Question: Who said the following?
I think there’s a socialistic impulse, which I hear every day, in every kind of community, that they would like things to be planned in accordance to their needs. And I would, too. Unfortunately, what stands in the way of that is hundreds of years of history that have elevated property rights and wealth to the point that that’s the reality that calls the tune on a lot of development….
Look, if I had my druthers, the city government would determine every single plot of land, how development would proceed. And there would be very stringent requirements around income levels and rents. That’s a world I’d love to see, and I think what we have, in this city at least, are people who would love to have the New Deal back, on one level. They’d love to have a very, very powerful government, including a federal government, involved in directly addressing their day-to-day reality.
If you answered Zohran Mamdani, the new socialist mayor of New York, you’re wrong. The answer is Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York from 2014-21. De Blasio said that in a September 2017 interview with the hard-left New York Magazine.
Look at those words again: a plan in “accordance to their needs” (“From each according to his ability,” wrote Marx, “to each according to his needs”) for government to determine “every single plot of land.”
That’s even crazier than comrade Mamdani’s plan for government stores!
The sad reality is that New Yorkers have elected socialists as their mayor before, and very recently.
The sad reality is that New Yorkers have elected socialists as their mayor before, and very recently. Thus, when hands were wringing over the possibility of a socialist being elected mayor, I quietly made little mention of Bill de Blasio. I didn’t want to portray an attitude of “no big deal, this has happened before.” But in fact, it has. (RELATED: New York Owes America an Apology)
Indeed, here at The American Spectator, beginning back in 2013, I wrote several times about de Blasio. I even did a deep dive into the FBI file of his so-called “commie mommy” — Maria de Blasio. (RELATED: Was Bill de Blasio’s Mom a Commie?)
Like Mamdani, de Blasio believed in the socialist goal of common ownership of the means of production. “Socialism,” states Merriam-Webster, is “government ownership of the means of production.” And as Marx and Engels and Lenin taught, socialism is the final transitionary step to communism.
“And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between socialism and communism,” wrote Lenin in The State and Revolution. “What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower, phase of communist society. Insofar as the means of production becomes common property, the word ‘communism’ is also applicable here, providing we do not forget that this is not complete communism.”
Mamdani speaks of “seizing the means of production” and “abolition of private property.” That was the core of the plan of Marx and Engels: “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property,” said Engels. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared: “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” (RELATED: Deroy Murdock, “Zohran Has Two Daddies.”)
Mamdani would like to do the same.
Thus, I was not shocked to see a self-avowed socialist running for New York mayor again and leading in the polls. I had little doubt he would win, especially with the erstwhile “Luv Guv,” the Albany Kissing Bandit — Angry Andrew Cuomo — as his opponent. After all, this had happened before.
Or had it?
Well, yes, a socialist has been elected mayor in New York before, but none quite like Zohran Mamdani. To be sure, de Blasio was a radical, too — especially on cultural issues. His radical wife makes Mamdani’s wife look like Margaret Thatcher. But with de Blasio, there wasn’t the Islamist strain. Worse, Mamdani was coronated by young New Yorkers (especially woke women) on the heels of the disturbing Islamist uprisings of the last couple of years at Columbia University. If ever there was a time to elect an anti-Islamist, this was it. Instead, they chose Mamdani. His election is especially upsetting to Jewish people in New York. (RELATED: DOJ Targets GWU, UCLA, Settles With Columbia and Brown for Antisemitism Claims)
Returning to the socialist element of Mamdani, he strikes me as more of a true believer who will seek to enact actual policies. De Blasio was a lifelong Democrat with connections to the historical roots of the party, not to mention an early upbringing as an Italian Catholic (which he later rejected). Mamdani, on the other hand, is less a Democrat than a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has long described itself as the “largest socialist organization in the United States.” (I’ve repeatedly written about the DSA here at The American Spectator.) Mamdani is a poster boy for the DSA’s goal of hijacking the Democratic Party, pushing it far from the party of Harry Truman and JFK to that of Congressgirl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and the weeping, seething, sobbing, half-crazed Rashida Tlaib.
Mamdani is a man who believes in the utopian dream. His words in his victory speech were jarring for their socialist simplicity and stupidity: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve,” Mamdani gushed to applause from the faithful.
That’s a far cry from Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address: “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Then again, New Yorkers didn’t vote for a Reagan conservative. They voted for a socialist. Once again.
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