Zoran Mamdani’s Marxist Dream for America’s Largest City

 

Zoran Mamdani’s socialist blueprint is a recipe for New York’s collapse, turning abundance into scarcity, driving out the wealthy, and trapping the poor in the very misery he pretends to fight.

Zoran Mamdani has decided that his political campaign will be fueled not by real solutions but by a traveling circus of Trump-bashing across New York City. His five-day tour is not about fixing potholes, lowering rent, or making groceries affordable. It is about shouting the same lines about being Donald Trump’s “worst nightmare,” as if that alone will make him the savior of New York. He even went to Staten Island, the most pro-Trump borough, where Trump once took 65% of the vote, to deliver his sermon on why the city must remain a sanctuary city. He painted himself as the defender of the city’s “fabric” while blaming Trump for SNAP cuts, all while carefully avoiding explaining why his own economic vision looks like a page torn from the playbook of failed socialist experiments.

His grand dream? City-run grocery stores. The idea sounds like a utopia until you look at reality. Missouri tried it. The shelves were empty, the goods vanished faster than free samples at Costco, and the store collapsed in total failure. In Mamdani’s New York, shoppers would likely line up at dawn, hoping to get a half-loaf of bread before the shelves cleared. If toilet paper vanished during COVID, imagine what would happen if Mamdani ran the city’s supply chain. Instead of whispers about “Charmin arriving at 11 a.m.,” New Yorkers would be whispering rumors about when the government truck might roll in with milk. In the end, the well-connected would hoard while everyone else stared at bare shelves. When government tries to run the market, it turns abundance into famine and fairness into chaos.

Mamdani insists his policies are about justice, but they are nothing more than Marxist fantasies dressed up as compassion. He talks about the forgotten, but his ideas would crush the very people he claims to champion. Government-run stores, government-controlled housing, and government micromanagement of health care and education would not liberate the poor—they would trap them in dependence and scarcity. Housing in particular would collapse. By destroying the free market, Mamdani would make apartments rare jewels. Real estate taxes would climb, and families who carefully saved to inherit or purchase their apartments would find themselves priced out of their own homes. When the wolf guards the sheep, you don’t get protection—you get dinner served.

Despite all this, Mamdani is soaring in the polls. He hovers around the 40s, while the others trail far behind. Eric Adams sits at a mere 7%. The vote-splitting among multiple candidates has given Mamdani an open lane to the mayor’s seat. It is a circus of egos where Cuomo clings to his family name like a child clutching a broken toy, and others scramble for scraps of relevance. Meanwhile, Mamdani positions himself as the anti-Trump candidate, understanding that mentioning Trump guarantees him a headline. In a city where media thrives on Trump stories, Mamdani is like a moth dancing in front of the brightest flame, knowing the attention will keep him alive.

But beneath the showmanship lies an ugly truth. The voters he claims as his base—minority and low-income communities—are not the ones who carried him through the primary. It was well-educated, older voters glued to MSNBC, the kind who nod at progressive slogans while sipping lattes in gentrified neighborhoods, who voted him forward. Meanwhile, the city bleeds revenue. In just one year, New York lost $15 billion as high-net-worth individuals fled the state. If Mamdani’s tax-and-regulate utopia takes hold, even more wealth will vanish. And who will bear the weight of the collapse? Not the elites in rent-controlled apartments, not the professors in cozy co-ops, but the low-income families who cannot escape. When the rich flee and the poor stay behind, the burden falls on the backs least able to carry it.

Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores are especially laughable when scaled to New York. With nearly nine million people and about 1,000 grocery stores already competing in the market, his plan would replace thriving competition with a single centralized disaster. It is one thing to run a lone store in a tiny town; it is another to imagine a bureaucracy capable of feeding millions without turning the city into a breadline. The absurdity of it would be comic if the consequences weren’t so tragic. A city cannot feast on slogans; it starves on them.

And yet, Mamdani plows forward, making the race about Trump rather than about governing. He thrives in the media echo chamber. Trump’s name gives him oxygen; without it, his policies would suffocate under the weight of their own impracticality. He paints himself as bold, but his boldness is little more than parasitism on Trump’s fame. Trump generates news stories the way a shark generates fear in water—it’s constant, inevitable, and magnetic. Mamdani knows this and attaches himself like a remora fish to the shark’s side, hoping the spectacle keeps him relevant.

Ranked choice voting in the primary also gave him an edge. But the general election will not be so forgiving. In a one-man-one-vote contest, his fragile coalition may face collapse if opposition unites. Yet as long as Cuomo and others linger, Mamdani continues to ride the split. His political rivals grumble, but they cannot seem to gather the courage to clear the stage. When generals squabble, the fool with the loudest trumpet takes the throne.

What makes Mamdani’s politics most dangerous is not just their impracticality but their hypocrisy. He rails against privilege while enjoying the fruits of status. He lectures about rent justice while sitting comfortably in a rent-controlled apartment he could afford to pay more for, obtained not by merit but by connections. He preaches about equality while enjoying the advantages of the very system he condemns. For him, politics is not about service but about status. It is about rising above the very punishments he would impose on others. He wants the power to wield the whip, not the humility to share the load. The hand that points at the oppressor often hides the whip behind its back.

Zoran Mamdani is not running to save New York. He is running to remake it into a socialist playground where slogans substitute for solutions and scarcity is called justice. His roadshow is not a vision—it is a warning. A city that hands itself over to him will not become a sanctuary; it will become a cage. And while the wealthy escape and the connected thrive, ordinary New Yorkers will stand in line at government-run stores with empty shelves, waiting for a miracle delivery that never comes. When the blind lead the city, the people stumble in darkness.

And yet, his rise proves one thing: New York, in its chaos and confusion, may very well hand its crown jewel to a man whose politics are built on fantasy and resentment. If so, the city will not just be voting for a mayor. It will be voting for its own slow starvation.