The Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City Zohran Mamdanihas commanded a share of the nation’s attention that few candidates for local office will ever achieve. Many of the controversies swirling around him have at least centered on issues that always inspire heated debate, like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Since his victory in the primary, though, a surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, John Catsimatidis (who owns the grocery store chains Gristedes and D’Agostino’s) warned that Mamdani’s policies on grocery sales amount to “radical socialism” and, if implemented, “would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” The same analogy was pursued by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. “Forget the old-school communist talk about socializing the means of production,” McCardle wrote. “Mamdani wants to socialize the means of consumption.”

A surprising number of denunciations of Mamdani by conservatives and libertarians have centered around … grocery stores.

Judging by these reactions, you’d think that Mamdani had, at the very least, proposed expropriating every privately owned supermarket and bodega in the city and placing them under control of a People’s Commissariat of Food Supply. You might even wonder if he’d gone further and proposed sending the NYPD to conquer some rural areas of upstate New York and forcibly collectivize agriculture there.

In reality, he’s proposed a very modest experiment. He doesn’t want to touch a single privately owned store. Instead, he wants to start five new city-owned grocery stores, one in each of the five boroughs, designed to provide a public option for grocery shopping in the areas within those boroughs with the fewest private options (where grocery prices at those few stores that do operate tend to be very high).

If this sounds like an extreme proposal, it shouldn’t. There are 17 states around the country with public monopolies on liquor stores. One of these is the most otherwise libertarian state in the union, New Hampshire, whose state motto is “Live Free or Die.” If the 80 state-owned liquor stores in New Hampshire don’t inspire hysterical analogies to the Soviet Union, despite the lack of private competitors, introducing a grand total of five private groceries to New York City (whose population is almost eight times the total population of New Hampshire) shouldn’t either.

Billy Binion, a writer for the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that this is an analogy that should make us more skeptical of the idea, rather than less. After the end of Prohibition, he points out, some politicians in these states supported moving state monopolies on liquor stores because they “wanted drinking to be difficult and expensive after alcohol was legalized again.” As such, the analogy to food sales “isn’t exactly reassuring.”

But there’s a world of difference between why some prohibitionist dead-enders might have supported a policy in the 1930s and why it remains popular in the 2020s.

The difference between prevailing attitudes in different states also matters. Are we really supposed to believe that voters and politicians in “Live Free or Die” New Hampshire continue to support the state monopoly because they wish Prohibition would come back and, failing that, they want a nanny state to do everything it can to discourage drinking?

If so, the policy has been a truly spectacular failure. States are clustered together closely in that part of the country, and people from around the region often drive to New Hampshire for the sole purpose of stocking up on cheap liquor at the state liquor stores. Anyone who’s ever driven into the state will remember the giant billboards directing people to those stores. In fact, NPR reported several years ago that latter-day bootleggers are sometimes caught buying up hundreds of bottles of cheap New Hampshire liquor to resell in other states. Far from being a hotbed of neo-prohibitionism, New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy in place precisely because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.

It’s a quirk of culture and history that publicly owned liquor stores are so much more common in capitalist countries than publicly owned stores selling milk and eggs, but on a basic logistical level, a city-owned grocery store in Queens would be much more like a state-owned liquor store in New Hampshire than it would be like a Soviet grocery store. Aside from John Catsimatidis and Megan McCardle, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the reason shelves were so often empty at Soviet stores was because the stores themselves didn’t know how to order needed goods from suppliers or stock the shelves, rather than the problems with making sure the actual production of goods was coordinated with fine-grained consumer preferences in a system where every aspect of the economy was centrally planned.

Perhaps, given the smaller profit margins in stores selling perishable groceries than stores selling beer, wine and hard liquor, though, Mamdani’s proposed experiment with a tiny number of municipal grocery stores would be a failure and it would have to be abandoned. There’s no way to be certain before it’s tried.

New Hampshire keeps its liquor store policy because it brings much-needed revenue to a state that’s notoriously reluctant to raise funds through taxation.

What I can’t get over, though, is the massive contradiction at the heart of the right-wing panic about his proposal. If the shelves would be empty since no public employee could ever navigate the delicate logistical hurdles, why on earth would anyone shop there rather than finding a private alternative? But if so, how are we supposed to understand the claim in the Wall Street Journal op-ed that Mamdani wants to “replace” private with public grocery stores? Is the problem that any city-owned grocery stores would be horrendously inefficient, such that we’d see empty shelves to the Leningrad in 1970? Or is it that they’ll be so wildly successful that the initial experiment with five stores will mushroom and all private competitors will eventually be put out of business?

Neither criticism is especially compelling on its own. But if critics want to make any sense at all, they have to pick.

I am a burgis

Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast.

