Something has shifted in American politics, and it happened faster than most people expected. A self-described communist just won a major Democratic primary in the nation’s largest city, and he did it without hiding a single part of his platform. Government-run supermarkets. Abolition of private property rights. Seizure of the means of production. It was all right there on the table.
Zohran Mamdani didn’t use softer language to sneak the agenda through. He campaigned openly on it, won on it, and is now governing on it in New York City. And according to observers on the right, his success is already inspiring other candidates to follow the same path, using the Democratic Party as their vehicle to power.
Two Republican congresswomen decided this week that the moment called for plain speech, not political hedging.
As originally reported, Nicole Malliotakis, whose mother fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1959, stood at a press conference and delivered a history lesson grounded in personal experience. “Communism destroys. It steals from the people. People end up living in squalor and lack the basic needs that human beings need, and the people that run the regime live as kings.” She connected those words directly to what is happening in American cities right now, arguing that Mamdani’s agenda is not a new experiment. It is a replay of a script performed before in Cuba, Venezuela, and every other country that traded individual freedom for a government that promised to run everything better.
Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan took aim at the rebranding operation with equal directness. “They’ve polished their branding. They’ve packaged it for social media and marketed it to young Americans and college campuses all over the world. They’ve packaged it as compassion.” The argument is straightforward: a friendlier name does not change the underlying ideology, and it does not change where that ideology leads.
The concern driving both congresswomen is the same. Every communist movement in history has ended in the same place, concentrated power, crushed dissent, and ordinary people living under conditions that the rulers who promised to save them would never accept for themselves.
Republicans now have a narrow window to make sure voters understand what they are actually looking at. The language has finally caught up to reality. The word being avoided for years in polite political conversation, communism, is no longer avoidable. The question is whether the opposition treats that development with the urgency it demands.