Comrade Mamdani Gets to Work on His Cult of Personality

New York City’s Communist Twelver Shi’ite mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has begun constructing his cult of personality, and that was only to be expected. Every socialist leader has to have one.

The cult of personality is essential to leftist regimes because socialism and Communism are built upon a big lie. Leftist regimes claim to be all about equity and justice, with everyone treated fairly and given equal access to the collective wealth. In reality, however, socialist and Communism are all about confiscating wealth from the productive and giving it to the privileged. This requires authoritarian rule, for few people outside of the most besotted and blinkered ideologues are willing to see the fruits of their labor taken from them and given to those who have not worked for them.

In order to make their populations more amenable to this authoritarian rule, socialist and Communist regimes make an idol out of the ruler. Dear Comrade Lenin or Comrade Stalin or Chairman Mao or Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, they love us. They are wise, virtually all-knowing, serene, and always correct. They know what is best for us. It may be hard sometimes, but in the end, their wise guidance will lead us to the implementation of full socialism, and justice and equitable treatment for everyone. We just have to trust them. Not to do so would be bourgeois, a clear sign of lingering capitalist tendencies.

Zohran Mamdani is not a head of state. He can’t go all-in on his socialist inclinations. But he is anxious to show, during his tenure as mayor of the nation’s largest city, that socialism works, and that means he has been busy from his first moments in office implementing as much of it as he possibly can. That includes the cult of personality.

And so the New York Post reported Sunday that Mamdani is doing all he can to set himself up as a larger-than-life socialist hero. He even “threw himself a great big bash to celebrate his first 100 days in office, and even launched a website so his faithful comrades can track his ‘achievements’ across the city — despite reneging on numerous campaign promises.”

At his party, where Mamdani himself was, of course, the main speaker, he invoked one of socialism’s foremost critics, saying: “I have thought often of Margaret Thatcher’s quote: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ If anything, my friends, it seems that you eventually need a socialist to clean up the mess. For 102 days, we have endeavored to do exactly that, delivering both public goods and public excellence. That is the change that government can deliver, and it is the change that democratic socialism can deliver.”

This is eye-poppingly counterfactual, but that’s what socialists do: they run their societies into the ground and then boast about how wonderful they’ve made everything. In Mamdani’s New York, garbage and snow clogged the streets for unconscionably long period of time, and the promised free buses and other socialist perks never materialized, but Mamdani found something to brag about anyway: he is, as it turns out, Mayor Pothole: “By the end of this year,” he announced proudly, “the Department of Transportation will repave 1,150 lane miles of our streets. On day six, when we paved the bump at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, that was pothole politics.”

From the city’s ostensibly smooth roads, he drew a larger lesson: “If government can’t do the small things, how could you ever trust it to do the big ones? How can we promise to transform our city if we can’t pave your street?” Hey, good question. Another one, in light of his plans to confiscate the wealth of those who work in New York City, is “How can we promise to transform our city if we don’t plunder the productive?”

Then there was the cult of personality: “The mayor’s party even had a ‘100 days museum,’ which featured a kid-sized podium from his day care announcement, and leftovers from the Taco Bell wrapper and drink he devoured during a March Q&A he gave about fast food worker initiatives.” Mamdani’s Taco Bell wrapper! It’s not quite Lenin’s-Tomb-level adulation of the Great Leader, but it’s a start.

Mamdani was also full of grandiose promises and vowed to continue advancing his far-left agenda: “Some said that once the hard work began, we would forget the movement of working people that rewrote what was possible in this city. Others warned that the left could only debate but could never deliver. Socialists might be able to win a campaign, they said, but we could never advance an agenda. Far more wanted to believe — but didn’t know how.”

He vowed to make people love Big Brother: “We hold a mighty responsibility in our hands. It is not just the responsibility of governing with honesty and integrity or delivering relentless improvement — it is to demonstrate that government can fix problems. To prove that government can be worthy of the people it serves.” As Mamdani continues implementing his socialist schemes, this little civic lesson is going to cost New Yorkers dearly.

The Post notes that “one attendee joked, ‘Mamdani said he was repaving 1150 miles of roadway… enough repaved road to go from NY to Miami… which would be helpful for all the people driving out of town and relocating to Florida!’” New Yorkers should get out while the getting’s good.

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