When President Ronald Reagan was trying to justify massive cuts on social programs, he would often invoke the so-called welfare queen.

His rhetoric focused on an imaginary American — typically assumed to be a Black, single woman — who was living large on the public dole.

Today’s Republicans haven’t invoked the stereotype as they’ve set about slashing the safety netbut that may be because they don’t have to.

There’s a persistent myth in American politics that poverty has a single face and that face is usually Black, often female, and somehow responsible for her own hardship.

The Senate voted to pass the “big, beautiful bill” on Tuesday. The House, after wavering for a few hours on Wednesday nightis now poised to send it to President Donald Trump’s desk in time for his Fourth of July deadline. But even as Trump and his allies in Congress have prepared to take food off the tables of poor Americans with their megabillthe decades-long project to demonize social welfare programs has helped them avoid accountability.

And make no mistake, the people that many of these cuts are going to hurt the most are the white, rural voters who backed Trump in the last three elections.

There’s a persistent myth in American politics that poverty has a single face and that face is usually Black, often female, and somehow responsible for her own hardship.

That myth was not born by accident. It was crafted, polished and weaponized. It was built on decades of policy choices and political messaging that added racial overtones to programs designed to combat poverty among all Americans in an effort to erode public support.

Ironically, these programs began as ways to help poor white people. When the New Deal began tackling poverty, programs such as Aid to Dependent Children (later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC) were designed to support mostly white, widowed mothers suffering in the Great Depression.

It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement gained traction in the 1960s that more Black families became able to access these same benefits. That led to a backlash against them that the right has long used to try to undercut them.

By the 1970s, amid rising inflation, economic anxiety and racial resentment, conservatives began to cast what was known as “welfare” not as a ladder out of poverty but as a trap and its recipients as ungrateful, unproductive burdens on the system.

Reagan took a story about a real woman convicted of fraud and exaggerated it into the fictional ‘welfare queen.’

That set the stage for Reagan, who took a story about a real woman convicted of fraud and exaggerated it into the fictional “welfare queen” who was supposedly cashing multiple checks under multiple names and driving a Cadillac.

The strategy worked. The “welfare queen” myth gave policymakers from both parties permission to strip benefits from millions of people.

When President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform bill, officially ending AFDC and replacing it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Familiesthe damage was codified. Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and he did. But what also ended was any real commitment to a guaranteed safety net in this country.

The truth is, the majority of people living in poverty in America today are not Black. They are white, rural Americans, children and veterans. They are seniors on fixed incomes or single mothers juggling multiple jobs and still coming up short. The face of poverty is not who many Americans have been conditioned to see.

The cost of that conditioning is showing up in real time.

Last month, House Republicans advanced a tax bill that would give about $4 trillion in permanent tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations over the next 10 years. And earlier this week, the Senate passed a revised version of that bill that would lock in those tax cuts that overwhelmingly help the rich. How do they plan to pay for it? By targeting the very programs that keep working people afloat — like SNAP and Medicaid. This isn’t fiscal responsibility. It’s cruelty disguised as economics.

Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania joined us on “The Weeknight” earlier this week to make this very point. He reminded viewers that there are two counties in Pennsylvania that are directly tied for the highest poverty rate. One is in Philadelphia and the other is Fayette County, which is along the border of West Virginia and 95% white. That truth rarely gets its deserved airtime, yet it is central to the stakes of this moment.

Vague political language like “spending cuts,” “entitlement reform” and “deficit reduction” allow harmful assumptions to do the dirty work.

Vague political language like “spending cuts,” “entitlement reform” and “deficit reduction” allow harmful assumptions to do the dirty work. It keeps people from realizing that when Congress cuts SNAP, they’re not punishing a stereotype. They’re punishing real people. The single mother in Appalachia. The retiree in Arizona. The family in Detroit living paycheck to paycheck.

Many of them are Trump voters, including both his die-hard supporters and those who say they were fed up with inflation and looking for change last November.

They will soon suffer from these cuts, too. So why did they vote against their own interests? Because they’ve been sold a story, one that says that the “takers” are Black and brown and implicitly promises that the pain will be inflicted on someone else. One that allows some people in poverty to think that they’re the virtuous ones who are being held back and that the cuts will only affect the “waste, fraud and abuse” coming from somewhere else.

The truth will become clear soon enough. Some of these voters may come to realize they’ve been sold a bill of goods. Let’s hope that the horrific effects of this legislation eventually cause a moment of reckoning for the people who continue to try to sell the lie of the “welfare queen” to justify their own cruelty.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Alicia Menendez and Symone Sanders-Townsend, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on BLN.

Symone D. Sanders Townsend

Symone D. Sanders Townsend is an author and a co-host of “The Weeknight,” which airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. ET on BLN. She is a former deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and a former senior adviser to and chief spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris.