Among others oozing angst about “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani’s election were two refugees from the USSR (one was Garry Kasparov) speaking on an anti-semitism panel Tuesday. Socialism, they declared, leads to communism! Even democratic socialism does! Just wait ‘til Mamdani shows his true colors!

Never mind, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, that democratic socialism works just fine in Denmark and elsewhere, without devolving into all-out communism.

Okay, Bianna Golodryga (the other refugee panelist) and chess grandmaster Kasparov understandably hoped to be free of that stuff, in the USA. But they haven’t been free of it, and weren’t, long before Mamdani.

·      With some justification, Mike Pence calls D. Trump a communist, because DJT acquired stock in Intel and Nvidia for the US government, and government ownership of the means of production is the very definition of communism.

·      My conservative friend @John Doggett just reposted an article that explains how WalMart grew by paying such low salaries that employees needed food stamps (aka SNAP benefits) in order to survive. In other words, WalMart grew on the back of taxpayer subsidies. And of course destroyed many small businesses in the process.

·      Do I even need to mention government bailouts of “too big to fail” banks and airlines?

The latter two bulleted facts came about via bipartisan agreement. They are controversial, but they’re not current red-blue flash points. So if Golodryga and Kasparov believe the alternative to socialism is American conservatism, they’re barking up the wrong tree. We live in a mixed capitalist-socialist economy.

This has nothing to do with Mamdani – who might turn out to be a bad mayor, or a good mayor. Though the refugees’ remark, “Yeah, we know about government-operated grocery stores” (one of Mamdani’s campaign points) does hit home.

I’m no Marxist, but Karl Marx’ idea of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” applies here. We’ve suffered at least eleven months from right-wing authoritarianism. If Mamdani and others spread left-wing authoritarianism, that’s antithesis – partially, a result of our fight against the right wing. We’ll then have to fight the extreme left. And hopefully converge eventually to a moderate synthesis.

When you come right down to it, nobody sees a real difference between right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing authoritarianism, except the authoritarians themselves. The rest of us suffer equally from either. We do notice, though, when corporate welfare flourishes while real humans go hungry.