Noah Rothman of National Review has recently delved “into Mamdani’s Marxist mind.” According to Rothman, the New York mayor is trying to sugarcoat his commitment to a vicious form of collectivism driven by Soviet-type thinking:

Zohran Mamdani is not bereft of schmaltzy euphemisms for “collectivism.” He chose to use that word during his inaugural address — one that conveys not nebulous communitarianism but expropriation, kommunalka, purges, and gulags — deliberately when he favorably contrasted the Soviet theory of social organization against America’s misplaced faith in individual liberty. Mamdani knows what he’s doing, and he has surrounded himself with like minds. The socialist mayor of America’s most capitalist city brought with him into power avaricious malcontents who view the state as a mechanism to engineer a dramatic social leveling.

Rothman also indicts Cea Weaver, Mamdani-appointed director of the revitalized Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, for representing the same Marxist collectivism as her controversial boss. Supposedly, these leftists are driven by the same dangerous worldview as the one that produced Soviet tyranny, and their thinking can be traced back to the teaching of Karl Marx, which apparently lives on in New York’s City Hall.

Although I can’t think of any political issue on which Mamdani and I would agree, such provocative words as “purges” and “gulags” don’t come readily to mind when his name is mentioned. I also find nothing distinctively Marxist in what the New York City mayor is advocating, and it wouldn’t surprise me if neither Mamdani nor Rothman ever dipped into Marx’s oeuvre, other than memorizing a few phrases from the father of “scientific socialism.”

Can’t we say we dislike what Mamdani is doing without pulling out archaic Cold War rhetoric to describe him and his policies?  Giving away “free stuff” to urban free-loaders and pushing wokery for his LGBTQ and anti-white followers are bad enough, without accusing the mayor of trying to carry out “the Soviet theory of social organization” or working to impose a Stalinist dictatorship on the Big Apple. Unlike Marx and his Leninist disciples, Mamdani is not calling for public ownership of the means of production. Public groceries and public housing and added taxes on the wealthy (many of whom voted for Mamdani) don’t quite make it as full-blown socialism, although I’ve no doubt that what the new mayor advocates as “economic reform” will have disastrous consequences. He also seems to have substituted for the secret police, once so conspicuous in communist regimes, teams of social workers.

Allow me to come back to what has become my favorite theme recently: the reasons our conservative establishment can’t seem to stop calling its opponents Commies. First, let me give the most defensible reason for this tendency, namely that Mamdani occasionally invokes Marx and talks about the beauties of “collectivism.” This, however, is mostly academic posturing of the kind I encountered daily during more than 40 years in higher education. Just about everyone I knew in the social sciences declared himself a “Marxist” and deplored the inequality of capitalist societies.

Although I found such types tiresome, I never believed I was looking at a future Lenin or Mao. By the time I left the academic world, most of these self-proclaimed Marxists had made the then-customary switch to wokery. Although they still referred ritualistically to Marx, they became far more involved in combating sexism, racism, homophobia, and, more recently, transphobia. None of these fixations has anything to do with Marxism, and for the record, the American Communist Party now denounces the cultural radicalism now advocated by Mamdani as bourgeois capitalist decadence.

There is another less excusable reason that the conservative establishment insouciantly throws around the terms “Marxist” and “communist” in denouncing its Democratic opponents. Our “conservatives” are reluctant to take on the cultural war in which we’re engaged, even if they admit this event is going on.  Beating up on Mamdani’s “economic collectivism” and calling it Stalinist or Castroite is less politically or socially dangerous than stressing the fact that Mamdani intends to turn New York City into a center for sex change operations, including for children. To its credit, the Manhattan Institute broke from the Conservative Inc. pack last spring to point out the new mayor’s plan.

Even socially riskier for conservative talking heads and podcasters these days, as Matt Boose recently noted at Chronicles, is commenting at length on anti-white racism:

This is what the socialism preached by Mamdani is about, at its core: resentment of whites and their historical success. Mamdani has been widely credited, even by begrudging conservatives, with acknowledging real issues with housing costs that are crippling the next generation. However true that may be, his solutions are deeply ingrained with the envy of a world that sees too many white people as a problem to be solved.

Boose perceptively notes that the New York Post and Fox News carefully avoid dwelling on Mamdani’s frequently voiced hostility to “white supremacy,” a theme that Cea Weaver has taken up in linking home ownership to white control. Screaming about an economic issue like “socialism” is harmless rhetoric compared with grasping the nettle directly: namely, that Mamdani is pursuing racial policies directed against white Americans. Perhaps someday a less politically correct “conservative” media will speak about such matters with less timidity.