What’s going on here? In a word: Mamdani’s political opponents are threatened by his unapologetic democratic socialism, and they’re trying a range of strategies to neutralize it. Honey, vinegar, whatever works to maintain the wealthy’s stranglehold on the economy.
First we have Congress’s resolution, the text of which suggests that adopting “socialist policies” would lead to totalitarianism and that any redistribution of wealth is a grave violation of traditional American values. It’s all nonsense.
Eight of the resolution’s twelve “whereas” lines are about the crimes of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other authoritarian dictators. As a general rule, it’s probably a bad idea to try to learn history from Congressional resolutions instead of reading the work of serious historians, but there’s no denying the brutality of these regimes. What, though, is this supposed to have to do with the politics of Zohran Mamdani or other democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Democratic socialists oppose authoritarianism in our time. Our commitment to democracy is right there in the name. And we carry on the legacy of socialists before us who opposed authoritarianism in their time — including from totalitarian leaders waving the banner of socialist politics.
In 1918, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg wrote a pamphlet expressing alarm about the early warning signs of authoritarianism in the brand-new Soviet Republic. (The Soviet Union wasn’t formally formed until several years later.) In it, she warned that “socialist democracy” isn’t and couldn’t be “something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.”
Luxemburg was arguing that ruling parties and state bureaucracies are unlikely to voluntarily give up their power. A regime that doesn’t start out as a democracy is unlikely to end up as one. And the whole point of socialism, she emphasized, is to create a system more democratic than capitalism.
The Overton window has shifted dramatically to the right on fundamental economic questions in the last fifty years. As a consequence, many Americans aren’t very familiar with the socialist tradition, which makes it easy for opponents of our politics to tar us with the brush of Stalin and Mao. In truth, today’s democratic socialists are, like many of our predecessors who opposed the authoritarianism of those regimes, deeply committed to democracy. In fact, we value democracy so much that we don’t think it should stop at the door to the workplace. Rather than letting a small number of CEOs make decisions that impact vast numbers of people, we want to empower workers and communities through social ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources.
Since Rosa Luxemburg’s pamphlet about the Russian Revolution, there’s been an unbroken tradition of socialist criticism of authoritarian one-party states that ruled in the name of socialism. Anti-Stalinist socialists in the West, for example, were denouncing Stalin’s show trials at a time when most Western liberals couldn’t be bothered to care. The organization Mamdani is a member of, Democratic Socialists of America, added the d-word to its name when it was founded precisely in order to differentiate the socialism it advocated from the undemocratic system that still existed in countries like the Soviet Union.
Pinning Stalin’s crimes (“the horrors of socialism”) on today’s democratic socialists makes about as much sense as pinning the historical crimes of the Catholic Church (“the horrors of Christianity”) on today’s Southern Baptists.
