NYC Mayor Mamdani & Socialist Allies Miss the Meaning of 1776

New York City Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has received a flood of criticism for his July 3 address, in which he used the semiquincentennial as an excuse to misleadingly emphasize America’s historical shortcomings rather than its achievements. But as tone deaf and inaccurate as Mamdani’s speech was, perhaps its most egregious aspect was the mayor’s glaring failure to appreciate the context in which the Declaration of Independence was composed and how the story of the nation it established disproves the lies of socialism and communism.

While paying lip service to the principles of freedom enshrined in the Declaration, Mamdani described America as exceptional only because “nothing” in it is “fixed into place.” He proceeded to lambaste the United States as a country in which the “select few” have prospered at the expense of such downtrodden groups as slaves, soldiers in the Continental Army, and immigrants.

Mamdani lamented that America’s health care industry “exploits the sick,” while “negligence is a business model” for “corporate landlords.” And he regretted “spend[ing]” the nation’s “tax dollars on bombs and bailouts,” while “we sell our elections to the highest bidder.”

To hear Mamdani tell it, the Declaration was nothing more than aspirational words on parchment that had no real impact on improving the lives of everyday people.

To understand the real impact of the Declaration, it is helpful to rewind the clock 100 years to the brilliant address which President Calvin Coolidge (who happened to have been born on the Fourth of July) delivered on the Declaration’s 150th anniversary in 1926 on the “Inspiration” for that world-changing document.

Looking back at the revolution that the Declaration announced, Coolidge observed that “it was in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden,” since even though the colonists “were accustomed to privations…. They were free from depravity.” Whatever “poverty” that existed among them was “the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer.”

But while the Declaration expressed the spirit of a pioneering and innovative nation, Coolidge observed, “[a]bout the Declaration” itself, “there is a finality that is exceedingly restful.”

That is, despite assertions of the “great deal of progress” the world had made since 1776, supposedly providing “new thoughts and new experiences” that constituted “a great advance” over that era, that reasoning “cannot be applied” to the Declaration itself, Coolidge argued: “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.” Any attempt to challenge this truth could result only in a “reactionary” or backwards movement from the Founders’ achievement.

In other words, contrary to Mamdani’s assertion, there are certain things in this country which must indeed be “fixed into place.” The Declaration was written and the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve those things.

Coolidge’s presidency witnessed a previously unrivaled growth in the prosperity of ordinary Americans, thanks to the preservation of the principles of limited government combined with excellent management of the country’s finances by Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon – even as the taciturn chief executive’s ostensibly “do-nothing” government earned the mockery of ambitious “progressive” journalists.

A century later, despite having experienced two major wars and several more limited ones, and even as the American people’s prosperity has continued to grow, the principles of the Declaration are under more serious attack than at any time in our history since the Southern states’ attempted “secession” to preserve slavery (which directly contradicted those principles). Today’s threat emanates not from slaveowners, but from those who seek to undermine our freedom while promising to protect it.

I speak specifically of the rise of the so-called “Democratic Socialists” – who are in fact directly opposed to the principles of the Declaration and portray America as a racist and evil country rather than a beacon of hope and liberty for the world. To them, our past is a story of suffering and oppression, rather than the steady progress of freedom and liberty.

Mamdani is perhaps the most prominent of these socialists to date, but he is hardly the only one. The list also includes New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is now a serious 2028 presidential prospect), Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, among others.

Even more alarmingly, as many as ten individuals aligned either directly or indirectly with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are set to win U.S. House seats in November’s midterm elections. Professed Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George is also the prohibitive favorite to become the next mayor of Washington, D.C.

Still, to date, Mamdani probably ranks ahead even of Ocasio-Cortez as a spokesman for socialist principles and policies, as well as a “kingmaker” within the movement. It is therefore worthwhile to pay attention to his July 3 remarks, as they are representative of a noteworthy and growing faction of America’s political left in the United States.

Of course, Mamdani’s speech is heavy on rhetoric and shockingly light on the facts. While he calls for universal socialist-style government healthcare, he fails to mention that America’s private healthcare industry is almost singularly responsible for major medical breakthroughs and has led spectacular advances in fighting diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. He attacks landlords but does not explain that it is New York City’s rent control laws, of which Mamdani has proposed a vast expansion, that make proper building maintenance economically unfeasible. (And wasteful “bailouts,” while a policy of both parties, pale next to the government takeovers that the socialists espouse.)

While posing as a champion of the common person, Mamdani also omits the fact that his campaign for mayor reportedly received massive sums of money from out of state, including from groups linked to progressive megadonor George Soros.

While denouncing America’s shortcomings, Mamdani ignores or dismisses the country’s many achievements. He calls America racist but does not mention that 600,000 Americans died to end the scourge of slavery, and that an almost entirely white Congress passed the civil rights laws that outlawed segregation. He smears Americans as “nativist” for wanting secure borders but ignores that this country has welcomed many millions of immigrants – including his own family – over its 250-year history. He portrays our military as an evil, imperialist force while eliding the fact that the U.S. military saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny and then checked the spread of communist, a doctrine under which more than 100 million people were killed in the 20th century.

If, as Mamdani maintains, America has “always” been dominated by a “powerful” few who disbelieved the Declaration’s doctrine of natural equality and freedom, how does he explain America’s attraction to all those legal immigrants (including a few just-naturalized citizens who stood alongside him as the mayor was giving his address), considering his emphasis on the discrimination and hostility that have always (by his account) greeted them? Even with all the anti-American propaganda that Mamdani and his ilk spread, people from all over the world continue to flock here by the millions, legally or not.

There is no country in history that has achieved prosperity and individual freedom through the socialism that Mamdani and his friends espouse. And there is no greater example of the bigotry that Mamdani denounces than the rising antisemitism the country has faced over the past decade, largely at the behest of the so-called “Democratic Socialists.”

Even before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the DSA was already chanting “From the River to the Sea,” a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state. And just recently, Americans were treated to the short-lived candidacy of Graham Platner, who was the Democrat nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Maine before announcing his intention to drop out this week amid a flood of scandals.

The first of those scandals was a revelation that Platner had a tattoo on his chest associated with the Nazi SS. (This notably was not enough to convince other prominent socialists like Senator Sanders to pull their support.) That emblem reminds us that the Nazis were indeed “national Socialists.” Similarly, it should be recalled that the abbreviation “USSR” stood for the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Communists and Karl Marx himself made no sharp distinction between socialism and communism, and some of Mamdani’s proposed policies, including making war on the rich and driving private groceries and landlords out of business, have clearly communist overtones.

The road to socialism is a road opposed to the truths proclaimed in the Declaration. As President Donald Trump put it in his July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore just hours after Mamdani’s shameful address, communism “is the enemy of July 4, 1776.”

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.