In What’s Wrong with the Right Side of History, author Lee Harris devotes two chapters to explaining why “the woke movement is the antithesis of orthodox Marxism.” Harris also makes clear that what now goes under the name “Democratic Socialism” is “not your father’s socialism.” “The tip-off here is the huge array of mega-corporations that are happy to sing woke party lines.” Moreover, “this curious and unprecedented conjunction of the immensely wealthy and the woke oppressed might have a future, even a big one. It may well provide a shiny new ideological banner, allowing the rich and the powerful to disguise their bid to become even richer and more powerful.”

Harris tells us something that I’ve argued in my books to the point of exhaustion. However much I may disagree with Marxists and “democratic socialists,” anything resembling traditional socialism only has limited relevance to the woke movement and to such supposed socialists as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, and Elizabeth Warren. Neither communist nor socialist parties have traditionally advocated for gender neutral pronouns, gender transitioning operations for kids, open borders, gay marriage, or a war on white people. Indeed, the present communist parties in Hungary and Russia, as I document in my book Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, oppose gay marriage and insist that we recognize only two genders.

Growing up in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the 1950s, I remember living under a mayor who belonged to the Socialist Party. This mayor, Jasper McLevy, stayed in his office from 1933 until 1957 and throughout his multiple terms proved to be a model public servant. Except for favoring state ownership of public transportation, I can’t think of anything that McLevy or any other socialist mayor of the time did (there was one then in Milwaukee and another one in Norwalk, Connecticut) that would now strike me as radical. The McLevy I recall was a Bible-reading churchgoer and an exemplary traditionalist. As a public figure, he certainly didn’t resemble Zohran Mamdani and never took any of the grotesque woke positions that frontrunner for the New York mayoralty loudly proclaims. McLevy didn’t call for discrimination against whites, abolishing the police force, putting violent criminals on the streets, or supporting black radicals. This should lead us to question the Murdoch media preoccupation with Mamdani as a “democratic socialist.” Having heard this charge on what we may presume is his favorite channel, President Trump is now slamming Mamdani as a “communist” as well.

The big thing about Mamdani, or so it seems to me, is not so much his advocacy of over-the-top public programs as his social policies. What I’m noticing about Mamdani’s politics, beside his expressions of solidarity with Hamas, is his passionate support for abolishing the biological truth that there are two genders, his enthusiasm for sex-changing surgery on children, and his call for putting criminals on the streets without police protection for the likely victims. These bizarre positions have no connection whatever to socialism or communism. In my books I treat such conceits as characteristic of the “post-Marxist Left.”

Although a Mamdani administration would pursue questionable collectivist projects like municipally owned grocery stores and lots of freebies for Gen Z, describing this fellow mainly as a “socialist” hardly covers the extent of his mad schemes for transforming the social bond.

What renders Mamdani and other Democrats, like Pete Buttigieg and AOC, distinctive is more their wokeness than their socialist, redistributionist rhetoric. Moreover, given their dependence on a tax-bearing class, it is doubtful these social radicals would really try to expropriate the rich. They need to dip into that class’s continued earnings to carry out both their woke madness and their wasteful spending.

The question for me is why Conservatism Inc. doesn’t pay more attention to the wacked-out wokeness of leftist politicians. They persist in describing their opponents through the prism of the Cold War, when the U.S. was opposing two communist empires. Americans of a certain age, especially the Reaganite Boomers, like to think of their enemies as Commies. It strengthens the sense of unity among one-time Cold Warriors and creates the comfortable impression that these aging crusaders are carrying on the fight against the same enemy, even if the Cold War has been over for decades.

There is, however, another equally obvious reason that the conservative establishment doesn’t want to talk about wokery too often. That establishment finds it more expedient to stress the financial threat represented by the Democratic left or to talk about the anti-Israeli statements that come from Mamdani and his voters. One can understand the usefulness of these concerns as campaign issues but there are good reasons for attacking Mamdani explicitly for his moral nihilism. It is socially and culturally pernicious. Unfortunately, for the most part, the establishment conservative media moves gingerly around divisive social questions.

 That may be because the movement’s leading benefactors have zero interest in what they see as bygone cultural wars. What they care about most is pursuing a neoconservative foreign policy, increasing their corporate wealth, and making their streets physically safer. Therefore, much of the left’s cultural radicalism is now blatantly and unceremoniously ignored.