The news of a Zohran Mamdani-backed slate of Socialist candidates — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — scoring big wins last night in New York City’s congressional primaries should send a shudder down the spine of America as we behold the transformation in the gilded city of Gotham. New York City’s heavy Democratic base all but assures that last night’s victors will take seats as members of Congress come January.
Something tectonic is shifting across America’s most elite sectors as candidates find receptive audiences among a voting bloc that explicitly disavows core pillars of the American experiment. What we should lament is not only political — the disavowal of the free market and self-government — but spiritual.
Post-Christian societies, which New York City has sadly become, are enacting post-Christian political economies wherein officials become czar-like, citizens become clients, and cultures deteriorate into ugliness and grievance.
Political economies are downstream of assumptions about the human person and human societies. Where Christianity and conservatism champion a constrained view of the human person and the need for government to balance competing interests under systems of law and liberty, socialism offers a rival vision deeply embedded within the progressive worldview — one that begins not with the depravity of man, but with man’s continued uplift and boundless progress through the power of an omnicompetent and omnibenevolent state. In this paradigm, people who no longer believe in the power of self-government exchange personal virtue for increased bureaucratic control. If humanity cannot govern itself from within through the “mediating institutions” that teach the virtues of self-control, thrift, and personal responsibility, it will necessarily look outside to czar-like apparatchiks who fill the vacuum left by self-government. The middle between the individual and the state thus vanishes.
This article originally appeared at The Daily Wire on June 24, 2026.
