Zohran Mamdani May Be a Socialist, but He Can't Even Define What It Means to Be Working Class

Ask ten socialists to define "working class" and you'll get ten different answers, but usually there's at least a passing attempt at coherence. Mamdani can't seem to manage that. He's running on the language of labor and wages while apparently unable to say who actually belongs in the category he claims to champion. That's not a small gap. It's the whole foundation of the pitch.

This matters because Mamdani isn't some backbench alderman shouting into the void. He's a serious contender in the country's largest city, and his entire political identity rests on being the guy who speaks for people struggling to pay rent and buy groceries. If you can't articulate who those people are, what you're selling isn't a program. It's a costume.

We've seen this movie before with democratic socialism in America. The label gets adopted because it polls well with a certain slice of the base, not because the person wearing it has done the homework. Bernie Sanders at least had decades of consistent rhetoric about unions and wages, whatever you think of the policies. Mamdani seems to be improvising, and voters in New York deserve better than improvisation when the stakes are their cost of living.

None of this means his critique of affordability in New York is wrong on its face. Rent is brutal, groceries are expensive, and plenty of working people are genuinely squeezed. But diagnosing a real problem doesn't require a coherent ideology, and pretending otherwise just invites the kind of scrutiny Mamdani is now getting. If you're going to run as a socialist, know what the word means before you put it on a bumper sticker.