Mamdani’s Socialist Delusion

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 16, 2026

 

In an appearance on CBS Mornings on Thursday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani articulated a Marxian version of dialectical materialism in which democratic socialism finally crushes its capitalist detractors.

 

Mamdani scoffed at those who told him that, “You could only be a democratic socialist in northwest Queens.” But when he won a bare majority of the general election vote in one of America’s bluest cities to become mayor, Mamdani claimed that his critics changed their tune. “Now,” he said, “the next question is the state, then it’ll be — the next question will be the country.”

 

“I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this country — that’s the working class,” the Big Apple’s collectivist mayor forecast.

 

Where would a socialist be without his undying faith in his movement’s inevitable historical triumph?

 

The mayor seems to have succumbed to the classic Leninist fantasy that socialism is broadly popular, but its ascendancy is thwarted by nefarious structural impediments. In reality, Mamdani-style quasi-socialistic progressivism has been the flavor of the decade on the American left, and it has not enjoyed broad appeal.

 

The far left’s inevitable ascendancy was supposed to begin in 2018, but voters had other plans. Arizona’s great progressive hope, David Garcia, lost his bid to unseat Governor Doug Ducey by nearly 18 points. Onetime NAACP chief Ben Jealous, too, underperformed against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s narrow defeat in his bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz was said to represent a sea change in Texas politics. It wasn’t.

 

At the congressional level, the far-left candidate Scott Wallace lost a winnable race in a suburban Pennsylvania district. Despite glowing coverage of his candidacy, Ammar Campa-Najjar went down to defeat in San Diego against a Republican incumbent facing a criminal indictment. Liz Watson raised $2 million on the back of her endorsements by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but she lost her Indiana race by 13 points.

 

What was billed as a progressive moment in American politics did not live up to expectations. Still, progressives comforted themselves with victories like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election in the Bronx, Ilhan Omar’s succession to fill Keith Ellison’s seat, and the disgraced John Conyers replacement by Rashida Tlaib. But these were all overwhelmingly Democratic districts.

 

Democrats learned all the wrong lessons from 2018 and embraced the most radical version of the left’s philosophy. The Green New Deal, free college, free housing, a universal basic income, Medicare for all, defunding ICE, tearing down the border wall, and so on — almost all the Democratic Party’s presidential aspirants ahead of the 2020 cycle endorsed some or all these policy prescriptions. But the candidate who didn’t, Joe Biden, won the nomination.

 

The far left’s march toward victory has encountered plenty of bumps in the road in this decade, too. The so-called “Squad” lost members in 2024, and not because counterrevolutionary conservatives succumbed to a false consciousness and voted against their economic interests. Their fellow Democrats turned on the likes of Cori Bush in Missouri and Jamaal Bowman in New York, throwing them out on their ears in favor of more establishmentarian figures.

 

Before that, left-wing darling Jessica Cisneros tried and failed (twice) to represent a Texas border district, but she never lived up to the hype around her candidacy in progressive media outlets. Despite many attempts, Ohio’s Nina Turner never managed to translate her electoral successes at the state and city levels into a national political career. San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin was perhaps the most famous progressive prosecutor to be defenestrated by his constituents, but he was hardly the only far-left reformer in that role to suffer the voters’ wrath.

 

Progressives have managed to avoid reckoning with these and many more electoral setbacks. For that, they can thank their willfully blind allies, none of whom are inclined to dwell on their philosophy’s shortcomings or its toxic advocates. In the last several years, self-described Democratic Socialists have engaged in anti-social activism and violence with such regularity that, if their politics were different, Democrats would recognize them as a run-of-the-mill hate group.

 

In the last two years, municipal-level socialists won victories in many (though not nearly all) of the campaigns they waged, taking the reins in places like Seattle; Burlington, Vt.; and, yes, New York City. But theirs is still a philosophy with niche appeal, and its reach is still limited to a handful of urban enclaves.

 

If victory is your destiny, you don’t have to compromise with your adversaries or calibrate your message to persuade the persuadable. It’s not hard to see the appeal in that outlook. But the kind of socialism Mamdani insists is welcome everywhere dismisses offhandedly the fact that it has been attempted almost everywhere, and it has gone down to defeat more often than not. Absent successes at the ballot box, Mamdani’s bravado sounds less like confidence and more like delusion — the ineluctable arc of history notwithstanding.