For months, Zohran Mamdani’s critics have gnashed their teeth over his self-identification as a democratic socialist, an ideology they consider beyond the pale. Their attacks didn’t work; Mamdani won the New York City mayoral race without backing down, even reiterating his socialist affiliation in his victory speech. So now, his critics are upping the ante. Last week on Fox News, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) claimed that Mamdani isn’t a socialist at all. Instead, Cruz said, he’s something far worse. He’s a Marxist.

The senator is very confused. First, he badly misunderstands what Marxism is. When Mamdani “argues for government seizing the means of production in society,” Cruz said, “that is Marxism.” Cruz is harking back to an earlier bout of right-wing hysteria about Mamdani that broke out last summer, when an old clip emerged of the future mayor at a Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) conference in 2021. In the clip, Mamdani mentions various short-term reforms favored by YDSA and its parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he also mentions the long-term “end goal” of “seizing the means of production.”

To the extent that any sense can be squeezed out of Cruz’s alarmism, his idea seems to be something like this: Normal, mainstream democratic socialists might want to implement doses of socialism within a fundamentally capitalist framework, like a “Medicare for All” system of single-payer public health insurance. But the end goal of going beyond capitalism entirely is only advocated by crazy marginal extremists, and Marxism is a word that describes that extreme.