American politics has always depended on a distrust of concentrated power. The Constitution divides authority because the Framers understood that Liberty weakens when government becomes the primary instrument for solving every problem. Socialism reverses that premise. It begins with the belief that government should not merely protect Liberty, but reorganize society.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democrat primary last year was significant for that reason. The concern was not simply that one socialist candidate won one race. New York had already lived through years of failed progressive leadership. Crime, disorder, unaffordability, and failing public systems existed before Mamdani became the face of the city’s leftward turn.

The real consequence of Mamdani’s victory was political normalization.

For years, Democrats supported policies that moved in a socialist direction while avoiding the label itself. They spoke of equity, affordability, and social justice. The substance often remained the same, but the word socialism still carried a political cost. Mamdani reduced that cost. He embraced the label and proved that, in major Democrat cities, it could become an asset rather than a liability.

The long-term threat is not Mamdani’s personal competence or incompetence. He may not be worse than the leaders who came before him. The threat is that his success showed other candidates they no longer need to conceal their ideology. Socialist politics can now be presented openly as the moral center of the Democrat Party.

Recent primaries have shown the same pattern. The party’s energy is moving toward candidates willing to challenge establishment Democrats from the left and reject the limits that once defined American liberalism.

This cannot be explained only by dissatisfaction with party leadership. It reflects a deeper change in how young Americans have been taught to understand the country.

Right and Left differ not only on policy but on their views of America itself. Conservatives generally begin with the assumption that America is an imperfect but exceptional nation worth preserving. The flag appears at conservative rallies because the country is treated as an inheritance to be defended.

The Left begins from a different premise. America is viewed less as a constitutional republic to improve and more as a system of oppression to dismantle. The flag, when it appears at radical protests, is treated not as a symbol of shared citizenship but as a symbol of guilt.

It should come as no surprise that socialism resonates with a political movement that expresses guilt over America’s identity: the modern Left.

The American tradition begins with limited government. The socialist “tradition” begins with government control. A government powerful enough to guarantee equality is also powerful enough to decide which freedoms may be sacrificed.

The modern Left does not share the same suspicion of state power. It sees government as the answer to housing, wages, health care, education, and inequality. Once every problem is defined as systemic oppression, every solution becomes institutional control. Socialism becomes not an economic theory, but an identity.

Higher education has accelerated this change. The problem is not always that universities explicitly teach socialism. The deeper issue is that they teach the assumptions that make socialism attractive. Students are taught to view society through oppressor and oppressed categories. Capitalism becomes a system of exploitation. America becomes the evil empire of the world. The Constitution becomes a document of exclusion rather than ordered liberty.

Over the past several decades, universities have taught students that if outcomes are unequal, power must be redistributed. If institutions produce disparities, institutions must be redirected.

Mamdani’s victory revealed that this argument is no longer an absurd thought limited to college students. A generation shaped by anti-American assumptions is beginning to convert those assumptions into political power. Mamdani did not invent socialism in the Democrat Party. He made it respectable within it.

We are now seeing the true effects of Mamdani’s victory. More than a dozen DSA-backed candidates won their races in New York. It will continue to get worse until a major political party that inevitably regains power becomes openly socialist.