In a country as historically committed to freedom and individual responsibility as the United States, the success of a candidate like Zohran Mamdani should be unthinkable. Yet, nearly one million New Yorkers recently cast their votes for a man openly campaigning on a socialist platform—and celebrated it like a cultural victory. This moment isn’t just a political shift; it’s a red flag for something much deeper and more dangerous.
Let’s be honest: this didn’t happen overnight. The groundwork for Mamdani’s rise was laid over decades through a systematic erosion of civic and historical education in America’s public schools. Where students once learned about the horrors of socialist regimes—economic ruin, repression, genocide—today they’re subjected to a sanitized or outright sympathetic version of socialism that ignores its real-world consequences. And this isn’t happening by accident. It’s the result of Marxist influence taking root in our institutions and reshaping the narratives that shape young minds.
The data speaks for itself. After Mamdani’s victory, Google Trends showed a surge in searches for “what is socialism.” Think about that. People didn’t understand the ideology before they voted for it—they looked it up afterward. That’s not informed civic engagement; that’s mob-level ignorance amplified by social media. Platforms like TikTok have become the new campaign trail, where style trumps substance and viral videos carry more weight than historical context or economic understanding.
This cultural illiteracy has paved the way for dangerously naive policies. Mamdani’s proposal for government-run grocery stores, for example, is being pitched as a way to make food more affordable. But grocery stores already operate on margins so thin—about 1.6%—that even minor inefficiencies can be devastating. When the government steps in to sell goods at a loss, it isn’t creating savings; it’s simply shifting the cost to taxpayers. And when private grocers can’t compete with artificially low prices, they fold. That’s not competition. That’s sabotage.
This is the bait-and-switch that always accompanies socialism. First, promise free stuff. Then, use tax dollars to prop it up. When the private sector collapses under the weight of unfair competition, declare victory—and raise prices. It’s a cycle we’ve seen in every failed socialist experiment from Venezuela to the former Soviet Union.
And while the economic fallout will hit New York first, the ripple effects will be national. As businesses and high-income earners flee, the city’s tax base will erode, leading to even more aggressive tax hikes. Thanks to the federal SALT deduction, red states will indirectly subsidize this dysfunction. And as disillusioned residents scatter across the country, they’ll take their voting habits with them—infecting stable states with the very ideology they fled.
This isn’t just bad economics. It’s an existential threat to the American way of life. A society that forgets the value of hard work, that abandons merit in favor of entitlement, that silences dissent while preaching “equity”—that’s not a free society at all. It’s the prelude to something far darker.
Argentina offers a counterexample worth noting. Under President Javier Milei, the country rejected socialist decay in favor of a merit-based system—and it’s working. Argentina’s economy surged by 7.6% in the first quarter of 2025, proving that when you unshackle people from government control and reward productivity, prosperity follows.
We should learn from that. We should demand that our schools teach history honestly, not ideologically. We should reject policies that punish success and reward dependence. And we should be clear-eyed about where Mamdani-style socialism leads—not just politically, but culturally.
If we don’t, we may wake up in a country we no longer recognize.
