Our families escaped socialism in Europe for freedom in the United States to live the American Dream. Nevertheless, socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mandani’s agenda echoes the very devastating policies our families fled.
Mamdani’s win, sadly, coincides with surging support for socialism and communism in America. A recent CATO Institute/YouGov poll found that 62% of Americans aged 18–29 hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34% view communism with similar fervor.
Socialism isn’t about socializing. The reality is that over 100 million people died globally at the hands of this wretched authoritarian system. Yet, Mamdani echoes support for collectivist policies that have ruinous and deadly effects.
Mamdani first quoted Socialist Party of America founder Eugene V. Debs in his acceptance speech. Notably, the 34-year-old former assemblyman, who only proposed three minor bills in Albany, declared his election was a “mandate for a city you can afford.” As history shows, socialist societies promising “free” stuff under the guise of affordability come with steep costs. The only affordable thing in a centrally planned society is the equitable sharing of misery.
Our parents know what real oppression looks like. They’ve felt it in the form of severe beatings — both physical and mental — in Bulgaria and with systemic antisemitism and anti-Catholic bigotry in Soviet Lithuania. They’ve seen what happens when power is centralized in the name of “the people.” We cannot let anyone — including a wannabe Karl Marx — implement the same collectivist policies that destroyed our parents’ homelands.
Mamdani’s policies would expand government bureaucracy, raise taxes, and hollow out the middle-income families he claims to champion. Rent controls and price caps sound great in theory, yet they shrink housing supply, discourage development, and make the city more dependent on subsidies. Redistribution schemes punish productivity and reward dependency, which is antithetical to the New York mentality.
Socialism doesn’t make life more affordable. As our families witnessed in Bulgaria and Lithuania, central planning resulted in scarcity. Individuals see the government confiscate 90% of their incomes and they can’t own private property. Under Mamdani, affordability will become another empty slogan, because his ideology will deliver the opposite.
Socialists like Mamdani loathe capitalism, yet they’re the product of successful parents who benefited from it. This trust fund socialist enjoys the fruits of his elite academic parents yet bites the hand that feeds him — just like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. It’s easy to hate free enterprise when you’ve never paid rent, started a business, or built something from scratch. As in 20th century Europe, animus toward private enterprise is born of pure entitlement. That’s why Mamdani’s policies are so dangerous. They come from someone who insulates himself from the consequences of his own ideology.
Our parents came to America from small countries swallowed by socialism after World War II. They came here with nothing but the conviction to thrive and succeed. Growing up, we heard their stories of the secret police who listened through the walls and of whispered jokes that landed you in prison. That was socialism. It wasn’t this utopian dream of equality. The reality was fear, control, and crushing the human spirit under the boot of an ideology that promised fairness yet delivered tyranny. Our parents escaped that. Decades later, echoes of the same poisonous, extremist ideas are now creeping into New York, repackaged and rebranded so craftily by Mamdani.
Given 20th century socialism’s record, Mamdani’s smiley socialist brand won’t succeed. Controlling housing, punishing business owners, redistributing wealth, dismantling law enforcement, and replacing merit with extremist ideology echoes the very system our parents experienced in Bulgaria and Lithuania. Mamdani’s slogans are smoother, but the underlying impulse is the same: the state knows best. What the state giveth, the state equally taketh–including your autonomy and freedom.
Democratic socialism promises “equity.” Our parents’ socialist governments called it “fairness.” Ultimately, it meant equitable sharing of misery — save for the elites in charge.
Our parents didn’t flee tyrannical societies so that one day, their daughters would watch self-styled “revolutionaries” run New York City into the ground under the same failed ideology that destroys incentive, punishes success, and worships victimhood.
Make no mistake: Mamdani’s politics would destroy this city. You cannot tax and regulate a city into prosperity. You cannot pit New Yorkers against each other – rich versus poor, landlord versus tenant, citizen versus cop — and expect anything but total and utter decay.
The dynamism that makes New York the city so many political refugees like our parents fell in love with — the ambition, the grit, the tenacity — is exactly what Mamdani’s agenda would suffocate.
Mamdani isn’t just merely wrong on policy. He represents a moral sickness that is taking root in American politics. It’s this twisted idea that envy is virtue, that dependence is compassion, and that freedom is dangerous. If that pernicious worldview dominates City Hall, New York will become unrecognizable.
With Mamdani taking the helm soon, one million New Yorkers could defect to freer pastures in the South. New York City used to welcome socialist escapees like our parents. Now, it will morph into a literal Moscow or Caracas on the Hudson River. What a terrifying reality for our families.
Gabriella Hoffman is a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Voice and daughter of Soviet refugees from Lithuania. Nicole Kiprilov is a visiting fellow at Independent Women and native New Yorker born to Bulgarian refugees.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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