By Kelly Sloan | Commentary, Washington Examiner
Watching Mayor Zohran Mamdani carry on in New York, I am reminded of Lord Percy of Newcastle’s ominous definition 75 years ago of “social democracy”: “The phrase,” he wrote, “does not imply that economic activity should not continue to be based on private property; it implies only that, as a matter of legal rights, such property should be perpetually insecure.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a more apt descriptor of the current situation in New York, three-quarters of a century after Lord Percy wrote those words intended as a warning to anyone who found themselves tempted by the intoxicating effects of socialism. Indeed, the rhetoric of Mamdani and his acolytes, who are now in the process of gobbling up Democratic primary nominations around the country, suggests their intentions for private property go further than that.
One can hope that it is merely hyperbolic license on their part, but such is the bombast emanating from the faction that is ascendant within the ranks of the Democratic Party. Conventional wisdom holds that this is a political anomaly, representing an extremist fringe that is too publicly unappetizing to warrant serious consideration. And yet they are winning primary elections in the middle of the country, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) name is being invoked unironically as a possible presidential candidate, and Mamdani is the mayor of America’s largest city. So, it’s probably best not to ignore the threat.
And if we are to take it seriously, we ought to determine its provenance. Many people, not only conservatives, are astonished at the historical and cultural illiteracy needed to embrace such a corrupt worldview. How, after the horrors of the 20th century — the “workers” revolutions left and right that tore apart Europe, and later much of the rest of the world; the Holodomor; Mao Zedong’s blood-soaked Cultural Revolution; the revelations of the Gulag after the fall of the Berlin Wall — could anyone still cling to the vicious ideology that birthed such desolation? The uneasy answer is, in part, that the appeal of socialism never quite went away. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it went largely dormant for a while, the idea of classical communism, the end of human conflict and the advent of a stateless society, dead, at least in its more extreme forms.
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