OPINION PIECE: Zohran Mamdani and the Socialist Tide Sweeping the West

It is a rare thing indeed for a mayoral election, of all the minor spectacles in the international democratic theatre, to be watched with bated breath across continents. Ordinarily, such contests are of interest only to their own municipal communities. Yet this year, even in Georgia, among people who possess no personal stake in the sanitation budgets or subway reforms of New York City, there was an uncanny attentiveness, a certain curious tension around New York City’s mayoral elections. Everyone could sense that the event possessed implications far greater than the governance of a single metropolis.

And rightly so. The rise of Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim Socialist, is nothing less than the culmination of a long, slow metamorphosis within Western liberalism - a transformation so unimaginable that the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century would scarcely recognize its own descendants. What began as a doctrine of individual liberty has, through decades of intellectual erosion, reshaped itself into an ideological project far more closely aligned with the socialism our own nation endured for seventy years.

No conscientious citizen can ignore the genealogy of this shift. One must speak plainly of the Frankfurt School, an assembly of German intellectuals founded in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, who, fleeing the convulsions of their own continent, transplanted into the fertile soil of American academia a new mode of critique that sought to reinterpret Western civilization, deconstruct it, and ultimately uproot it.

For the thinkers of the Frankfurt School - Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin - the fundamental assumption was simple, and profoundly corrosive: hierarchy is evil. Not merely corrupted hierarchy, nor abused hierarchy, but hierarchy itself - all distinctions between high and low, sacred and profane, virtuous and vicious, excellent and mediocre, were to be suspected. They believed that any value structure, any inherited order, any form of cultural continuity was inherently an instrument of domination.

Thus, they diagnosed the entire Western tradition, from the law of ancient Rome to the Christian moral system, as a monument to oppression.

From this premise, everything else followed with mechanical inevitability. If hierarchy is oppression, then the family is oppression; religion is oppression; tradition is oppression; nations are oppression; excellence is oppression; even beauty, because it presupposes standards, is oppression. And on this last point, the contemporary West supplies examples so brazen that one hardly needs to resort to metaphor. Nowhere is the Frankfurt worldview more vividly displayed than in the fashion journals of the United States, where editors have begun placing heavily overweight models on their front covers and insisting, with an ideological fervor bordering on Communist religious mania, that this is “beauty.” Beauty must fall because beauty implies order, and order implies hierarchy, and hierarchy is, to the disciples of Frankfurt, the primordial sin.

Thus, the campaign against the aesthetic is inseparable from the campaign against the metaphysical. For if a society can be taught to deny visible hierarchy-beauty, excellence, virtue - it will not be long before it also denies invisible hierarchy: moral truth, spiritual reality, concepts of the sacred.

The central ideology of the Frankfurt School was, of course, Marxism - but a Marxism refined into something more insidious: a cultural Marxism, which sought not merely to seize the means of production, but to seize the means of meaning, the great flowing current of civilization.

And in their seminars and manifestos, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School were perfectly explicit: the task was to erode the value hierarchies that give coherence to civilization. Replace objective moral order with relativism; replace tradition with permanent revolution; replace cultural inheritance with critical suspicion; replace faith with psychology; and replace the common good with endless grievance.

They understood, far better than the liberals who welcomed them, that true transformation is achieved not by sudden insurrection but by the slow, persistent re-education of the cultural class. And thus they began their famous “long march through the institutions” - universities, publishing houses, film studios, philanthropic foundations, eventually even the churches themselves.

It is from this intellectual lineage that much of modern liberalism derives its current form. What passes today as “progressive” thought is often nothing more than Frankfurt-School Marxism wearing the attire of compassion. The suspicion of tradition, the moral relativism, the contempt for national identity, the hostility to Christianity, the belief that society must be continually deconstructed - all of it flows directly from that single poisoned spring.

And Zohran Mamdani, whatever his personal qualities, is unmistakably a child of this tradition. He repeats its vocabulary with mechanical precision and embraces its suspicion of the past; he channels its belief that society is not an inheritance to be stewarded by its sons, but a vast ideological laboratory to be redesigned from scratch.

To a Georgian ear, sharpened by the memory of seventy years of ideological “reorganization” under Soviet tyranny, Mamdani's rhetoric sounds terribly familiar. He said, during his campaign, in an interview with Salon: “While there may not be an ideological majority in New York City, there is a majority of people who feel left behind by this mayor’s economic policies… I’ve been clear from the beginning about what I stand for, and that’s making sure people can live a dignified life in this city rather than letting the market pick and choose who deserves access to even the most basic human needs.” At first glance, this may sound noble - “dignity,” “fairness,” “not leaving people behind.” But upon closer examination, beneath the flowery rhetoric, the Communist reveals himself. What Mamdani calls “letting the market pick and choose” is, in his vision, to be replaced by a centrally managed, top-down allocation of goods and power. This is a revolution in social structure that is perfectly willing to subsume individuality under a mythical collective vision of the “working class”. And this collectivist promise, however softly delivered, carries within it the same logic that once justified the wholesale subjugation of nations under ideological tyranny.

And here in Georgia, we see the same specter rising again in miniature - parties and personalities preaching the identical mythology of “class struggle,” as though Georgia were a battleground for abstract economic blocs rather than a living cultural organism with a shared destiny. These parties and movements speak of the “worker” as Marx imagined him: a hollow, universalized creature with no language, no faith, no inherited loyalties. But true history has taught us that there is no such thing as class interest; there is only national interest. A class is an accounting category; a nation is a spiritual bond. Classes do not bury their dead, guard their churches, defend their borders, or inherit the moral duties of their ancestors. Only nations do these things - and it is nations, not classes, that ideologues like Mamdani seek to dissolve. We have buried enough dreams under the ruins of socialist experiments to recognize the scent of one more. And so when Zohran Mamdani, cheered on by his immigrant-majority supporters in New York and our fellow Georgians who have proclaimed themselves his admirers across the sea, takes the helm of New York and calls it progress, we, who endured the long night of Soviet imperial domination, can know that this is not the dawn of a new era, but the dim return of an old and terrible one.

Written By: Sandro Mrevlishvili

Edited By: Elene Mosiashvili