The socialists who swept recent New York elections and will soon run the United Kingdom are really not very radical, say many in the media. The three democratic socialists endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and who won congressional primaries in New York, Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), socialist Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, and the UK’s next prime minister are proposing seemingly moderate policies for cheaper housing, food, and transportation, support for child care, a higher minimum wage, peace in Gaza, health care for all, and an end to ICE raids.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester, the UK’s next new prime minister, Andy Burnham, socialized the city’s buses but still contracts out to private firms. That’s no different from the regulated utility model used for natural monopolies around the world, including the United States, whether for electricity or water. In the US, roughly one-third of electric power comes from publicly-owned utilities. And even President Donald Trump, an avowed enemy of communism, has negotiated for taxpayers to own a share in 20 companies the US government has supported, including Intel, US Steel, and Westinghouse.
But all of those socialists support a much more radical agenda than the one they ran on. The program of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani and AOC are members, calls for: total defunding and abolition of the police, jails, and prisons; ending the independence of the Supreme Court and the entire Executive Branch, making them subordinate to congress; “expropriat[ing] property from capitalists and deliver it to the working class”; socializing energy production; allowing surgeons to sterilize children and adolescents in an effort to change their sex; a return to Joe Biden’s open borders policy; and the decriminalization of illegal camping and open air drug use. Burnham has proposed to spend an additional £39 billion on public housing, impose a new tax on everyone, and adopt the “Housing First” policy, which has resulted in the subsidization and enabling of drug addiction and death in the U.S.
