating with young voters in particular, who turned out in record numbers for Mamdani in the Democratic primary.

Socialism was tried, and failed, repeatedly in the 20th century, racking up a death toll of 100 million lives. Millions more still live under socialism's long, dark shadow in North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.

So why does the socialist movement never seem to die?

One unsettling possibility is that economic reality is secondary to cultural shifts when it comes to 21st-century U.S. politics, and the culture necessary to maintain a free society is slowly deteriorating. 

"The pure economic analysis of Zohran just fails to account for the cultural worldview and ideology that is very clearly not only part of his candidacy, but to me is a central piece," says Stepman. "It does touch something in us that is deeper and somehow more politically potent than housing regulations."

Mamdani says it wasn't Marxist economic theory that first drew him into the Democratic Socialists of America, but that his "journey in politics began with Palestine."

"I came to this country when I was 7 years old, and as soon as I got to any kind of level of political consciousness, the contradiction around Palestine struck me," Mamdani told his fellow DSA members in November 2024 as he outlined.

Stepman describes Mamdani's anticolonial views as a "terrifying meld of third-world resentments and modern sort of elite, woke views" that somehow reconcile enthusiasm for Palestinian statehood with gay rights in the form of "queers for Palestine" signs.

"Don't you realize you'll be thrown off a building there?" asks Stepman. 

The Venezuelan writer Carlos Rangel called the ideological blend of Marxism and anticolonialsm "third worldism," which rests on the idea that precolonial societies were socialist paradises. The so-called "noble savages" lived in communal harmony before European imperialists came to pillage their lands and impose savage capitalism, brutal individualism, and a rigid social hierarchy.

This iteration of socialism purposely conflates imperialism and capitalism, which helps explain why Mamdani has said that socialists and Palestinians are fighting "the same struggle."

"The reason that I joined DSA, if I had to pick one, was because there was no exception for Palestine," Mamdani told his DSA comrades. "I'm in this organization because we didn't just pick and choose the battles that everyone was ready for in this very moment, but because we picked and chose the battles that were right and that are extensions of the values that we have as socialists."

Stepman, a libertarian turned conservative, says libertarians overemphasize economic arguments when countering Mamdani.

"The way that I read Mamdani's politics, it's almost a register that a lot of libertarians just don't see, like talking to somebody who's colorblind about the color purple," says Stepman. "They are not recognizing a register that is fundamental to human politics since the ancient world."

Irving Kristol, the founder of neoconservatism, made the same observation in 1972 when the future Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman invited him to speak before a classically liberal audience at the Mont Pelerin Society. The topic was: Why does socialism persist? Kristol's answer was that "the enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism."

For Kristol, the fading relevance of organized religion in liberal capitalist societies left too many people with a God-shaped hole to fill. When there's no promise of a cosmic justice in the afterlife that will right life's inevitable wrongs, we're more prone to seek justice through politics.

Socialism exploits our yearning for cosmic justice.

To Mamdani and other socialists, such "justice" means more equal distribution of wealth, which is why he wants to abolish billionaires.

Libertarians, on the other hand, believe that justice encompasses the right to private property and to retain the fruits of one's own labor. Those who end up as billionaires through a market process don't relinquish the right to keep what's theirs. The fact that the rest of society benefits most from the success of exceptional individuals is a welcome byproduct of this arrangement.

Still, some people do get rich dishonestly, others are victimized, and luck plays a big role: The children of wealthy professionals have a head start, which feels unjust.

So progressives champion "social justice" to engineer a more equal outcome, as illustrated in the well-known meme of a family of differing heights watching a baseball game over a fence. In reality, socialists often achieve greater equality by making everyone poorer. That's because socialists like Mamdani see capitalist profit as inherently unjust, which is why they advocate "seizing the means of production" so that the socialists can more "equitably" divvy up the profits.

"If there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or whether you call it a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now," Mamdani argued in an interview promoting so-called "social housing."

To libertarians, injustice happens to individuals, not political classes. And it's remedied via individual compensation for damages, not continuous social engineering. By focusing on specific instances of injustice that violate an individual's rights to life, liberty, and property, liberal capitalist societies build institutions with a predictable and universal set of rules, allowing for the type of long-term planning that leads to prosperity.

Kristol said in 1972 that this libertarian version of justice was once the dominant understanding in this country because it grew from America's "Puritan or Protestant ethos," which recognized the virtues of "honesty, sobriety, diligence and thrift" as deserving of worldly success. But Kristol believed it was disappearing. Libertarians can't defend capitalism and freedom in the long run because our belief system has a fatal flaw: It's amoral, lacking a concrete set of values.

"The central kind of thrust of his speech was that libertarianism alone cannot maintain the culture that's required for libertarianism to work," says Stepman, who authored an updated version of Kristol's argument.

Kristol criticized libertarians like Milton Friedman for failing to condemn the "libertine" aspects of the '60s counterculture—drug use, promiscuity, the abandonment of family values—because libertarians prioritized individual "self-realization" as the goal of society. 

"What if the 'self' that is 'realized,'" Kristol warned, "is a self that despises liberal capitalism, and uses its liberty to subvert and abolish a free society?"

But libertarians can fight for cultural values without contradicting any of their fundamental political beliefs. And they should.

This isn't the first time we've been in this predicament. The Austrian economists F.A. Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter were asking that same timeless question in Europe during the interwar years: Why was collectivism taking hold? 

