Zohran Mamdani puts the social in socialism and rides a blue wave to victory.
He’s got the MAGA faithful sweating in their too-tight pleather hammer pants.
Trump called New York’s newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani a “little communist,” and a “communist lunatic.”
For Ted Cruz he’s a “literal, Karl Marx-quoting, America-hating jihadist.”
Mamdani’s biggest crime? He wants to make New York — America’s most eye-wateringly expensive town — more affordable.
Awful, right?
The catch? He wants to do it by sharing the wealth. Because Mamdani is a democratic socialist.
For the people holding the reins of power, that’s an existential threat.
We’re talking reds-under-the-bed. The red peril.
But Mamdani’s opponents dropped the bundle by leaning into Cold War fearmongering.
For anyone under the age of forty, “reds under the bed” is a Pornhub category.
It’s been a long time since it’s carried any real political heft.
Mamdani gets that. He said that his opponents “speak only in the past because that is all they know.”
But to the powerbrokers who worship at the temple of Mammon that is 21st century capitalism, what Mamdani is proposing is the thin end of what they see as a very evil wedge.
By Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – X.com, Public Domain
A trillion reasons to hate capitalism
Want to know what really is evil?
Have a guess how much cash each New Yorker would get if Elon divided his trillion-dollar pay packet up between them.
$125,000 each. Every man, woman, and child.
To put it another way, imagine you were paid a million bucks a day.
Want to know how long it would take for that to add up to a trillion dollars?
2,700 years.
That’s not a typo.
To put it in context, 2,700 years ago, Homer decided it might be cool to tell a story about the Trojan War.
Is it any surprise that people like Elon Musk are keen to keep things as they are?
Unfortunately for the rest of us, it doesn’t add up.
Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash
Cost-of-living crisis? No shit.
Why are so many of us struggling?
It’s pretty straightforward.
The system is broken.
The billionaires’ club is bigger and richer than ever.
Fifteen per cent of the world’s wealth is controlled by just three thousand (mostly) men. That’s fewer than a quarter of the number of spectators you see on Wimbledon’s Centre Court.
Those three thousand individuals control $16.1 trillion between them. You have to combine the GDP of Japan, India, and the UK to equal their combined wealth. The only countries with a higher stand-alone GDP are the US and China.
There is no world in which that level of inequity is fair.
What’s not to love?
Zohran Mamdani isn’t an ideologue. He’s just coming up with real solutions to real problems.
Free buses. Free childcare. A freeze on rent increases. A $60 million municipal grocery store program.
Mamdani won because he chose hip-pocket issues over polarising identity politics.
Culture wars have no victors, only victims.
For the left, it’s a winning equation.
Photo by Janine Robinson on Unsplash
This is what happens when you have nothing to lose.
Democracy means you don’t need a revolution to make change. Because change begins at the ballot box.
And the people driving that change have plenty of gas left in the tank.
In the New York mayoral race, 72% of voters aged under forty-four supported Mamdani.
As for the Trump-backed, former Democrat mayor, Andrew Cuomo, despite millions in donations from billionaires including Mike Bloomberg, The Estée Lauder family, and a Walmart heiress, he racked up just 23% in the same demographic.
If the powers-that-be weigh the game so heavily in their own favour, young people have nothing to lose.
They’re locked out of the system. They can burn it to the ground without flinching.
It wouldn’t be the first time.
Mao Zedong was a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party at 28. Fidel Castro began the Cuban revolution when he was 27. When Vladimir Lenin laid out the principles of the Russian Revolution in his 1901 pamphlet, What Is To Be Done, he was 31. Seventy-five per cent of the signed-up members of Russia’s Bolshevik Party in 1907 were younger than 30.
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in Wall Street.
“Greed is good”… you think?
Cuomo did attract 55% of the over-65 vote, though.
Kudos, mate.
Only problem with that?
They don’t have many elections left in them. Fewer still if the American health and aged care systems keep going the way they are.
But greedy old fuckers like Donald Trump who fuel the machine haven’t got the memo. They’re still living in the 1980s.
They still think Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko was a good guy.
Remember him?
“Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms. Greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will save that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
A tsunami of voters looking for change
Well, the next generation has some news for them.
Greed is not good.
Greed is not right.
And greed does not work.
Not when greed means people can’t afford to feed themselves, much less afford a place to call home.
And you know what? The voters who pine for the glory days where hair was big, shoulder-pads were bigger, and greed was the buzzword… they’re on their last legs.
