Creating a campaign of covetousness, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani coasted to victory in the Democratic primary by vowing to take wealth from the affluent and give it to those he believes are the rightful recipients of his largesse. Mass-marketing envy in his election messaging, Mamdani — like a typical Marxist — has promised to destroy those entrepreneurs who sacrificed to build what was once the City of Dreams by seizing the means of production and sharing the spoils with his supporters. (RELATED: Zohran Mamdani, ‘Honest’ Democrat)

Promising to put profit-oriented grocery store owners out of business through government takeovers of food distribution, Mamdani has channeled Josef Stalin by suggesting that he will create a “network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low and not making a profit.”

Suggesting that these city-owned stores would reduce overhead and pass on the savings to shoppers, Mamdani ignores a century of evidence —much of it from the Soviet Union — demonstrating that when government control of food distribution expands, price controls distort the market and lead to shortages, black markets, and reduced quality of goods. As citizens become increasingly reliant on the state for food, they are more vulnerable to bread lines and increasing state control of their lives. (RELATED: Government Stores in NYC? Yes!)

But that is the true goal of Marxism: seizing control over the means of production, including the production and distribution of food and housing. Promising to create “affordable” government-controlled housing, Mamdani has demonized New York City’s landlords and has promised tenants that if he is elected, he will “take control” of the property of landlords who have demonstrated insufficient attention to the quality of life for tenants. Demanding that landlords submit to his policy guidelines for rent control, Mamdani has promised that “the worst landlords will be put out of business.” And, like all Marxists, Mamdani will get to decide how a landlord might find himself locked out of his own rental properties.

Promising to “update the Housing Maintenance Code” to meet the risk of “extreme heat as our planet warms,” Mamdani will make it a Class C violation to fail to provide adequately cool apartments during the summer months: “We will require building owners to maintain a maximum indoor temperature of 78°F when the outdoor temperature is 82°F or higher. We will also install heat sensors in buildings with repeated heat violations.”

Mamdani knows that by imposing strict monitoring of indoor temperatures in rental properties, he is effectively setting landlords up for failure — paving the way for government takeover of their buildings.  Landlords are in a lose-lose situation under Mamdani’s draconian demands: if they install window air conditioners in each room of their rental units, they will be charged with violating city guidelines on energy consumption, but if they do not install the cooling devices, they will be charged with failing to adequately meet the cooling demands of an increasingly intrusive government. The landlords lose either way.

But for Mamdani’s Marxist goals, that is the point of all of this. Creating a culture of covetousness by relentlessly provoking people to envy those with “more” results in a deeply indignant and rapacious electorate that becomes convinced that those with greater wealth probably accrued that wealth by exploiting people like them. Envy then leads to resentment, which eventually erupts into violence and rage, malicious mobs, cancel culture, and the elevation of dysfunctional political systems like the malevolent Marxism of Zohran Mamdani.

The Marxist promise of “fairness” to the proletariat was a promise of a utopian world in which all conditions that produce envy will disappear. The Marxist assures us that an egalitarian world would remove all targets of envy so that the envious will have nothing to envy. But envy creates its own targets, regardless of how equal people may appear to be. In the aftermath of the revolutions to overthrow capitalist systems — whether in Cuba or Nicaragua, or Venezuela — the spoils are never evenly divided.

Socialism’s Past is Prologue

In the final days of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, when the Sandinistas marched into Managua, the first thing the revolutionary leaders did was to grab for themselves and their own families the luxurious homes left behind by the Somoza regime.

The fact that throughout history there has never been a socialist society that brought about the promised utopian classless conditions is dismissed by today’s “democratic socialists” like Mamdani. They claim that such examples of the failure of socialism have not gone far enough in redistributing the wealth equally.

In 2019, as Venezuela’s socialist regime collapsed amid the starvation of the people in the once-rich nation, the apologists for socialism blamed corruption, cronyism, and even the capitalism of the United States and its punitive sanctions on the oil-rich country. Claiming that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator-president, did not exert “enough control” over the populace, the writers for the Nation suggested that what Marx called a “dictatorship of the proletariat” is necessary to tamp down envy, as residues of capitalist thought and envious desires would permeate the new socialist society in the early days.

While he has attempted to obscure his intentions, Zohran Mamdani is indeed proposing a dictatorship of the proletariat to re-educate and monitor how the people of New York City would think, act, and associate in the new socialist order. This dictatorship of the political elite is necessary to suppress any attempt to speak of private property or the ownership of the production of the past. These political elites — led by Zohran Mamdani — would be charged with indoctrinating the masses to accept that true freedom and happiness involve ensuring that there is nothing left to envy.

Religion once stood as a check on our envy, but the decline in organized religion has created a void that Mamdani’s Marxist promise of an egalitarian utopia attempts to fill. He has cunningly capitalized on the seductive appeal of revengeful revolution. But most thoughtful people know that societies flourish when people find ways to control envy — not encourage it the way the democratic socialists have attempted to do.

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Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology and director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH.  She is the author of The Politics of Envy (Crisis Books).