Mamdani Is Making Democrats’ Communist Fantasies Come True

In his inaugural address as the new mayor of New York City, Ugandan-born Zohran Mamdani promised, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The blatantly Marxist statement has generated a spate of controversy, but the reality is that Democrats have long embraced such a worldview — Mamdani is just the first to do it so explicitly.

From government health care to punishing high achievers, the left loves communism, but nowhere is it clearer than in its view of property.

Days into his tenure, Mamdani appointed Cea Weaver as director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver, like Mamdani, is a radical Marxist who once said: “For centuries we’ve really treated property as an individualized good and not a collectivized good. And … transitioning to treating it as a collective good … will require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families — especially white families, but some POC families who are homeowners as well — are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have. “

The New York Post also uncovered old posts from Weaver in which she said, “Seize private property!” on June 13, 2018. Weaver also said, “Private property including an[y] kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy” in a post on Twitter in 2019.

Weaver’s worldview fits perfectly with Mamdani’s: If individualism is “frigid” and collectivism is “warm,” then property rights — which belong to each individual — are to be eroded rather than defended. And while Weaver’s comments are shocking and dangerous, she was hired precisely because of these radical views, the same way Mamdani was elected because of his Marxist convictions.

And what’s remarkable is that the American left and propaganda press are treating these explicit commitments to Marxism as normal rather than as a threat to America’s vitality and very existence.

But that’s because in reality, Democrats have long subscribed to the same Marxist ideology — they’ve just been trying to cloak their Marxism in softer language.

Mamdani represents the logical culmination of a Marxist worldview that people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spent years mainstreaming. What they advanced rhetorically in Congress, Mamdani is now implementing administratively.

Take, for example, how the Biden administration issued an unconstitutional moratorium on residential evictions. During the height of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions. Then-President Joe Biden extended the moratorium before the Supreme Court struck it down 6-3. The Supreme Court previously ruled the CDC “exceeded its existing statutory authority” by issuing the moratorium in the first place.

That was the “warmth of collectivism” in practice: The property belonging to the landlord was treated not as the fruit of his labor, protected by right, but as a resource the state could collectively take control of in the name of a collective emergency.

Or look to Atlanta, Georgia, the “epicenter” of a nationwide squatting crisis. Across the country, squatters are taking over homes — and they’re emboldened by Democrat policies. As Helen Raleigh explained in these pages, “overly lenient squatters’ rights laws” give squatters legal rights to take over someone else’s property if they’ve been squatting for more than 30 days.

Or consider California Democrats passing a law to decriminalize theft, another infamous example of the left’s war on “rugged individualism.”

The pattern is the same: Individual rights are being eliminated in favor of “the collective.”

These are not disconnected policy failures. They are expressions of Democrats’ ideological shift to the far left and their embrace of communism. If Democrats thought they could impose an explicitly Marxist governing philosophy nationally without costing themselves politically, they would. But it’s still politically toxic in the sane parts of America. So they’ve obscured their radical ideology, calling it equity or excusing it as an emergency response to a virus. But that doesn’t change the fact that the left has spent years trying to normalize the idea that property does not truly belong to the individual. Rather, in the Democrats’ worldview, property is conditional and ultimately subject to the will of the collective.

The opening moves of Mamdani’s mayoralty simply represent the concrete, explicit implementation of this worldview.

It’s a particularly egregious realization as America approaches her 250th birthday — a birthday that celebrates that we are a nation founded on the recognition that every person is created in the image of God, and therefore, every person has God-given, inalienable, natural rights. Those rights include the right to life, liberty, and property.

If rights belong to the individual by nature, then no collective — no matter how radical and powerful — has the authority to take those rights away. A political majority does not get to dictate what rights an individual has simply because of mob rule. Natural rights exist independently of mob rule.

Collectivism rejects that premise entirely, treating people as replaceable cogs in a political machine, valuable only as long as they serve the collective. Under collectivism, the majority can seize the individual’s property, override his choices, and ignore his rights — all in the name of the collective. That flies in the face of natural rights, property rights, and everything the founders put their lives on the line for. 

Mamdani isn’t trying to cloak collectivism in the guise of a temporary response to a pandemic or some other crisis; he is openly rejecting individualism and staffing his administration with people hostile to the fundamental principles of the republic. In that sense, Mamdani is proof of where the Democrat Party truly stands.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2