Schumpeter, who used the phrase "creative destruction" to describe how innovation spurs material progress by upending the existing order, worried that these same forces undermined popular support for classical liberalism in his 1943 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

Schumpeter observed that capitalism has a tendency to "destroy the moral authority" of institutions like the Church, slavery, or the monarchy, but it doesn't stop there. It "goes on to attack private property and the…bourgeois values" that undergird the liberal order. Kristol would make roughly the same observations 30 years later.

Schumpeter also noted that capitalism generates enough abundance to support a large class of intellectuals lacking in practical skills who feel underappreciated in a market economy, such as Karl Marx himself, whose father criticized him for his extravagant, disorderly, and degenerate lifestyle. 

The writer and social psychology researcher Rob Henderson, who coined the phrase "luxury beliefs," agrees.

"When we evaluate our lives, we don't look at the people beneath us and think, 'Oh thank goodness I'm not that person,' as you step past a homeless person on the sidewalk," says Henderson. "But then when you see someone who's doing really well, and you lay eyes on them, you might think, 'Well, why does he or she have all of that?'" 

Maybe that's why in New York's Democratic mayoral primary, the lowest income bracket skewed toward Andrew Cuomo, while upper–middle class voters went for Mamdani. The richest neighborhoods, which would be most affected by high taxes and wealth redistribution, picked Cuomo.

"If you take a random, upper–middle class, college-educated New Yorker, they're doing better than just about everyone in New York," says Henderson. "But people don't compare themselves to the average person. They compare themselves to those who are around them, those whom they could reasonably hope to be."

Henderson says socialist movements tend to emerge not from a disgruntled working class but from "intra-elite conflict." Back in 1949, Hayek wrote that "socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement."

He described an "intellectual" class that embraces socialism as "secondhand dealers in ideas"—the journalists, writers, artists, talk show hosts…influencers. 

This group, said Hayek, tended to judge ideas not on their merits, but by how "modern or advanced" they seemed. Mechanical and industrial engineering were remaking the economy, so Marxists assumed that social engineering could remake society. Intellectuals should be running the world. 

"Broad visions," not "technical details or practical difficulties," are what appeal to the young and idealistic, wrote Hayek.

Mamdani's signature issue is freezing the rent for about a million regulated apartments, sticking it to the greedy landlords. That's a lot easier and more romantic-sounding than actually fixing the problem by unwinding zoning laws, permits, and other regulatory burdens that limit supply and drive up prices in the first place. So are his proposals to have the city own grocery stores and produce its own "social housing" by going "beyond the market" to have "community ownership" of the land.

Rebuilding from scratch inspires young professionals who want to make a difference in the world—more so than defending what's left of the liberal order. A grand plan for society sounds more exciting than just giving individuals more freedom to pursue their own plans.

"It may be that as a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction," wrote Hayek. "That once freedom has been achieved, it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued."

This has happened in America, where socialism is ascendant on the Left and "national conservatism" is ascendant on the Right: Trump reorders the global economy with unilateral tariffs and directs the federal government to take a stake in some of the country's largest companies.

Hayek says our only hope is to "make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage."

So was Irving Kristol right? Partially, yes. Talk of shared values shouldn't make libertarians uncomfortable.

Liberty needs personalities who will fight to defend it and inspire others to do the same. And it needs shared cultural values in support of its principles. 

This doesn't mean indoctrinating kids with struggle sessions, injecting religious language and symbols into government institutions, or banning "offensive" speech like the very authoritarians libertarians oppose.

Libertarians want to make civic life less political by pulling government influence out of schools, the workplace, and the home. But the belief that everyone should be free to choose, as Milton Friedman put it, doesn't conflict with a shared culture that deems some of those choices bad.

"It is most important that a free society be based on strong moral convictions," said Hayek in a 1961 speech, "and…if we want to preserve freedom and morals…we should do all in our power to spread the appropriate moral convictions."

Socialists deride qualities like self-reliance, self-control, a strong work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and commitment to family as bourgeois shackles. They aren't shackles at all, but the path to a freer and more flourishing world. There's a reason that Marx explicitly sought to displace the family unit with the collective as the fundamental transmitter of such moral values.

And none of these are strictly liberal or conservative values. They are quintessentially American ones. They are the cultural values that make liberty and prosperity compatible. 

On the other hand, a culture of entitlement and grievance, fixation on ethnic, tribal, or class identity, demonization of entrepreneurship and wealth, and glorification of shallow pursuits and quick payoffs leaves a void that the religion of socialism promises to fill. 

The basis of a free society is the shared cultural belief that individuals have agency and aren't cogs in a machine or helpless victims of a rigged system, even if bad luck sometimes means there's a moral duty to help the unfortunate.

One of Mamdani's opponents was the incumbent Eric Adams, an incompetent mayor plausibly accused of corruption. Nevertheless, he became an unlikely messenger for these values in a campaign speech before he dropped out.

"There's no dignity in someone giving you everything for free," said Adams. "There's dignity in giving you a job so you could provide for your family and the opportunities that you deserve. So this is not a city of handouts. This is a city of hands up."

Religious believers tend to embrace this kind of individual agency. Kristol is right that the collapse of religious faith has left America more vulnerable to socialism's allure. That doesn't mean America should or ever will have a national religion. But it already does have a pretty good national creed: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Notice Jefferson wrote "pursuit," not "guarantee," and "happiness" to him meant a constantly engaged mind pursuing truth, "virtue and goodness."

Hayek argued that ideas work their way from the "intellectuals" to the masses. If he's right, then those of us who want a free society must show moral courage in our personal lives and in our public pronouncements. In a world full of "influencers," it's more important than ever to have the right kind of influence. 

A socialist America isn't inevitable, but neither is a free one. It's up to each of us—as free moral agents—to fight for it.