The Democratic Party is Incoherent Right Now

There’s no such thing as “woke socialism”

A few days ago the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed entitled “Democrats are spiraling into irrelevance. Good riddance.” I clicked on the link primarily because the headline was intriguingly iconoclastic by the standards of our city’s newspaper of record. Over the two decades the Times has been as reliably Democratic as the California Teachers Association, only with less subtlety. With few exceptions, both reporters and editors at the Times side with the political establishment 99% of the time (they disbanded their editorial board in March). The op-ed in question was a guest column by a conservative writer.

I started to read the piece as clickbait, but a sentence halfway through it set off a political light bulb. The writer zeroed in on the Mamadanimania (I can’t believe no one has coined that term yet) currently sweeping the party. As anyone who hasn’t spent the last month atop Shangri-La knows by now, Zorhan Mamdani is the 33 year old New York state assemblyman who won last month’s New York City Democratic mayoral primary, almost certainly making him Gotham’s next mayor. A full-throated Gen Z communist with a penchant for quoting Karl Marx and whose previous endeavors included an brief career as a rapper called “Young Cardamom” is about to assume control of the world’s capital of capitalism. Like his Soviet, North Korean, and Cuban forebears his walk is rather at odds with his talk: The candidate calling for the overthrow of capitalism began his political career in his mom’s $2 million Chelsea apartment. Because of course he did. He’s never paid his own bills, and he’s about to take over the biggest city in the country.

As I wrote last week, I’m popping the popcorn.

The line that set off the ah-ha moment was this: “Mamdani’s communism is only part of his overall political persona. He also emphasizes, and trades in, exactly the sort of woke culture warring and intersectional identity politics that have defined the post-Obama Democratic Party.”

The writer is conservative, so one may take issue with his partisan framing. Nevertheless, there’s plenty to suggest that Mamdani isn’t just a socialist, but full-blown communist. He’s spoken approvingly about the elimination of private property, which is one of communism’s core objectives. He wants workers to seize the means of production (in Manhattan, one imagines Ivy League interns storming the boardrooms of Wall Street investment banks). As a candidate he’s promising a laundry list of state-provided freebies worthy of Fidel Castro: Free transit, free pre-k-12 education, free basic health care, state-run grocery stores. He even promises that every expectant mother in New York City will receive a “baby basket” of goods. Under Comrade Mamdani, government will be involved with the births of your children.

Part of me wonders if Mamdani was created in some Matrix-like woke laboratory, or inserted into the woke part of the Simulation. He’s an Indian who was born in Uganda to a Marxist-leaning Ivy League professor of political science father and an Oscar-nominated director mother. On his application to Columbia University he identified himself as “African American,” the accuracy of which reflects more on the term than the applicant. Politically, he’s an almost comically perfect embodiment of the far Left radicals who are staging a political blitzkrieg within the Democratic Party. On one hand he hews to the Democratic Socialists of America’s talking points, which are largely indistinguishable from Marxist communism. On their webpage you can read all about the elimination of capitalism, the nationalization of industries, the creation of state-run banks, and so on. At the same time, Mamdani preaches the wokest of woke identity politics, going so far as to call for a tax on wealthy white people. He’s also anti-semitic, calling for the “globalization of the intifada.” He’s been associated with 9/11 and October 7 apologists.

These two concepts do not go together.

Figures like Mamdani, along with Alexandria Occasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, comprise a fast expanding political black hole into which the frenetic, conflicting entropy of the current Democratic Party is at risk of collapsing. The party’s crisis boils down to a simple reality: There’s no such thing as a “woke socialist,” much less a “woke communist.” Zohran Mamdani is a walking, talking contradiction.

