New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has a laundry list of uniquely terrible ideas for New Yorkers, such as taxing white people more, government-run grocery stores, rent-controlled housing, a $30-an-hour minimum wage, taxpayer-funded gender change surgeries and chemicals on minors, and one of the worst in his list of horrors: queering the police.
That is a whole lot of terrible ideas from one 33-year-old Socialist Muslim who has been an American for about five minutes. But he won the election by boldly proclaiming them. Democrats chose him. So this matters because many Democrats see Mamdani's highly divisive, Marxist-fueled vision for New York City as the future of the Democratic Party.
Several of his policy prescriptions will fit this category, but queering the police is a perfect avatar for how Marxists have operated for generations. They never free themselves from whatever socialist utopia was cooked up in the fevered minds of tenured college professors and delivered to them. Sure, socialism has failed miserably everywhere it has been tried on every continent and among every people type, but the truly faithful never lose faith in its utopianism.
Because Marxism is fundamentally about the eternal struggle and the permanent revolution rather than the current cause driving the battle, the progenitors, dating back to Karl Marx himself, understood this, and it explains why the utterly repudiated concept remains so resilient.
Marx saw revolution — based on the economic class struggle led by the proletariat, the working class, to overthrow the bourgeoisie — as a long-term necessity to achieve the ultimate goal of communism. Communism requires the destruction of what is. A central tenet of Leon Trotsky's Marxist theory was the concept of the permanent revolution. He believed that the revolution needed to be continuous, expanding beyond national borders and ultimately leading to a global socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. Vladimir Lenin argued that a communist revolution must be led by "professional revolutionaries," which we most clearly have in America.
So Marx, Trotsky, and Lenin combined showed the way forward for an ever-ongoing revolution of the (insert oppressed class) to destroy the (insert oppressor) through the use of professional revolutionaries.
The original economic class struggle never took hold in America, in large part because of the development of a vast middle class — which undermines the financial class struggle type of Marxism. Truly impoverished workers are a relatively small portion of the American population, unlike in revolutionary Russia or Maoist China. But Marxists are like dogs with a bone. They will have their revolution one way or another. It's always the revolution.
If economic class warfare does not work, then insert race instead of economics, where people of color are the proletariat and white people are the bourgeoisie that must be overthrown. Rich people are less the enemy. It's the white people! But as more and more black Americans become middle-class millionaires and billionaires — through capitalism, it should be noted, the original bogeyman of Karl Marx — this insert, too, has lost its luster.
And so we have seen a series of increasingly odd categories within the movement, most recently queering the environment and now queering the police. Of course, no one knows what such twaddle means, but it isn't meant to be understood. There is an academic nonsense explanation of queering the police, but it doesn't matter. It is the latest stand-in for being down with the struggle, insert-and-play drivel for the eternal conflict inherent in the Marxist hive.
The difference today, and what is so very dangerous with Mamdani's very public plans, is that for the first time, the Democratic Party establishment in America seems to have completely given itself over to it. Mamdani himself, with the prompting of Jen Psaki, Biden's former press secretary, said his platform is the way forward for the Democratic Party.
Former President Bill Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have all publicly congratulated and praised Mamdani on his win. Do they understand the electoral consequences of his platform nationally? Probably. And yet, reading the tea leaves in their party, they are embracing him.
Mamdani and the Democrat base, along with many leaders in the party in office and influential media roles, see Mamdani's highly divisive, Marxist-fueled vision for New York City as the future of the Democratic Party.
Conservatives dare not shrug this off as just a New York radical because Mamdani is now the face of the growing and energetic AOC-Sanders base. There is an obvious appeal to too many people, including young people and minorities, who have been trending toward Trump and Republicans but could too easily slide in the other direction.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at [email protected].
