The socialists win one and lose one so far this year. Zohran Mamdani takes office as Mayor of New York City, but Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro is toppled by the U.S. and moved to a jail (federal, not city) in New York City.
Mamdani constantly grins without remorse because, like most Americans left-wing or right-wing, he’s blissfully oblivious to the basic laws of economics, so he perceives no need to worry about consequences, certainly not a military coup anytime soon. He’s not the first socialist mayor of this city. In some sense, they’re all socialists, but just two mayors ago we had Bill de Blasio, a communist who openly complained about property rights-based law and who had honeymooned in Cuba.
But Mamdani’s the first socialist mayor we’ve had young and ignorant enough to let it all hang out, having (Brooklyn-born, delusional) socialist kingpin Sen. Bernie Sanders perform the mayoral swearing-in last week, vowing to insert city government into every problem no matter how small, bellowing like a villain from an Ayn Rand novel that he’ll replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” and throwing a “block party” around City Hall during his inauguration that gave citizens a real glimpse of what socialism brings: no food and no bathroom facilities.
Mamdani took a few leftward steps on day one, rescinding all of (fairly moderate) outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ executive orders from his final three months in office, thereby effectively eliminating heightened protections against anti-Semitism amidst aggressive rallies in the City over Gaza and retaining rent control, a regulatory scheme that warps markets in housing to yield less construction and more entrenching of long-term, already-rich occupants, making life harder for poor newcomers.
Showing consistent messaging, Mamdani also scrubbed from the official mayoral X account some old posts denouncing anti-Semitism. Prior to taking office, he claimed not merely that he must allow the arrest of Netanyahu should the Israeli prime minister visit NYC but, taking things a big step farther, claimed that because NYC is cosmopolitan, he must let “international law” override the U.S. law, though that way lie untold legal and regulatory horrors, not just a wave of happier campus protestors.
I notice at least one of my fellow libertarians, the eccentric Shikha Sood Dalmia, reacting to it all not with outrage but with strange observations such as that Mamdani is a “warm and cuddly” socialist and thus preferable to, say, the more cold and stern socialism of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Would the world have been better off, though, if Stalin had been warm and cuddly, or would it have been in even greater danger?
I can’t really ask such questions on Dalmia’s Facebook page, though, since she has declared even my mildest criticisms “trolling” and fit for deletion. In retrospect, I’m glad Reason magazine fired her. Like several of the “liberal-tarian” faction of libertarians, she’s humorless and intolerant while masquerading as a grand arbiter of civil discourse.
She also dismisses the “antiwar” faction of libertarians as phonies who just want to cozy up to Trump and thus exaggerate his peacenik tendencies. That’s no doubt true of some of them, but then, her favorite cuddly socialist seemed pretty chummy with Trump during his visit to the White House last year, a veritable Non-Aggression Pact of communist/fascist friendship. And why not? They’re both authoritarians, both would-be strongmen, Trump even giving Mamdani permission to call him a “fascist” if he felt philosophically obligated to do so.
We waste a great deal of time worrying about political labels instead of focusing on political consequences, though. Take Trump’s current attack on Somali Medicaid fraud in the Midwest. Is his interest primarily an expression of basic justice, fiscal conservatism, or opportunistic fascist-racism? Instead of getting bogged down in that narrow question, how about demanding the resignations of Tim Walz, Trump, Mamdani, and any other politician who has tacitly endorsed the existence of massive, wasteful, inefficient government programs such as Medicaid, then following up by calling for the abolition of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, just for starters?
Now, that would separate the socialists from the libertarians, and they need separating. Absent such clear distinctions, most people prefer to stay bogged down in debates over whether, say, the Nazis were technically socialists. I saw a Facebook thread in which the fair-but-shallow point that “Socialist” is right there in the full name of the Nazi Party was countered by someone making the equally shallow but far less fair argument that the Nazis lied so much we should assume that if they called themselves Socialists, they were likely the opposite.
Truth in labeling: authoritarians, by whatever party name, are all around us. Let’s not be petty about it. Naziism was a form of socialism (as was fascism in general from the get-go, according to the explicit words of Mussolini on the topic), and socialism in all its forms, scary to mild, is at least somewhat detrimental to humanity, insisting upon amassing power in the central government and siphoning it away from private institutions, much like fascism. Authoritarianism is bad despite its endless, exhausting variations. Please go back to the 20th century if you want to have endless semantic disputes about all that, but keep your hands off the future.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey