Progressives Cheer Zohran Mamdani Like He's the First Communist to Run in the USA

He's Not

Crazy harridan Liz Warren (D-MA) went on social media site X to praise Zohran Mamdani’s win in the mayoral primary for New York City, proclaiming, “He’ll be a fantastic mayor!” She lent him her strong support. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) declared that Mamdani has a mandate and gave a snarky “Sorry, Trump” that fascism has been defeated with this one primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has appeared proudly in public with Zohran Mamdani and made goo-goo eyes and drooled all over him. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) says that criticisms of Mamdani must be considered vile, anti-Muslim attacks and must be stopped. Ayanna Presley (D-MA) says if you criticize Mamdani, you are anti-Muslim and that makes your attacks disgusting. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Mamdani’s campaign was “brilliant” and the Democrat party could learn so very much from him.

Generally when you see progressives this excited, it’s like a smoke detector going off in the house. Maybe it means nothing, but then again, maybe your house is going to burn down.

They are acting like Ugandan-born Zohran Mamdani is the first such candidate to run in the United States or that he invented communism or something. Mamdani did not invent communism. Or New York. Or radical politics in New York. Heck, he didn’t even invent antisemitism.

A Short History of NYC and CPUSA

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) opened its doors in 1919 in the city of Chicago, which is still true Blue. While the commies tried to stay loyal to Chicago, most of their active members lived in New York City so by 1921, the CPUSA moved its headquarters to New York City. The building is gone now but originally it was at 35 East 12 Street, near Union Station.

Many of those original 1920s American commies were Eastern European Jews. In 1931, 80% of the communists living in New York City were born somewhere other than the United States.

Sound familiar? Mamdani’s heritage is Indian (both parents) and he was born in Uganda. The last person of Indian heritage to make a big political splash was Kalamity Harris, and she was pretty left wing herself. As a nation, India tends to be more right-wing and centrist than communist; I guess they export their communists over here.

In case you’re no student of obscure New York City mayoral politics, the first time a “socialist” ran for mayor in New York was 1917. The guy was named Morris Hillquit and he hailed from Latvia. He lost, but he garnered 20% of the vote, which is pretty astounding. At that time there were distinctions and arguments between socialists and communists, so had he been able to unify the lefties, he might have done even better. Of course, Hillquit could not have won.

The reason Hillquit lost is likely that he ran against a very formidable candidate. It was a guy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). I guess running against Hillquit, FDR looked like a conservative, or at least a moderate.

World War II gave a big boost to American communism, because various organized groups of communists shifted their attention from seizing the means of production to more helpful goals like forming a “popular front” to beat the nazis and the fascists. In other words, during the 1930s and 1940s, the communists became more patriotic and even useful to this country, making them slightly more palatable to the mainstream.

When American communists noted that they could be perceived as likeable, they started to rebrand themselves. They were now saying communism was nothing more than “20^th century Americanism.” Even now, American communists hate the word communist and prefer to call themselves “Democratic socialists” or “socialists.”

By the end of the 1930s, New York City was hosting May Day parades and having rallies in Madison Square Garden. The official Communist Party USA had 38,000 members and more American-born citizens were joining up.

These were the days when Lucille Ball identified herself as a communist (she’s a New Yorker from upstate, and she said on her voter registration that she was a communist). The communists in this era had a sort of brief shimmer of acceptability. Labor unions liked them, since they argued common cause on things like better pay, stronger labor unions, and improved benefits for working people. New Deal Democrats—once the arch-enemy of the communists when FDR snatched the election from Hillquit—suddenly became their allies. By the time FDR was rolling out his New Deal, the communists and the New Deal Democrats were pretty friendly.

Mamdani Is Not New York City’s First Communist, I Mean Democrat Socialist

Although Zohran Mamdani has called for seizing the means of production (right of the Karl Marx playbook), he says he is not a communist but rather a Democrat Socialist. For the purposes of truth and accuracy, I say he’s a communist since he is espousing some of the most extreme but also basic tenets of Marxism.

Mamdani—if elected to mayor—wouldn’t be the first openly communist person to hold a New York City political office. That honor goes to Peter Cacchione (Brooklyn) and Benjamin Davis (Harlem), who joined the New York City Council in 1938. Their careers were so undistinguished that even being communists didn’t save them from total obscurity.

When World War II concluded, the Communist Party USA hit the skids. They, along with other communist parties from other nations, got tied to Stalin. Stalin’s many unspeakable war crimes were laid at the feet of communists everywhere, including the New York commies. The Red Scare of the 1950s and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, including the Berlin Wall in 1961, did not help them much.

By 1958, the Communist Party USA was in tatters. It managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union, but not with many members or support. Most people—even political denizens, progressives, and many New Yorkers—don’t even know they exist. They do have a website. The website offers a number of educational opportunities, in case you want to learn about Women’s History or Latino Equality from a communist point of view. The last big article in the Articles section on the website is dated February 17, 2025, so we can’t say that they are a very active group. Ricochet Café publishes more often.

Wikipedia says that the Communist Party USA had about 5,000 members in 2017 and 2018 but “nearly half paid no dues.” That’s funny. What’s not funny is that the party had 15,000 members in 2023 and 20,000 in 2024.

What does the party want? Well, among other things:

• Federal minimum wage of $15/hour

• Universal healthcare

• No privatization of Social Security

• Higher taxes for the rich and corporations

• More regulation of business and industry

• Public ownership of utilities

• Nuclear disarmament

• Reduced military budget

• And boring, detailed stuff like campaign finance reform, election law reform, and so on

  

They have always been pro-abortion but have wrestled a bit with the PRIDE agenda. American Communists have always favored even the most extreme of the LGBTQ+ messaging, but the Soviet Union and other communist groups considered even homosexuality (the LGB part) as well as aberrant sexual practices (the TQ+ part) as “fascist.” In the Soviet Union, homosexuality was a crime and homosexual activity between consenting adults only became legal in Russia in 1993. But even to this day, there is no legal recognition in Russia of same-sex marriage or even civil unions. While homosexuality is now tolerated in Russia, “non-traditional sexual relationships” are still outlawed and the distribution of LGBTQ+ materials is illegal in Russia—even to adults. In fact, in Russia, if you identify yourself as a pro-LGBTQ+ advocate, you are considered a political extremist and face potential arrest. So-called gender-affirming care (transgender surgery and medical treatment) is illegal in Russia today. Putin is quite clear on his differences with the PRIDE cause. This has caused some headaches for the American communists who did not come out with anything even remotely pro-PRIDE until around 2005.

This is not to say that the Soviet Union does not support the Communist Party USA. In 1987, they threw about $3M at the group. The American communists say that funding stopped in 1989 and they are today supported entirely by donations from Americans and American organizations.

Who Are These People?

American communism tends to be an upscale, urban phenomenon with outposts in New York City and Chicago and maybe a little bit here and there in Los Angeles. Sporadic rural outposts develop but rarely flourish. Attempts to invade other organizations, such as civil rights groups, have met with mixed results. The appeal of communism in America definitely has a geriatric flavor since most of the hardcore American communists have grown long in the tooth. Angela Davis is just one year younger than Joe Biden and she is an American communist icon. Zohran Mamdani breaks this elderly tradition; he’s just 33 years old.

For American communists, their headquarters has always been New York City. That’s the heart and soul of American communism, so there’s no surprise in the emergence of a Zohran Mamdani there. Zohran Mamdani could not get elected in Dallas or Miami and maybe not even in Los Angeles.

That’s not for lack of trying. Commies have always been attempting to get elected. The first time a communist ran for President was in 1924. The ticket was William Z. Foster and Benjamin Gitlow. They ran in 1924, 1928, and 1932 and never got more than 0.5% of the vote. The communists ran a guy named Earl Browder and Black vice president, James W. Ford, in 1936 with approximately the same results. In 1968, the communists ran a Black woman, Charlene Mitchell, for President and her official vote count was “nil” which means she got so few votes they rounded it to 0.

Gus Hall ran four times for President as a communist (1972, 1976, 1980, and 1984) and the last two times, he put Angela Davis on the ticket as his vice president. Poor Gus did worse than Foster and Gitlow, never getting more than 0.1% of the vote. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Angela Davis broke away from the Communist Party USA and started her own party called the Committees of Correspondence of Democracy and Socialism. It still exists and calls itself “democratic socialist” but it smells a lot like the Communist Party USA.

The current co-chair president of the Communist Party USA is a woman named Rossana Cambron, who hails from Los Angeles. I can’t find out her age, but she appears to come from the gray-haired set. I don’t know her economic policies but I can tell from her photographs she doesn’t fritter her money away on clothes, hair, or make-up. The other co-chair is a guy named Joe Sims who has ties to Washington, D.C. I can’t find any personal data on his age or any background apart from his ties to the party and the fact that he edits their journal, People’s World. From the photographs, I can say that Sims is long past draft age.

Details about the leaders of the Communist Party USA are pretty sparse.

Everything Old is New Again

Zohran Mamdani is nothing new. New York City has always been a hotbed for communism, and he fits the bill of the classic NYC commie in that he is foreign born and has a bunch of extreme ideas that he calls “democratic socialist.” He is the first to tell you he’s not a communist. Unlike most of the rest of the commie crowd, Mamdani is young, appears physically fit, dresses smartly, is very photogenic, and speaks well. The media outlet Aljazeera has hailed Mamdani’s recent political victory and debunks the “lie” that he’s a communist. It’s also kind of a lie to say Aljazeera is a media outlet; they’re a publisher funded by the Qatari government.

Mamdani has talked about seizing the means of production in New York City as well as opening government-run grocery stores, freezing rent, offering free child care, raising the minimum wage, boosting corporate tax rates, making public transportation free, and eliminating billionaires. It is a little unclear and rather unsettling in terms of how he intends to “eliminate” billionaires.

All of that sounds communist to me and if communism is so great, why not claim the name? I’m proud to call myself American; he should be proud to call himself a communist.

Mamdani is one of a long line of New York City radicals. I hope he continues their long tradition of political failure, but Polymarket today says he has a 72% chance of becoming the next mayor. Of course, Polymarket also at times said Kalamity Harris would beat Donald Trump and ascend to the White House, so they’re capable of error. I hope Mamdani fails and fails spectacularly; here’s why.

• Mamdani refuses to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He tap dances like Gene Kelly around this statement. The globalized intifada means we should have worldwide uprisings of Palestinians (or Palestinian supporters) against Israel (or those who support Israel)

• He supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which intends to economically destroy Israel. BDS is the antisemitic version of cancel culture deployed on a national scale. It primarily hurts small business in Israel

• The BDS movement (which Mamdani supports) tacitly affirms a lot of antisemitic ideas

• Although Mamdani, like Beto O’Rourke, had a fleeting and unsuccessful musical career, he has never held a real job or started a real business

• The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) posted on Facebook that Mamdani’s recent win is a victory for Palestine. How can a New York City political contest have such international implications? Does New York City now have its own foreign policy?

• Ironically, Mamdani seems to be sitting in the space between two chairs (that’s an old German expression)—the communists say he is too close to the Democrat Party (which communists oppose) and much of the Democrat Party says he’s a communist

• This is perhaps why Mamdani has an identity crisis and labels himself a “Democrat Socialist,” since that would include the progressive wing of the Democrat Party

• New York City is the most Jewish city in America and one of the most Jewish cities on earth outside of Israel. Mamdani has refused to support the right of Israel to even exist as a Jewish state

• The world’s two economic hubs are London and New York. London has already been captured and is under the thumb of a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan. Shall New York really be next? Why should the West’s main financial centers be hotbeds of pro-Palestinian politics?

• While a student, he founded a pro-Hamas organization

• Mamdani intends to circumvent ICE and maintain New York City as a sanctuary city

• Mamdani said that if Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu set foot in New York, Mamdani would arrest him. It puzzles me as to what Mamdani would arrest him for

• Plus, Mamdani has in the past stated that he likes the idea of defunding the police. Not sure who is going to arrest Netanyahu in this case

• Mamdani is a naturalized U.S. citizen and, in my view, they should not be allowed to hold major political offices. Plus, he only got naturalized in 2018. The Black Lives Matter movement started before Mamdani became a U.S. citizen (it started in 2016)

• He has described Israel’s activities in the recent war as “genocide” but has not made condemnatory statements about Hamas or Gaza

• Mamdani is right now an assemblyman in New York. A recent resolution was put to a vote there to condemn the Holocaust. Sounds like a no-brainer, but Mamdani wouldn’t vote to condemn the Holocaust. His campaign manager later explained this that it was a “campaign decision”

• Speaking of campaigns, Mamdani spoke at a mosque and encouraged Muslims to vote in the upcoming mayoral election—specifically to vote for him because Mamdani is “one of us.” Doesn’t sound very unifying or inclusive

Why is such a Jewish city in such a Jewish state in the United States suddenly so in love with a Ugandan-born radical who states he is a Palestinian supporter and practicing Muslim who does not agree that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state? (He says Israel may exist, but not as a Jewish country.)

One anonymous Big Apple commenter online said she is Jewish but she supports Mamdani because she cares more about making the city affordable than anything else. And it’s true, Mamdani has found some surprising support among New York City Jews, particularly the younger ones, who tend to have a unfavorable opinion of Israel in general.

Right now—over half of all hate crimes reported in New York City were against Jews. Yet Jewish support of Mamdani has been “surprising” according to political observers. Some say that it is only religious Jews who have a problem with Mamdani and that more secular Jews actually support Mamdani’s negative views about Israel. New York is a Democrat stronghold and nationally, 70% of Democrats have an unfavorable opinion of Israel.

As a student of World War II, I have long observed that Jewish people as a group are generally intelligent, productive, and law-abiding citizens but they lack a keen grasp of imminent political danger.