Mamdani and the Emperor’s New Clothes

Mamdani and the Emperor’s New Clothes

This July 4^th, my family and I attended the 52^nd Conservative Independence Day Soirée at the Occoquan Regional Park in Northern Virginia. It was a delightful party, with live bluegrass music, mouth-watering barbecue, and entertaining games. It was heartening to observe numerous young people of various backgrounds among the attendees, indicative of the recent revival of patriotic values across different ages and ethnicities.

Still, we have a long way to go in order to neutralize the clear and present danger posed by the pernicious ideologies promoted by leftist media, public schools, mainstream universities, and globalist businesses. This danger is plainly visible in the success of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, whose worldview combines Marxist, Islamist, anti-capitalist, anti-white, anti-police, anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western elements. These elements are not covertly lurking behind some moderate, traditionally leftist façade but overtly reflect the absurd and harmful beliefs of violent campus protesters and city rioters. These beliefs appeal to a growing segment of misguided young Americans by being brazenly proclaimed.

Mamdani’s plan to introduce state-controlled grocery prices, for instance, reveals a shocking ignorance of both economics and history. As someone whose daily routine under communism involved waiting for hours in the hope of purchasing meager quantities of basic food staples, I find it almost surreal that such ideas would receive fervent and increasing support today in the largest American city, which for many decades has symbolized sky-rocketing success, unsurpassed prosperity, and entrepreneurial innovation.

In his humoristic travel memoir Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson describes the effects of state-controlled socialist economy he witnessed in Bulgaria. Despite having expressed some socialist sympathies in his youth, he honestly portrays his shock at the reality he observed:

I had read that things were desperate in Bulgaria – that people began lining up for milk at 4:30 in the morning, that the price of some staples had gone up 800 percent in a year, that the country had $10.8 billion of debt and so little money that there were only funds enough in the central bank to cover seven minutes’ worth of imports – but nothing had prepared me for the sight of several hundred people queuing around the block just to buy a loaf of bread or a few ounces of scraggy meat.

Mamdani is the new face of the American left, a culmination of the radical anti-Americanism that was propagated for decades in public schools and mainstream universities and acquired official political prominence during Obama’s presidencies. Some twenty years ago, if one walked into a store, a restaurant, a gas station or another public venue on Independence Day, even in predominantly Democrat areas of the country, one was greeted by a cordial “Happy 4^th!” Over the past decade or so, this has changed beyond recognition.

Senator John Fetterman posted a congratulatory 4th of July message, stating that he was “unapologetically grateful for our nation and the American way of life, today and always.” He strongly criticized his fellow Democrats for not honoring the holiday with sufficient pride and enthusiasm. Rejecting the American experiment as irreparably flawed is now the norm for the Western left. This view has become a fashionable virtue-signaling act of self-flagellation among laptop-class college-educated elites. However, it is still not fully embraced by millions of moderate, classically liberal, Democrat supporters. These old-school Democrats do not hate America; yet, unfortunately, they continue to vote for radicals.

In a recent podcast, Melanie Philips remarked:

You have … white-skinned left-wing radicals marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Islamists who would take the head off their shoulders in different circumstances because they stand for and practice in their lives values which Islamists find inimical…. [B]oth are marching shoulder-to-shoulder because both have a common aim … – the overturning of the Western order…. [T]hey have a very different idea of what the society is that they want to put in place. The white radicals want the kind of John Lennon type utopia of the Brotherhood of Man, no war, no nations to divide us, no religions to divide us – we are all basically one happy global family…. And the Islamists, of course, want to produce the rule of Islam on Earth … under Sharia law, which requires submission to a set of rules which … have absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with the West. They deny human rights.

With Mamdani, the mask is off. “The Emperor has no clothes,” and the destructive anti-Western agenda of the new left is no longer hidden behind balanced rhetoric and seemingly moderate figureheads. Orwell’s 1984 reminds us that “ignorance is strength.” The numerous young supporters of the discrepant ideologies that Mamdani’s agenda combines are woefully ignorant of what the application of these ideologies really means.

Yet, ignorance is not an excuse. It is time for New Yorkers and Democrat supporters who still love America to reject the radical agenda that seeks the annihilation of our institutions and way of life. Otherwise they shouldn’t be surprised if their votes bring about the demolition of the Statue of Liberty and everything it represents.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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