Every year, another wave of young people reaches voting age.
Pretty soon, it’s going to be a tsunami of voters looking for change.
Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash
Sewer socialism
Zohran Mamdani is speaking their language.
There’s a not very polite term used for Mamdani’s approach. “Sewer socialism.”
That doesn’t mean it’s shit.
It means it’s from the same school of thought that centered on Milwaukee in the first half of the 20th century.
The card-carrying members of the Socialist Party of America didn’t want to burn the capitalist pigs.
They wanted to clean up cities and improve ordinary Americans’ way of life. They started with the sanitation system, hence “sewer socialism.”
Milwaukee was America’s socialist heartland for half a century. Socialist candidates dominated the city from 1910 to 1950.
Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash
What Red Peril?
Anti-Communist hysteria is so last year.
The only people coming to burn your books, silence the press, dismantle democracy, quash dissent, and rob you of your individual freedoms nowadays aren’t communists.
The only red-under-the-bed coming to do that is a red-blooded American.
Communism as it existed in the 20th century is dead.
Russia today is an autocracy ruled by oligarchs and a dictator-in-charge. China is a global economic powerhouse also ruled by a strongman.
If the MAGA faithful want to push back against the undeniable appeal of socialist ideas, they’re going to have to come up with a better line.
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Roy Cohn
The communist witch-hunt
But MAGA is sticking with their (literal) guns and leaning into yesterday’s-tired patriotism playbook.
If the way Trump weaponizes patriotism seems familiar, it’s because it is.
It was the same tactic used by the House Un-American Activities Committee during their Cold War Anti-Communist witch-hunts in the mid-20th century.
The committee’s most loyal and dedicated pit-bull terrier?
Attorney Roy Cohn.
An old friend — yes, friend — described him like this: “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil.”
This is the same Roy Cohn who was Communist attack-dog, Joe McCarthy’s, wunderkind, and went on to mentor Donald Trump.
Coincidence? Definitely not.
The other thing Roy Cohn taught Trump were his rules for success:
1. Never settle, never surrender.
2. Counterattack, counter-sue immediately.
3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.
Yeah. They were lessons young Trump took to heart.
Roger Stone by Gage Skidmore – https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=172612712
Dirty tricks
Roy Cohn is also how Trump met the flamboyant Roger Stone, one of Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters.
Stone, who has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, describes himself as a political hitman, and was Trump’s political Svengali.
In the 1980s, Stone was business partner with Paul Manafort, Trump’s first campaign manager.
Their first client? Donald Trump.
Another of Stone and Manafort’s early clients? Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
In true Trump style, legend has it that when he gave Cohn a gift of diamond cufflinks to thank him for years of service, the diamonds turned out to be fake.
Some things never change.
A new Gilded Age?
Trump likes to claim he’s setting America on the path to a second Gilded Age.
The term was coined by Mark Twain in his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
It was the age of America’s Robber Barons.
The term came from medieval Germany. Raubritter, or “robber knights” were lords who charged illegal tolls on roads crossing their lands.
The American feudal thieves demolished competitors, bought politicians, and rigged markets. Sound familiar?
Sure, there was progress. New railroads crisscrossed the continent. Factories pumped out new technology — typewriters, archaic calculators, cash registers. And the steel and coal mining industries went gangbusters.
Their methods were on the nose, even then.
The pockets of the obscenely wealthy few were lined through the exploitation of the workers who manned their production lines and hacked minerals out of the earth for them.
Without any regulations, it was a time of rock-bottom wages.
As for workers’ rights? Yeah, right.
You know the names, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Duke, and Frick.
But want to know the key difference with today’s robber barons?
The reason their names are familiar, is that they gave back. Libraries. Universities. Scholarships. Museums.
Sure, they may have been doing it as an incredibly effective form of corporate whitewashing. But, still, they did it.
What do we get from our Costco bargain-bin robber barons?
Vanity rocket rides, eight-figure wedding ceremonies, and douche-canoes for cruising the Mediterranean worth as much as Trump’s overinflated ballroom.
Billionaires hate redistribution of wealth.
The reason socialism is such a threat to people like Trump and his billionaire cronies is that there’s no profit to be made.
No shareholders.
No CEOs.
No dividends.
You don’t get to be the billionaires we have today without capitalism and consumerism.
Little Rocketman Jeff Bezos wouldn’t be sending his then-new squeeze, now wife, Lauren Sanchez, and “astronaut” Katy Perry into space without a system that turned him into the world’s most effective middleman.
