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In the shifting discourse of twenty-first-century politics, the boundaries between the Left and the Right are no longer etched in ideology but blurred in performance. The spectacle of Zohran Mamdani – the young, articulate son of an African-born Ugandan academic and an Indian mother – ascending to the mayoralty of New York City as a self-proclaimed socialist democrat has revived a question that modern political theory thought it had buried: is the New Left truly re-emerging, or has the Right cunningly absorbed its moral vocabulary, leaving the Left hollow and performative? Mamdani’s manifesto – freezing rent, free public transportation, expansive social spending – evokes the moral optimism of the 1970s socialist movement. Yet when one glances at the policies of right-wing populists from Narendra Modi to Viktor Orban, the same moral claims reappear, wrapped in the rhetoric of nation, welfare, and the common man. The irony is staggering: the Right, once the custodian of austerity and market discipline, now wears the costume of redistribution.
The rise of figures like Mamdani appears, at first glance, as a resurgence of democratic socialism in the capitalist core. The language of rent control, universal services, and redistributive justice is making a comeback in urban America, where corporate greed and housing inequality have disfigured the promise of the American dream. However, it would be naïve to think this signals an ideological victory for socialism. Rather, it is the exhaustion of neoliberal capitalism that has forced even the Right to speak the language of equity. Across continents, conservative populists have begun to appropriate welfare narratives – from Trump’s rhetorical defense of “forgotten workers” to Modi’s welfare populism dressed as moral nationalism. What we are witnessing is not a revival of the Left but a mutation of the Right – a Right that has learned to sound compassionate without surrendering control.
India offers the most sophisticated version of this ideological inversion. The Modi government, outwardly rooted in the Hindu nationalist imagination, has systematically redefined welfare in moral and political terms. Free rations to eighty crore citizens, financial assistance to farmers, subsidized housing, health insurance schemes, and the rhetoric of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas together form a new moral economy of the state – one that reclaims the distributive function of socialism but empties it of its emancipatory content. This is welfare without solidarity, redistribution without social equality, charity without critique. The logic is no longer to empower the citizen as a rights-bearing individual but to reconfigure her as a beneficiary of the state’s benevolence. In this transformation, socialism is domesticated into an instrument of legitimacy.
The paradox is glaring: if Zohran Mamdani’s call for rent control and free bus service makes him a socialist, then by the same logic, Narendra Modi – with his massive welfare machinery – would appear as the world’s most successful socialist. Yet the difference lies not in the substance of welfare but in its spirit. The socialist democrat seeks to use the state to equalize power; the populist Right uses the state to consolidate it. Both distribute, but one distributes to empower, the other to bind. Modi’s genius lies in the symbolic inversion of socialism itself – transforming it from a class-based solidarity into a cultural compact. Welfare here is not an instrument of justice; it is an extension of loyalty.
The Left’s tragedy is that it has lost its monopoly over the moral language of equality. Once the natural inheritor of the politics of compassion, it now appears as a faction of complaints – fragmented, procedural, and intellectually fatigued. Its leaders, from Sanders to Corbyn, have romanticized a nostalgia that cannot return, while the Right has absorbed the social anxieties that once animated leftist politics. The new poor, the abandoned middle class, and the cultural losers of globalization no longer look to the Left for answers; they look to populist demagogues who promise both dignity and bread. The Right, in its postmodern disguise, has stolen the emotional register of the Left – speaking of dignity, justice, and belonging, while simultaneously deepening social hierarchies.
The emergence of Mamdani, therefore, must be read less as a triumph of socialism and more as a symptom of a wider crisis – the crisis of political authenticity. His manifesto speaks to a moral yearning, not an ideological breakthrough. For decades, capitalism has produced inequality faster than democracy can redistribute it. The technocratic Left of the Clinton-Blair era accepted this inequality as inevitable, managing it through token reforms. In that vacuum, a figure like Mamdani represents an ethical protest – but one constrained by the institutional limits of the system he seeks to reform. His socialism is aspirational, not revolutionary; municipal, not systemic. It appeals to the conscience of the privileged, not to the collective agency of the dispossessed.
Contrast this with India’s populist transformation. The Modi government’s policies – the Ayushman Bharat health scheme, PM-KISAN income support, Ujjwala gas connections, and Jan Dhan financial inclusion – have created a new vocabulary of welfare politics. These are not redistributive in the socialist sense; they are distributive in the moral sense. The beneficiary is no longer a worker asserting her right but a citizen receiving the leader’s grace. Welfare, in this schema, is a tool for manufacturing belonging. It legitimizes the leader’s authority while creating an emotional economy of gratitude. The political result is devastating for the traditional Left, which finds itself outflanked not by neoliberalism but by nationalized socialism.
