A Failure Already? Bill Maher Declares Zohran Mamdani "A Straight Up Communist"

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How respectable liberalism helps defend systems it claims to oppose.

One of the earliest dynamics I imagined in my recent novella (Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President & Changed America Forever) was not triumph, but backlash. The story assumes that the moment entrenched systems are seriously challenged, the response will not be curiosity or patience, but immediate verdicts of failure -- long before structural change has even had time to begin. That reflex is not accidental. It is part of how power protects itself.

Which is why the speed with which Zohran Mamdani has been declared a disappointment is not surprising at all. Three weeks into office and New York's housing crisis remains. Imagine that -- after three whole weeks!! Rents are still unaffordable. Shelters are still crowded. Families are still doubling up, and young people are still leaving the city they love because they cannot imagine building a stable future there.

But what has been just as revealing as the impatience is the source of much of the outrage. Some of the loudest denunciations of Mamdani have come not only from the right, but from television personalities who still market themselves as liberals -- most notably Bill Maher -- who appear genuinely appalled that a major American city might elect someone who does not instinctively genuflect before market solutions.

Forgetting about our nation's history of racially segregated neighborhoods and ghettoes, ignoring real estate and banking redlining, gated communities, white flight, and the exclusionary practices of the Trump family itself, Maher ridicules the obvious fact that home ownership in the U.S. has been and remains racist and an instrument of white supremacy. Think about it. Think about the racial impact of using property taxes to determine the quality of public schools. Yes, Mr. Maher, home ownership in America is racist.

However, by the standards of contemporary political commentary, such amnesia and willful ignorance has apparently provided enough time to declare defeat.

What is more striking still however is how little these attacks have to do with actual housing policy. They are not debates about zoning law, construction finance, or tenant protections. They are ideological rituals. Mamdani is denounced not only as a "socialist," but as (in Maher's words) "a straight-up communist," as if these were self-explanatory epithets rather than political terms with long and very specific histories.

Red-baiting, once a reliable weapon of the right, has now become comfortable entertainment for liberal audiences.

One might reasonably expect professional commentators to understand the vocabulary they deploy so confidently. However, they evidently do not. Instead, we are offered ideological pantomime: capitalism good, socialism bad; privatization efficient, public ownership corrupt; taxes theft, regardless of what they fund or whom they protect. These slogans are not arguments. They are incantations -- repeated not to clarify reality, but to prevent serious discussion of alternatives that might threaten existing concentrations of wealth and power.

Yet after just a few dinner-table conversations, even my own middle school grandchildren could explain what Maher and others seem either not to know or not to care to acknowledge. My grandkids knew that socialism refers to public ownership of the means of production, the use of regulated markets, and limits on extreme wealth through progressive taxation. They knew that communism, in classical political theory, is not a description of any society that exists or has ever existed, but a hopeful vision of a future. It's a North Star goal in which abundance is shared, class divisions disappear, and even the state itself -- always a structure used to enforce class hierarchy -- withers away.

My little grandchildren also knew what most economists acknowledge without controversy: that every functioning economy in the world today is a mixed economy. They all combine public and private ownership, regulated and freer markets, and redistribution through taxation. To repeat, they are "mixed economies" -- every one of them. The question is however, in whose favor are they mixed -- in favor of the rich or of the poor? In the U.S., it's the rich. In China, it's the working class.

Moreover, what Maher and others call "communism" has already proven to work in the United States. They called it the New Deal. They called it Keynesianism, and it gave us workers Social Security, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation for injury on the job, and a 40 hour work week. It made unions legal and provided jobs, income, and socially valuable work for millions of impoverished Americans when the government stepped in as employer of last resort. Its creation of the national park system made the U.S. government the country's biggest land owner -- the master of the planet's most important "means of production."

None of this is radical. (Though all of it was opposed by Republicans.) It is introductory political economy.

What is radical, apparently, is saying any of this out loud on American television without first wrapping it in nervous apologies.

Housing policy then becomes not a question of long-term public investment and institutional redesign, but a morality play in which reformers are expected to perform miracles on cue -- and are mocked when they cannot.

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