You had to know it was coming. The Overton Window for the Democrats shifted left quite a while ago, but earlier this year the so-called "Moderate" Democrats were still trying to get away from the (formerly?) poisonous label of "socialist." 

Their base is having none of it, so the tack has shifted: if socialism is the new default, the definition of "moderate" must be changed. And here we are. 

Democrats fought very hard to keep the DSA left out of the spotlight, but Zohran Mamdani's victory last year, which was easy to attribute to his undeniable charm, was merely a prelude to a socialist wave that handed victories to Graham Plater (before he imploded), Abdul El-Sayed, and a raft of socialist candidates across the country. Congress will have a full socialist wing next year, all nominally Democrats, and few Democrats are willing to fight the leftward trend. 

Already, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are out campaigning for candidates they desperately wanted to lose their primaries, their desire to win control of Congress, even if that control is mostly nominal, outstripping their desire to avoid the stain of socialist extremism. And, perhaps, they really do believe the national winds are blowing leftward with hurricane force, for all I know. 

Whatever the case, most Americans want to at least pretend to be moderates, so the Democrat establishment is now going to argue that...Zohran Mamdani is just that. 

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It falls to Jonathan Chait, a pillar of the moderate left, and The Atlantic, the voice of the Establishment Left, to make that case. Far more than any political figure, the credentialed elite looks to publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic to tell them what they are supposed to think. 

Chait's argument is simple enough: Mamdani ran left, but is governing centrist. By that, I suppose he means something minimally true: he is not Brandon Johnson, who longs for the day he can go all Che Guevara, or Katie Wilson, who is too stupid, quite literally, to run a lemonade stand on a street corner. Mamdani is smart and picks his battles, but his goal is more coherently communist than either of those two. 

He has a plan, and it doesn't include embracing fights he cannot win. He's not "moderate"; he's savvy, which is far different. 

Ever since Zohran Mamdani exhilarated the left with his out-of-nowhere mayoral campaign, mainstream Democrats have been dejectedly searching for an inspirational figure of their own. Where is the Democratic executive who has the media savvy to inspire his own cultlike following while making pragmatic governing decisions and ignoring the incessant demands of progressive activists?

At last, the moderates have found such a Democrat. His name is Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s election, which created the theoretical prospect of 8.5 million Americans living under “the warmth of collectivism,” as he once put it, was met with understandable shock. The reality, however, has been far more mundane.

Mamdani’s campaign platform already contained several gestures to moderates. He said he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is, to put it plainly, a billionaire Zionist cop, three things never in favor with the hard left. He also pledged to liberalize permitting to encourage more housing construction by private developers. When The New York Times asked him during the campaign, “What’s one issue in politics that you’ve changed your mind about?” Mamdani cited “the role of the private market in housing construction.”

Most important, Mamdani emphasized the importance of efficiency in city services. This might sound like an ideologically neutral goal, and it has been embraced at times by the leaders of left-wing governments—including Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” during the early to mid-20th century. But efficiency creates tension with progressive interest groups, which generally care less about maximizing taxpayers’ bang for the buck than maintaining secure jobs and high wages for public employees.

Once elected, Mamdani retreated from some of his progressive ambitions. Among his splashiest campaign promises was “fast, free” bus service. Skeptics had questioned the wisdom of forgoing the revenue from bus fares, especially given the possibility that free buses would become mobile homeless shelters inhospitable to other New Yorkers. Mamdani still says he wants free buses, but in his initial proposal, released in concert with Governor Kathy Hochul, he quietly adopted the position of his critics, dropping the plan to eliminate fares and focusing instead on speed and reliability. He shrank another of his most ambitious proposals, universal child care for 2-year-olds, into a more gradual expansion, beginning with a modest increase of 2,000 new seats this fall and a goal of adding more in subsequent years.

