Forget commemorating the thousands of lives lost on 9/11. The Economist is instead pushing readers to float the idea of socialism firmly being established as the left’s bulwark against Trumpism in New York. Talk about completely butchering your priorities.
In a crazy September 11 piece, the British magazine sought to downplay communist Democratic New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s affiliation with the radical Democratic Socialists of America party. In “Who’s afraid of the Democratic Socialists,” the outlet was giddy over the fact that they could “prove to be the left’s populist alternative to Trumpism.” For Mamdani, The Economist tried to help his illusory “centreward” rebrand of himself by distancing him from the DSA’s nutty platforms like defunding the police and closing jails.
How did the outlet achieve this? According to The Economist’s spin, the DSA “no longer officially holds those positions.” No, you didn’t misread that.
The Economist instead tried to mainstream the DSA by promoting its new watered-down platform that was supposedly a departure from previously held positions like ending the “fictions of whiteness” and “public ownership of media”:
"In their place the new platform supplies a vision for ‘thriving working-class communities’ and ‘an economy for the working class’ by calling for Medicare for all and taxing the rich. Freeing Palestine is still in there, naturally, as is a call to ‘demilitarise’, not defund, the police. The thing is in plain English, and it brightens its brief text with sprightly icons.”
Apparently the outlet doesn’t know the definition of “Trojan Horse,” because it was DSA organizer Daniel Goulden himself who chillingly declared with gusto recently that Mamdani was actively helping the Marxist group be in the “best possible position to seize state power.” Does that sound like a legitimate rebrand? Nope. Did The Economist mention this at all? No.
The rebrand sounds about as sincere as when the bloodthirsty terrorist group Hamas updated their 1988 charter that declared Islam will “obliterate” Israel in order to be somewhat less violent and acceptable to the international community.
But The Economist beamed that DSA is already “spreading its sails” in anticipation of an impending Mamdani victory, “which would for the first time put a Democratic Socialist in charge of America’s largest city, Earth’s capital of finance.” It continued: “Rising generations do not remember the Soviet Union. Indeed, like ‘MAGA’ and unlike ‘Democrat’, the term ‘socialism’ carries a subversive appeal.”
It is only at the bottom paragraph of its ridiculous item does The Economist give an inkling that even it doesn’t buy the load of malarkey it’s selling about Mamdani and his socialist cohorts. “Yet it is also right to call him to account for his membership of the DSA. It excludes just one class of worker: not landlords, not hedge-fund gazillionaires, but police officers.” No kidding, Sherlock! Ironically, the Marxist doctrine also excludes anybody who tries to achieve upward mobility in life and not be dependent on government handouts and not be intimidated by authoritarian socialist diktats. But whatever.
We may never forget 9/11. But we can certainly forget The Economist being anything close to a publication of serious scholarship.