We’re living in a world where that’s exactly what many of the wealthiest companies and their owners do. Most of them don’t create anything other than elegant strings of code or efficient supply chains. They shuffle things from makers to consumers.
Amazon is a glorified parcel delivery company.
Airbnb is a holiday rental business on speed.
Uber is a dating app between people with cars and others who need a lift.
Without people buying shit, none of these people would have two red cents to rub together.
Photo by Raymond Petrik on Unsplash
Remember when fridges lasted thirty years?
Sure, they cost more to buy, relatively speaking. But they were made to last.
A drive along any suburban street on the weekend is a living testament to the culture of waste we’re buying into nowadays.
Flat-pack furniture, TV screens the size of small sedans, enough sofas to break little JD Vance’s heart, all left out on the sidewalk to rot in the rain.
There’s no market to resell them, because they’re junk.
And they’re junk because the billionaires, their companies, and their shareholders don’t want you to keep them.
They want you to buy them again.
And again.
And again.
Hands up if you can sew on a button?
That’s the other thing we’ve been encouraged to give up to feed the beast.
Self-reliance.
We work all day to earn money to buy things we used to make or do ourselves.
When a button falls off a shirt, and the guy who repairs shoes and does the odd bit of tailoring wants ten bucks to sew it back on, what do we do?
Seems a bit pricey. Plus, we don’t have a sewing kit and wouldn’t know how the fuck to sew a button back on even if we did.
So, we buy a new shirt.
Subscription slavery
It’s all part of the plan to turn us all into good little consumers.
And the best little consumers are those who are chained to the treadmill.
One of the most insidious means of coaxing us onto the track is the subscription model.
Some of the most important things we once bought outright and owned, we now rent in digital form.
I mean, sure. Convenient! Space saving! Yay!
But if you lost your home, at least you had your CD or record collection, your photo albums, and your DVDs to take with you.
Now, if you want to listen to your music, watch a movie, or look at photos of your kids, you need to pay to play.
Can’t afford your iCloud anymore? Well, fuck me. Say farewell to the lot.
It’s the 21st century version of indentured servitude. Which has nothing to do with false teeth.
The tomato problem
The other thing the consumer model achieves brilliantly, is conning us into paying for things we used to get for free.
I use the tomato example. Which probably only works in places like my home, Australia. Because no way would any self-respecting Italian put up with this shit.
Used to be the tomatoes at the supermarket were plump, juicy, and red. They smelt and tasted like… well, tomatoes.
Until the day they didn’t. Overnight, they became firm, pink things that looked like sun-bleached cricket balls.
A short time later, the tomatoes we knew and loved turned up on the shelves again. Only they had green stalks attached (and, so, smelt even more tomatoey) and had a fancy new name. Truss tomatoes.
They also cost twice as much as the disappointing tomatoes.
So, within a very short time, we were paying twice as much to get the exact same thing.
It’s what’s happening with free-to-air vs. streaming services.
We used to watch TV for free. We paid in kind by using our time to watch ads, which fed money back to the broadcasters.
Then streamers came along, and we paid for their services and got to watch our shows without ads.
Now? Unless we want to pay even more, we’re stuck with paying for something we used to get for free. Watching a program with ads.
See how it’s done? And we all fall for it.
Let them eat brioche
While kids wonder how they’ll survive this mess, Trump clutters up the Oval Office with gold trinkets and spends his days building vanity projects, while entertaining fawning billionaire buddies at an ill-conceived Mar-a-Lago ball that coincided with SNAP benefits running out for millions of Americans.
When he talks about needing an ID to fill up the car, or to buy groceries — great word, that one (?!).— he flags himself as a man who has never done a single ordinary thing in his life.
Man of the people? Yeah, right.
It’s Trump’s Marie Antoinette moment.
Not long before her head was forcibly detached from her body, when told that the peasants were starving because they were out of bread, she supposedly responded, “then let them eat brioche.”
Photo by Eye Speak on Unsplash
A shitload of smiting.
“Jesus!” is right.
I’m a committed agnostic.
But I am also a student of human belief systems. And I can say with absolute certainty that the Jesus so many Americans claim to believe in would be doing a shitload of smiting and turning over of tables in the temple if he were here today.
Money? He had a bit to say about it.
“You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realise that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17)
Also this:
“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21)
And most of all:
You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24)
Maybe it’s just me.
But what Zohran Mamdani and his crowd are hoping to do sounds a fuckload more Christian than anything else going on in America at the moment.