Chait is making a virtue of necessity in these cases. First, Mamdani isn't exactly cleaning house in New York City to increase efficiency, making him a mini-Donald Trump by cutting public employment. Actually, the opposite: he has redirected public hiring to mirror his DEI-centered focus. Many of his initiatives focus on RECRUITING people into city jobs, so Chait is blowing smoke. 

AS for the other "moderate" moves Mamdani has made? Abandoning free buses wasn't his choice, because the city doesn't run the bus system; Hochul did, and he actually bullied her into meeting him halfway. The child care? There was no money to do it, so he didn't "choose" not to; he did as much as humanly possible. 

Mamdani is moderate in the same sense that Cuba has "free" healthcare; you can make the case, as long as you ignore reality. He is as communist today as he has ever been; he's just smart enough to know that he got elected and didn't become El Jefe at the point of a gun, so he has to work within a system that constrains him. 

But if you look at his housing policies, for instance, you immediately see his long-term goal, which is the legally seize properties one by one, since he has no revolutionary guards to do so by force. The end goal is communism; Mamdani is just smart enough to use the means at his disposal, which makes him much more dangerous in the long-term than Katie Wilson. 

Mamdani did follow through on his promise to freeze rent for about 40 percent of the city’s apartments, even though nearly any economist would say that the freeze makes housing less affordable in the long run. But this move merely followed decades of ineffective precedent. Mamdani’s most novel position on housing has been to push for a streamlined approval process to unlock more private home construction.

He has pushed Albany to raise taxes dramatically on wealthy New Yorkers, although so far he has settled for a pied-à-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And he has continued to pursue his goofy notion of opening city-run grocery stores that he believes would hold down food prices. It is difficult to see how this project could succeed, because public employees have little expertise in the complex supermarket business, and subsidizing public stores to undercut their competitors on price would both threaten small businesses and encourage black-market reselling. But Mamdani met these and other objections to his plan by scaling the public stores back to the size of a small demonstration project.

Chait's argument for Mamdani's moderation boils down to this: Mamdani is smart enough to chip away at freedom and prosperity over time, rather than try to seize it all at once in an ineffective putsch that the courts would strike down or the federal government would prevent. 

That's not moderation. That's savvy. 

"Moderate" means, to most people, not just the means by which one achieves his goals, but also the goals themselves. And Mamdani's goals are anything but moderate. He's just smarter than the average DSA member, who still hasn't learned that COVID is over, that antiperspirant is a thing, and that blue hair dye fries your brain. 

Chait either believes his line of bulls**t in the same way that David Brooks was charmed by the crease in Obama's pants into believing that he was a moderate figure who would bring racial healing, or he is just selling this line of bulls**t to move the center of the Overton Window far to the left, because that is where the base of the Democrat Party is, but not the country. 

It could be a bit of both, I suppose. 

Mamdani's failure to don a beret, shoulder an AK-47, and start executing Wall Street traders is not a sign of moderation. It shows he is not an idiot. He has Brownshirts for the violence and intimidation, and releases them when convenient. 

This is the man who made a TikTok video putting a target on the back of one of his biggest taxpayers to brag about taking his money. His housing guru is Cea Weaver, who urges people to vote for more communists. He is the guy who laughs uproariously with AOC at the 9/11 memorial. 

If Democrats are having a moment because Trump is down in the polls, the DSA is having a better moment because the ground has shifted in their favor within the Democrat Party. They aren't becoming moderate; they are simply occupying the party's center now, or at least inching there. 

It's hard to see how that trend continues nationally, though. If El-Sayed wins, the DSA will crow and take even more ground. If not, the party's civil war will be epic, and Chait's article will have aged like milk left out in the sun. 

No evidence suggests Americans have shifted far left as a group, though trends among the young, especially young women, are troubling. 

Who knows, though? Perhaps Chait and The Atlantic's bet will pay off. If the economy tanks entirely or AI wipes out half of humanity, socialism may really capture the imagination of "moderates." 

But probably not. And Mamdani will never be president.