There can be only one

Both wokeness and communism pit different groups of human beings against each other. Indeed, resentment and violent conflict are their very lifeblood. The ideologies differ in the social soils into which they sow their antagonisms. Marxist communism sees the world as divided into two broad classes, the working proletariat and the capitalistic bourgeoisie. From a sloganeering standpoint its singular brilliance is its binary simplicity: Workers good, owners bad. Its novelty was its application of scientific ontology to human civilization. Just as flora and fauna can be classified and defined to a degree of certainty that their behavior can be predicted, so can disparate groups of human beings. As I wrote recently, Marxism’s fatal flaw is in this very premise, the notion that the Italian baker, the Russian woodworker, the Nigerian truck driver, and the Chinese steelworker all fall into the same class and therefore, ipso facto, share the same values, aspirations, and resentments. Marxism is politico-social Darwinism, simultaneously taken to an absurd extreme and simplified beyond recognition.

Wokeism evolved out of Marxist communism insofar as it presupposes that human existence and history boil down to a matter of oppressors and the oppressed. However, wokeism supplants individual identity for class. An individual’s identity is a plural noun that encapsulates their race, nationality, ethnicity, skin color, religion, language, sex, sexual orientation, education, economic status, career, life experience (or “lived experience”), political worldview, and other factors. These identity factors are in constant flux both in and of themselves and in their relationship with each other. The number of factors constantly increases. Two decades ago there was a gay and lesbian rights movement. Today it’s the 2SLGBTQQIPA+ rights movement. The prolixity is not accidental, it’s essential.

Wokeism identifies, or more accurately, creates, innumerable and ever expanding fissures between and among groups of people. A straight black man and a lesbian black woman are aligned in some areas and at odds in others. A straight white man and a black genderqueer trans woman have nothing in common but mutual antipathy, and never will.

In short, communism and wokeism start from the same logic — oppressor and oppressed — and proceed in diametrically opposed directions. Communism’s remedy is complete submission to the collective, to a state that is indistinguishable from the collective as embodied by the dictatorship of the proletariat. In contrast, wokeism rests on radical individualism and an adversarial relationship with nearly all forms of authority, most of all the state. Communism calls on its adherents to sacrifice individualism in the name of the greater national good. Wokeism pushes people to become virtual islands of identity unto themselves. The ultimate status symbol in a communist home is a son or daughter who gloriously died for their country. The ultimate status symbol in a woke home is a son or daughter who is very much alive and oppressed along as many fronts as possible. Under communism the state is the repository of all that is good. Under wokeism it’s the embodiment of subjugation and repression.

That’s why you can’t be a woke communist. Communism, at least theoretically, envisions an end game in which class disappears in a workers’ utopia. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote, “National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.” (emphasis added)

Marx and Engels famously theorized that societies evolve through different stages, with communism at the apex of that evolution like a political Nirvana in which all other forms of identity disappear. Communism resolves in a paradise in which all loyalties belong first to the state, the source of all good. It demands radical conformity and extreme, even fanatical patriotism. Wokeism suggests that society is in a perpetual state of decline and atomization. It demands radical nonconformity (“radical self-expression”) and extreme, even fanatical opposition to patriotism. A favorite word among the woke is “transgressive.” 

Figures like Zohran Mamdani are trying to fuse two ideologies that are naturally repellent to each other, like trying to push together two positively charged ends of magnets. It’s never going to happen. Communism demands total fealty to the state. Wokeism requires total fealty to the self. What wokeness and communism have in common is that both are total. There can be only one. You can either have a society based on radical submission to the collective or radical individualism. You cannot have both. That’s the big crack-up that’s about to hit the far left ascendancy in the Democratic Party. Again, keep the popcorn handy.

