The Wall Street Journal quizzed many of its opinion writers recently to opine on the prospects of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty of New York City in a lengthy (nearly three-quarters of a full Journal page) editorial piece, titled “Living in Zohran Mamdani’s America."
The compilation of insights from these bright folks makes for interesting reading. They wax on at length about the absurdity of Mamdani’s campaign platform (government-run grocery stores, a $30 per hour minimum wage, abolishing the police, and so on). They discuss what led to the rise of Mamdani, a hardcore socialist (arguably communist) for the top government slot in America’s most capitalist city. They talk about the ills of modern society that have left youth disaffected and lacking in meaning.
But for all the verbiage expended by the Journal’s big thinkers, the rise of Mamdani should not surprise us. It can be explained very easily and eloquently by two simple quotes from two of the 20th century’s greatest statesmen – Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan.
Prime Minister Churchill famously said: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
And President Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Taken together, these two short quotes tell us all we need to know about the rise of the 33-year-old Marxist mayoral candidate. In a Democratic primary contest in which just over a million votes were cast in a city with nearly five million active, registered voters, Mamdani won a plurality of 43.5 percent. Then, given the city’s new, ridiculous ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani received ultimately 56 percent of the vote to the next highest-ranking candidate, the scandal-tarred Andrew Cuomo, with 46 percent.
How did Mamdani, a little-known state legislator, pull this off? By appealing to those described by Churchill – the failed, the ignorant, the envious, and the miserable.
Mamdani promised free childcare and free bus service. From whence the magic money to pay for this largesse will spring was never articulated, to my knowledge. The city’s expenses exceeded its earnings by $1.1 billion in 2024, and it was only thanks to surplus funds from prior years that the shortfall was overcome. There is no such thing as a “free” anything. Only the ignorant do not understand this.
And then there is Mamdani’s past demands to defund the police (before he tried to walk it back in the campaign). Are we to believe that New York will be a safer place sans the city’s finest? Only the miserable would vote for this.
And there was Mamdani’s promise that, if elected, he would shift the tax burden to “whiter and richer neighborhoods”. This certainly appeals to the envious and the failed. It will, of course, drive away yet more wealthy New York residents to tax-friendlier jurisdictions, thus reducing New York’s tax base still further, accelerating the deficit from all the “free” stuff Mamdani promises.
This is where Reagan’s admonition comes in. Those of us looking at New York from the outside shake our heads at the foolhardiness of the Mamdani voters. But we must understand that many of these voters, particularly the young, were simply not taught the principles of freedom, which Mamdani’s socialist policies would inevitably eviscerate.
Mamdani’s campaign plank to provide government-run grocery stores really gobsmacked us. Surely, New Yorkers would not be idiotic enough to think this is a good idea. But many of them are not familiar with the pictures of the barren shelves in the old government-run Soviet, East German, and Cuban grocery stores.
They do not know, because we older folks assumed that knowledge was passed to the younger generation “in the bloodstream.” I guess that if you polled New Yorkers under age 30 and asked them what the Soviet Union was, the majority could not tell you.
Envy and ignorance are as old as humanity itself. During the horrible years of famine imposed by Mao on the Chinese population during his Great Leap Forward economic experiments, envious peasant farmers would rat out their neighbors if the neighbor had one more chicken than they did. An estimated 15 to 55 million would perish in Mao’s efforts to industrialize China. Mao Zedong would prove to be one of the worst mass murderers in human history. Yet many millions of Chinese, particularly the young and ignorant, embraced him in his rise to power.
Zohran Mamdani is just the latest incarnation of the opportunistic politician who will promise anything to the ignorant, the failed, the envious, and the miserable. We need simply turn to the wisdom of Churchill and Reagan to remember age-old truths about avoiding these charlatans.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 39 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News' 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News' Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)