Zohran Mamdani, 34, a democratic socialist, was elected the first Millennial mayor of New York City on Tuesday; Abigail Spanberger will become the first female Governor of Virginia; Mikie Sherrill slayed the Gubernatorial race with a seismic win in New Jersey; California remapped to create five new Congressional districts in hues of blue; and a trio of liberal justices are keeping their seats in the battleground City of Brotherly Love. Millions, literally, of voters in the City of Dreams enjoined a mandate across the land of the free.

To make sense of the week’s elections, we needn’t look back any further than five years. In 2020, Joe Biden won by promising to restore normalcy to American life. Why he failed in part is because pandemic stimulus and spending produced an economic shock called inflation, and a subsequent affordability crisis around the world. Voters revolted to goods and services rising faster than their wages, ushering practically every incumbent party in every developed country to either lose ground or be defeated.

“This city belongs to you,” Mamdani told supporters in his victory speech at the Brooklyn Paramount theater. He all but dared the establishment to challenge him. “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us!” Religion was a defining theme of the race, and at no time has Christianity ever been questioned as the nation’s unofficial religion until now. The most prominent face in the Democratic Party is now an African born, social democratic Muslim.

At the core of the debates neither God nor Allah were talking points. Mamdani’s platform focused on affordability, rent freezes, universal childcare, free bus rides, and raising the hourly minimum wage to $30. Here again, concerns that reflect the nation and world.

Roughly 6 in 10 Americans now blame U.S. President Trump “a great deal” or “a good amount” for the current rate of inflation and rising prices, according to Post-ABC-Ipsos. From groceries to gas, Americans believe they’re spending more under Trump. However, inflation had already hit a 40-year peak of 9.1% in the summer of 2022, and was the defining issue in Election 2024. Specifically, affordability. Moody’s Analytics’ chief economist Mark Zandi recalls, “High inflation, and the high cost of living, alone didn’t return Trump to the White House.” The affordability platform debated two evils, and focused specifically on who in the private and public sectors had exploited the American people.

The way forward presents two opposing theories of economics. Either the nation is trying to correct itself from the pandemic era stimulus, spending, and inflation via purging federal employees and invoking unprecedented presidential emergency powers, or the republic itself is tilting toward a new democratic socialist regime. Harvard’s political scientist Steven Levitsky observes, “Between 2020 and 2024, incumbents lost their jobs in 40 of 54 elections held in Western democracies.”

It’s Day 40 of the longest U.S. government shutdown in the nation’s history, and therefore an opportune moment for Americans to at least consider whats at stake. In his victory speech on Tuesday, Mamdani invoked Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. Nehru speaks at his swearing in at the Viceroy House in 1947:

A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new. When an age ends, and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance. Tonight we have stepped from out from the old into the new.

Though Trump characterized Mamdani as a “communist” during the campaign, he here again randomly hits a tree whilst missing the mark entirely. In brief, democratic socialists are not communist. In fact, their calls for social ownership of the means of production explicitly reject a centralized, authoritarian state or command economy such as the former Soviet Union.

What they intend is some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on work, labor, and economic democracy. There are several schools of thought among socialist democrats, but Mamdani belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA's stated goal is “to participate in the workers' rights movement with a long-term aim of social ownership of production such as public enterprises, worker cooperatives, or decentralized planning.” In 2025, approximately 250 politicians elected to public office in the United States were endorsed by the DSA, 90% were elected after 2019.

A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a clearer picture: 62% of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34% say the same of communism. Each and all of the 19 Democrat Socialist nations share a penchant for universal healthcare, education, and welfare. Ironically, India isn't included among their ranks.

After 13 years as India’s first prime minister Nehru said: "Political democracy has no meaning if it does not embrace economic democracy, and economic democracy is nothing but socialism.” Ten years on, India enshrined the word “socialism” into it’s constitution in 1976, and pushed ahead with further nationalizations in the 1980s. However, the world’s forth largest nation by GDP is actually a mixed economy, where the private sector drives innovation and growth, while the public sector owns and controls most of the infrastructure, insurance, and banking.

The hallmark of socialist states everywhere rely on a precondition of fairness. Still, corruption, nepotism, and cronyism run rampant in India today. Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Ramesh Thakur writes in “Our Enemy, the Government:"

It’s easier for a person of Indian origin to reach high public office in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States than in India. If you’re an immigrant or even second generation Indian in the US your far more likely to succeed in exams, far more likely to go to university, and be far more highly paid than your countrymen in India.

India’s experiment with socialism belies their exodus to new lives, careers, and political posts in capitalist countries. Their diaspora brought the Indian-origin population in the US to an estimated 5.2 million in 2024, and Nehru was half right: “Without social freedom, and a socialistic structure of society, neither the state nor their people can develop much.”

If Milton Friedman was famous for his influence on economic theory and policy, it was because as a Nobel Prize-winning economist he championed free markets and limited government intervention. At the height of the Great Depression in 1933, FDR capitulates: “True individual freedom can’t exist without economic security and independence. People who’re hungry and out of work are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Ronald Reagan spoke to the era's recession, high inflation (13.5%), and soaring interest rates (20%) in his inaugural address in 1981: “Without economic liberty, political freedom is no more than a shadow. Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Several weeks ago, Trump foresaw Mamdani’s win from his newly gilded Cabinet Room: ”He’s a communist. He’s not a socialist, by the way, he’s a communist. Communism has never worked anywhere,” but New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani spun it this way on Tuesday night. ”If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

Somewhere in all the noise lies Two Americas: "One America is beautiful for situation. And, in a sense, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. The Other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair." Martin Luther King invoked the phrase many times, but in 1967 at Stanford University he condensed them both into an argument for a Universal Basic Income.

Sixty years on, Open AI’s Sam Altman agrees. Artificial General Intelligence — expected to emerge in society as early as 2026 — will match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks. And lest we rush to either side of the debate or aisle let us first consider Altman’s view: “A world where highly autonomous systems will outperform humans at the highest levels of economically valuable work,” and at least consider how best to unite, rise, and take ownership of that future.