Nine days ago, in this outlet, I told New Yorkers what socialism did to my family — the cattle wagons, the Kazakh steppe, three generations crushed by a system that called itself the people’s. I wrote it as a warning, before the vote. On Tuesday, New York voted for it anyway.
Three candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, all aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, swept their primaries. Brad Lander unseated two-term Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY). Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former Mamdani staffer who helped organize the Columbia campus occupations, defeated Adriano Espaillat, the five-term chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Claire Valdez took an open Brooklyn seat. In districts this blue, the primary is the election. All three are bound for Congress. Mamdani called it a beginning. The crowd chanted three letters: DSA.
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So let me set my family aside, since I have already told that story, and meet the movement on the only ground where it still has a real argument. Confront a socialist with the gulag, and the same reply arrives within seconds: Nobody wants the Soviet Union, we just want Denmark. Universal healthcare, free college, a humane safety net. Capitalism with a conscience. Who could object to that?
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It is a fair-sounding reply, and it deserves a direct answer. Here it is: the Scandinavian model is not socialism, the Scandinavians say so themselves, and the people who just won in New York have told you, in writing, that it is not what they want.
Begin with the Danes. In 2015, tired of being used as a prop in American campaign speeches, Denmark’s prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, went to Harvard to set the record straight. Denmark, he said, is far from a planned socialist economy — it is, in his word, a market economy. The Nordic model is vigorous free-market capitalism plus a generous welfare state, financed not by soaking a few billionaires but by taxing the middle class heavily — income taxes approach 60% and a 25% sales tax that falls on everyone. On the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Denmark and Sweden score as more economically free than the United States — freer to trade, lighter on regulation, with a corporate tax rate below ours and no legislated minimum wage. That is not the abolition of capitalism. It is capitalism carrying a generous insurance policy.
Now, the part that the New York crowd will not quote back to you. The DSA has considered the Denmark argument and rejected it. In their own words, on their own website, they say their vision “pushes further than historic social democracy.” They do not want a softer safety net under capitalism. They want, in their phrasing, to “collectively own the key economic drivers” of American life. One of the organization’s founders put it without decoration: The end goal is social control of the means of production. They do not want to improve capitalism — they want to get rid of it. The group’s 2025 platform calls for abolishing the Senate, dismantling the police, and building “a new society from the ground up.”
So when they hold up Denmark, they are holding up a system their own platform dismisses as not going far enough. Denmark is not their destination. It is their brochure. And you can already see the difference in what New York’s socialists actually build. Denmark does not run state grocery stores. Mamdani does. His signature policy is a network of city-owned supermarkets, the first of which opened in the Bronx this year, designed in his campaign’s words to keep prices low rather than make a profit. That is not a safety net catching people who fall out of the market. It is the state stepping into the market and becoming the merchant, public ownership, one storefront at a time. A beginning, exactly as the chant promised.
Let me be precise, because precision is what this debate keeps losing. Mamdani’s candidates are not planning cattle wagons, and America in 2026 is not Georgia in 1951. I will not insult anyone by pretending otherwise. But ideas have a direction. Socialism does not begin with deportation lists. It begins with a state that decides who may sell what, at what price, and to whom, and with politics that sort citizens into oppressors and oppressed. The lists come later, and always for the same kind of person: the capable, the independent, the one who refuses to be made smaller. The welfare state redistributes money. Socialism, the article the DSA names in its own documents, redistributes power. Only one of those promises has ever needed barbed wire to keep it.
I know the difference because I did not read about it in a seminar. In 1996, while serving in Georgia’s security services, I reviewed original Soviet-era intelligence archives in Tbilisi. What struck me was not the espionage. It was how much of the effort went to what the KGB called active measures — the long-term shaping of education, culture, and institutions, designed not to steal secrets but to change how a future generation understood its own society, until it came to see its own civilization as the thing most in need of tearing down. The Soviet Union disappeared in 1991. The assumptions it worked to plant in Western minds did not disappear with it. A young American raising a red flag over an American city is no one’s agent. He is something the planners wanted more than any agent: a free citizen, certain he is liberating his country, doing the work they once had to pay for.
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That is why the Denmark answer cannot be left standing. The New Yorkers who chanted three letters last week believe they chose a kinder society. Their own movement’s documents tell a different story. I gave my warning before the vote, and the vote came anyway. That is democracy, and I do not begrudge it. But a warning ignored is not a warning disproven. The least a free people can do, before the next election and before the next flag is raised, is read what the flag-wavers have already written in their own platform.
They did not vote for Copenhagen. They voted to go past it.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former member of the Parliament of Georgia (2008–2012) and a former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is co-founder of SU&EG LLC, a California-based importer of traditional Georgian wines.
