NEW CRITERION: Other people’s money.

As we await Mamdani’s socialist dégringolade, it is worth keeping in mind two points from his victory speech. One was the grateful praise he lavished upon “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.” Note the group he omitted: Americans; indeed, no form of the word “American” occurs in his speech.

The second point to bear in mind from Mamdani’s speech concerns coercion. Frantz Fanon taught that “decolonization” always requires violence to succeed. Mamdani’s frequent deployment of the word “mandate” in his speech, despite receiving votes from only a million New Yorkers (in a city of 8.5 million), should give us pause. He had, he said, been given “A mandate for change. A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.” The word “mandate,” we note, comes from the Latin verb mandare: to order, command. Who can doubt Mamdani’s implicit understanding of that etymology, given his devotion to Fanon?

When you strip away whatever emollient rhetorical packaging in which it is delivered, socialism rests on two basic demands: the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth. The more aggressively those demands are pushed, the more severe will be the imposition of state control by those working the levers of power. We write a few days after Mamdani’s victory at the polls. Already the cultivated nice-guy rictus of his campaign countenance is disintegrating, replaced by something harsher and more grasping.

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