A few weeks ago, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won a landslide victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo by twelve points. Since then, his most adamant haters have responded with an avalanche of red-baiting.
Many of these attacks have centered on his plan for a modest experiment with five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, in some of the neighborhoods with the fewest and most expensive private options. The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran an op-ed by grocery chain owner John Catsimatidis warning that building these five stores would “collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” Never mind that the US federal government already operates hundreds of grocery stores through the Defense Commissary Agency for service members and their families, or that seventeen states actually have state monopolies on liquor stores — no, five municipal grocery stores in New York would augur the downfall of Western civilization.