By BEN R. WILLIAMS
Just a few weeks ago, President Donald Trump called New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani a “Communist lunatic.”
Trump, and many other voices on the right, have repeatedly referred to Mamdani as a Communist (although Trump has taken a different tone since Mamdani met with him at the White House last week and Trump became his new best friend, possibly because a bunch of vintage opium seeped into the White House water supply after the East Wing was demolished).
First off, Mamdani is not a Communist; he’s a Democratic Socialist. Democratic Socialists generally believe in New Deal-style social programs and that the sort of welfare policies favored in Europe can coexist with a capitalist society. They support equitable taxation, which means they believe that the rich should pay their fair share (which they did prior to the 1980s, for the record).
Importantly, Democratic Socialists believe in Democratic elections and power being granted to the people. Under Communism, meanwhile, power tends to be accumulated by a small number of government officials and it quickly becomes a tyrannical system.
This column isn’t about the differences between Communism and Democratic Socialism, however. It’s about an observation.
There’s one thing that people who fearmonger about Communism generally have in common:
They’re old. Older than I am, anyway.
I was born in 1984, which means that I vaguely remember the tail-end of our nation’s era of relative peace and prosperity. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to reap many of the benefits. I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened, and I graduated from college right before the 2008 financial crisis, the first of many once-in-a-lifetime economic disasters we’ve all had to endure over the last 20 years.
My entire adult life has been set against a backdrop of global conflict and a crumbling economy. For my generation, every time we start to get ahead, the rug gets pulled out from under us again.
However, Millennials should count ourselves lucky. At least we have memories of a time when things were different and a vain hope that we might one day return to those days. The Zoomers have never known a time when capitalism worked for them.
We have an entire generation of people entering the workforce who have never known a time when the average person could support a family on a single income. They have never seen income scale to match inflation. They don’t know that there was a time when a modest salary could buy a house.
Instead, they have seen billionaires exploit every loophole to avoid being taxed their fair share, causing them to siphon up all the money that should rightfully belong to the rest of us. They have watched these same billionaires work their tentacles into our government to shape it in their image while refusing to invest in the systems they seek to manipulate for their personal gain.
The only version of capitalism they have seen is end-stage capitalism, which posits that nothing can be immoral if it’s not explicitly illegal. If you tell a die-hard capitalist that maximizing profit at the expense of human lives is wrong, they will all respond the same way: “Hey, that’s capitalism. It may not be perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got.”
Maybe that once rang true. But if you’re living within an economic system that has only exploited you without ever offering a single benefit, it’s pretty hard to believe someone when they tell you that it’s the best system around. And, I would imagine, it’s pretty hard to make younger generations fear Communism and Democratic Socialism when they’re already afraid of starving under capitalism.
To quote Voltaire, “If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then are the others?”
