The shouting about communist/socialist/Marxist/Islamist by the US Right when it comes to Zohran Mamdani suggests they live in a 1950s McCarthyite time warp and/or an ideological ignorance bubble. Besides a social democratic being none of the above, the operative term in the phrase is “democratic.” He was elected in a landslide on a working class focused platform that was well known and well received across the electoral demographic (age, gender, religion race, etc.)”. Although the Right did its dishonest best to smear him with the usual culture wars and “Reds under the beds” fear-mongering, it may be the case that after years of corrupt NYC machine politics-as-usual that catered to the interests of the corporate and oligarchical classes, voters are willing to try something new.
“New” means a move to the center-Left. Mamdani is no radical extremist no matter what the rabid Right mouth-frothers say about him. NYC has never had a social democratic mayor and given what has come before, especially recently, perhaps voters decided to not listen to the troglodytes and try something different when it comes to a governance approach.
Mamdani still has to deal with a city council, borough governments, state government and people within his own party who will force him to compromise in order to be effective. But shifting the starting point to the policy Left after years of the city government maintaining a corporate-Right bias could just break the hold of embedded vested interests when it comes to how the public purse is distributed. That can only be a good thing, especially if working and middle class socio-economic wellbeing is a major focus.
Best of all, even if NYC is not representative of the entire nation (far from it), Mamdani is an absolute nightmare for the MAGA morons in and out of government at all levels. That is because should he be successful and cast his eyes an even higher federal office, there is bound to be a lot of bed-wetting in Red States and in red parts of DC as a result.
That should be fun to watch.
On a personal note, the rightwing hysteria about Mamdani’s “Marxism” brought back memories of when I underwent my first Top Secret US security clearance interview and polygraph test (in the early 1990s). I was asked if I had ever been a member of a Communist Party or advocated for the overthrow of the US government. Although I had affiliations with left-wing groups in Argentina and then elsewhere as a teenager and young adult, I could honestly say that I was never a member of any Communist Party (basically because most CPs of that era were pro-soviet Stalinists and I was and am not into Stalinists). I could also honestly say that I did not advocate the overthrow of the US government, although I certainly advocated for the overthrow of US client dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere.
So I said “no” to both questions and passed that part of the exam. In the long form interview I explained to my interviewers from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) that I was a Peronist symnpathizer-turned-neo-Gramscian analytic Marxist whose political sympathies tended towards what was then called the “Eurocommunist” line. I tried to be helpful and told them that they should try to be more specific in their questioning, since there were significant differences between Maoists, Leninists, Trotskyites and other Marxist derivatives. In response (and I kid you not, dear readers), the interviewers literally rolled their eyes, looked at each other, shook their heads and mouthed the letters “W-T-F?” After a long pause, the lead guy said to me “we do not care whatever you were and are so long as you are not a commie.” That was the state of play when it came to official Defence Department understanding of Marxism in the year Bill Clinton came to office.
They then moved on to ask me if I “liked” men. What ensued was an interesting discussion about the meaning of “liking men” and in what context. Their basic line was that they did not care whether I “liked men” or not, but that they simply had to know in the event that I was blackmailed given my new job. My then Navy Officer girlfriend was highly amused by this when I told her about the interview and offered to vouch for my, er, “proclivities.”
Anyway, I passed the test and headed off to the Pentagon with my clearance secured. I met a fair amount of closet commies and man-likers once there.
Mamdani was not among them.