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.

Other attacks have focused on a 2021 clip where Mamdani stated that the long-term goal of socialist politics is to socialize the means of production. Any dictionary will tell you the same thing, and democratic socialist parties around the world are openly committed to that goal. But on the Right, where private ownership of the means of production by a small coterie of economic elites is sacrosanct, Mamdani’s statement was taken as equivalent to a promise to reenact the worst horrors of Stalinism.