Mamdomino Theory: Democrats Struggle to Contain the Spread of Communism in Their Party

Ugandan-born, socialism-loving New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has emerged as a “kingmaker” in the Democrat party, says one pundit.

William Sullivan | July 5, 2026

Ugandan-born, socialism-loving New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has emerged as a “kingmaker” in the Democrat party, says Phillip Elliot of TIME. 

Two prominent House Democrats lost their primaries to insurgent rivals while a third left-wing candidate defeated the Brooklyn Borough chief,” he writes. “All together, the results demonstrated the fragility of an Establishment imprimatur, the power of the New York Mayor’s blessing, and the ascendancy of socialism.

Elliott then goes on to do this silly thing that Democrats have done for a few decades now, and suggests that this “ascendancy of socialism” is not, as Donald Trump and some others have recently observed, tantamount to an ideological embrace of communism.  “There is a difference between socialists and communists,” he says, while scoffing that this “distinction does not matter to Trump or other Republicans.”   

In truth, that “distinction” exists only in the minds of Democrats who are hopeful that the party is not currently being swallowed by communism in the same way that Eastern Europe and much of Asia was swallowed by communism during the Cold War. 

Let’s first consider that Karl Marx and his millions of his ideological offspring have often employed the words “communism” and “socialism” interchangeably.  The mechanism to reach “communism” or “socialism,” whether it be democracy or violent revolution, is incidental. 

And neither approach to reaching communism is mutually exclusive.  After all, the murderous, revolutionary communist regime of North Vietnam went by the official name of the “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” back when it was trying to convince the world that its ambitions to subjugate the South Vietnamese via violence were a “democratic” effort.   To this day, the backward, famine-inducing leadership of communist North Korea is officially known as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” 

In short, “democracy” is often more window dressing than a political ethos, and we have no reason to believe that “democratic socialists” believe in the “democracy” part more than the “socialism” part.

Next, consider that whatever “distinction” Phillip Elliott imagines to exist between some benign form of modern “democratic” socialism and the scourge of Marxism that the world........

© American Thinker