You can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out

Washington Post editorial: "Zohran Mamdani drops the mask - The mayor-elect divides New Yorkers into two groups: the oppressed and their oppressors."

Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies — from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers — and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.

People’s lives, in Mamdani’s world, can be improved only by government: “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” The crowd cheered, of course, but a thinking person might wonder whether it’s good for the institution that has a monopoly on violence to insist that nothing is beyond its purview.

As the editorial concludes, Mandani won among newcomers and the "educated" while long-time New Yorkers were skeptical of his promise of free stuff and his message of victimhood.