This mutation of ideology – where welfare becomes the terrain of populism – is not confined to India. Across Europe, right-wing parties have discovered that selective welfare can reinforce national identity. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France advocates welfare chauvinism: redistribution for natives, exclusion for immigrants. Similarly, Viktor Orban’s Hungary offers pro-natalist subsidies for Hungarian families while demonizing refugees. These regimes mimic the language of socialism – solidarity, protection, social justice – but redirect it towards cultural homogeneity. The welfare state, once a universal project, is now being reimagined as a fortress.
What makes this shift so insidious is that it disarms critique. When the Right provides material benefits, it cloaks its moral agenda in compassion. The Left, stripped of its redistributive edge, is reduced to a politics of moral outrage. Its intellectuals speak of justice while the Right delivers food. Its activists demand equality while the Right guarantees stability. This inversion has collapsed the moral geometry of politics. The Left no longer owns the poor; the Right has nationalized them.
In this new political economy, the question is no longer who distributes, but why. The socialist tradition viewed redistribution as a means of democratizing power – of turning subjects into citizens. The populist Right sees redistribution as a means of personalizing power – of turning citizens into loyal subjects. This subtle but crucial difference defines the politics of our age. Zohran Mamdani’s socialism, with its language of equality, appeals to the conscience of a liberal metropolis; Modi’s welfare populism, with its language of nation and gratitude, appeals to the psychology of belonging. Both inhabit the moral vocabulary of care, but only one converts it into political obedience.
The intellectual consequence is profound. The Left is forced to defend its ideological identity by radicalizing its rhetoric even as it loses its constituency. It speaks in the language of structural justice but fails to offer emotional reassurance. The Right, meanwhile, has mastered emotional politics – it knows how to make people feel seen. In this sense, Modi’s populism is not anti-socialist; it is post-socialist. It acknowledges inequality but neutralizes its anger. It replaces class struggle with emotional stability. The citizen may remain poor, but she feels part of a national story. This emotional substitution is the secret of the Right’s success.
It is tempting, therefore, to say that ideology is dead, that the Left and Right have merged into a moral continuum. But that would be an illusion. Ideology has not disappeared; it has mutated into form. The Right no longer opposes welfare but redefines it as a moral duty rather than a social contract. The Left no longer demands revolution but seeks ethical reform within capitalism. The battle is no longer over redistribution but over recognition – who deserves care, and on what terms.
In this global landscape, figures like Mamdani and Modi are not opposites but mirror images: both articulate moral politics for an age of economic despair. One invokes socialism to restore dignity to the working class; the other invokes nationalism to restore pride to the forgotten citizen. Both reject neoliberal austerity, but for different ends. The tragedy is that in the process, socialism as a critique of power has been domesticated into a politics of benevolence.
To judge Mamdani as a socialist democrat, then, is to measure ideals in a distorted mirror. His manifesto reminds us that inequality is intolerable, but his politics reveals that structural transformation remains impossible without confronting capital itself. Modi’s welfare populism, on the other hand, demonstrates how socialism can be emptied of ideology and deployed as spectacle. If Indira Gandhi’s socialism was a political weapon, Modi’s is a psychological one – subtler, deeper, and more efficient. He has achieved what the Left only dreamed of: mass legitimacy through state compassion.
The question, therefore, is not whether the New Left is rising, but whether socialism can survive its own imitation. When the Right promises welfare, speaks of the poor, and delivers tangible goods, it occupies the moral terrain that once sustained the Left. What remains for socialism is not to compete in generosity but to reclaim its moral distinction – to reassert that welfare without freedom is servitude, that compassion without justice is control. Until that distinction is revived, the Right will continue to dominate the politics of care while the Left will remain trapped in the politics of memory.
In the end, Zohran Mamdani’s victory is both inspiring and ironic. It reveals that socialist language still carries moral weight, yet it also shows how far the Left has drifted from its structural ambitions. The Right, by co-opting socialist themes, has reduced ideology to aesthetics. What we witness today is not the rebirth of socialism but its mimicry – a world where every ruler speaks of the poor, but few dare to share power with them. The true challenge is not to praise the new socialists or condemn the populist welfare regimes, but to recognize that both are products of the same disenchanted age: an era where justice has been replaced by comfort, and equality by access.
The world, it seems, has not turned Left again. It has merely learned to speak Left while walking Right.
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