Capitalism Loves It Some Woke

Ironically, wokeism is much more compatible with capitalism than with communism. It costs a lot of money to express one’s every identifying factor. Corporations have spent billions competing with one another to be seen as the most diverse, the most inclusive, the wokest. They’ve hired diversity consultants and established entire departments dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Governments at all levels have done the same. Hollywood has spent billions on tentpole movies and TV shows that hew to the woke agenda. Woke authors like Robin D’Angelo, Ibram Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates make millions off their books, speaking engagements, and consulting gigs. Woke influencers likewise make millions airing grievances on social media. For that matter, imagine how many millions of dollars collectively are spent on clothes, make-up, costumes, and paraphernalia at the average Pride parade or “No Kings” protest. It’s anti-capitalism capitalism. You don’t see any of that in communist countries. Try organizing a Pride rally in Pyongyang. Or, for that matter, in Gaza.

In this country, communities and cities with larger LGBTQ populations tend to be more prosperous. Places like the City of West Hollywood and San Francisco’s Castro District have considerably higher individual and family income levels than surrounding areas. Entire tourism industries cater to LGBTQ populations. Gays and lesbians in particular have long been overrepresented in hypercompetitive, hypercapitalistic industries like entertainment, literature, architecture, design, fashion, and the arts. While it’s true that until the late 20th century many remained closeted throughout their lives, the larger point is the centrality of key cohorts within the woke movement to the country’s capitalist system.

In fact, it’s always been this way. With apologies to Dr. Ian Malcolm, capitalism finds a way. In the 1960s it made millionaires out of hippies. Like modern wokeness, the “counterculture” movement of that era was intensely capitalistic. The ideal of a collective, possession free utopia was spread via record companies, electronics manufacturers, movie and TV studios, broadcast networks, publishers, and newspaper and magazine conglomerates. The great 60s counterculture road trip was possible because of automobile manufacturers and petroleum companies. And like their modern counterparts the anti-capitalist class spent lavishly on clothing, hair styling, and make up.

The Crest is Breaking

Even as Mamdani and others like him rise — Omar Fateh in Minneapolis, Jasmine Crockett in Texas, Illhan Omar in Minnesota, along with serious candidates in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and elsewhere — wokeism is proving to be incompatible with coherent governance. Lurching from one outrage to the next leaves little time for things like filling potholes and cleaning streets. It’s happened time and again, at all levels of government. In L.A., former mayor Eric Garcetti squandered nearly his entire second term as he repeatedly genuflected to increasingly unhinged demands from the woke left. It’s ironic that the faux woke, knee taking Garcetti left such a mess that the actually woke, former and possibly still socialist Karen Bass has largely been forced to govern from the center.

During the same period, Gavin Newsom all but stopped governing, instead freezing the state in the amber of multiyear lockdowns and other restrictions even as he himself embarked on a national campaign to promote woke California values (and his own presidential aspirations). District attorneys like L.A.’s George Gascon and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin contributed to crime waves harkening back to the bad days of the 1980s and 1990s, this time fueled by fentanyl and meth instead of crack and ice. Of the dozen district attorneys George Soros funded in 2020 and 2022, all but one have resigned, declined to run for reelection, been recalled, or are in jail.

The Democrats Badly Need a Better Alternative

Which is where things largely stand. Voters are moving in one direction, toward the center, while the Democratic Party is embracing its extreme left. Currently, the alternative to far left wokeism in the Democratic party is the so-called “abundance agenda,” which is a rebrand of 1980s supply side trickle down economics. Only proponents don’t call it trickle down. That would be showing their hand. Instead, the call it “filtering,” which brings to mind a political Britta. The Republicans are equally in thrall to their more extreme impulses on the right. The difference is that the GOP has largely disciplined its membership to toe the MAGA line. Regardless of how one feels about their movement, at least Americans know where Republicans stand. Not so much with Democrats right now.

I disagree with the L.A. Times headline. We need two (at least) robust political parties. Look at the disaster that California has become under one-party Democratic rule. We’re the world’s fourth largest economy and we’re a basket case.

Representative government needs competitive ideas. It needs alternatives. So I don’t wish for the Democratic Party’s demise. Quite the opposite: I fervently hope it returns to the liberal middle where it thrived for the better part of three-quarters of a century. The country desperately needs it.