The Dictatorship
Zohran Mamdani’s modest grocery proposal has sparked a right-wing panic for no reason
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.
Ben Burgis is a political commentator and author. He has written articles for Jacobin and The Daily Beast.
The Dictatorship
Monday’s Campaign Round-Up, 6.22.26: Why Trump backed both Republicans in a key S.C. race
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* In South Carolina’s gubernatorial raceDonald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Pam Evette last month. Last week, however, ahead of this week’s primary runoff election in the race, the president published an online item telling voters that “you can’t go wrong” with either Evette or state Attorney General Alan Wilson.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Trump has done this before. Around this time two years ago, for example, he endorsed both Republicans running in a congressional primary in Arizona. And two years before that, he endorsed two leading contenders in a Senate primary in Missouri.
Only the president can say for sure why he ended up endorsing Evette and Wilson in the South Carolina race, though it’s worth emphasizing for context that GOP primary voters have already ignored his direction into two gubernatorial primaries this month, and it stands to reason that he hoped to avoid a third.
* We’re one day away from a variety of notable racesincluding but not limited to South Carolina’s gubernatorial race. There are also some congressional primaries in a handful of statesincluding Maryland, New York and Utah.
* In took a while, but the ballots have been tallied under Maine’s ranked-choice systemand we now know that Democrat Hannah Pingree, the former state House speaker, will face off against Republican Bobby Charles, who worked at the State Department during the Bush-Cheney era.
* As for Maine’s closely watched congressional racestate Auditor Matt Dunlap won the Democratic nomination in the battleground 2nd District, defeating state Sen. Joe Baldacci, who enjoyed the backing of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Dunlap will run in the fall against a familiar figure: former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, who had moved to Florida a few years ago, but who returned to run for Congress.
* In California’s congressional special electiontwo Democratic candidates — state Sen. Aisha Wahab and Melissa Hernandez, a Bay Area Rapid Transit director — have advanced to an Aug. 18 special general election. The winner will fill the vacancy left by disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned in April.
* In a new commercial shared first with MS NOWDemocrat James Talarico has launched his campaign’s first multimillion-dollar ad buy in Texas’ gubernatorial race. In the 30-second spot, Talarico focuses on affordability and the cost of living. The state lawmaker will face scandal-plagued state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the fall.
* And in New Jersey, Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.who has been missing from Capitol Hill since early March, will reportedly return to work on June 30according to a statement from his spokesperson. Neither Kean nor his office have offered any public information about why he has been away.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
The Dictatorship
Trump tries dual endorsement in South Carolina as his pick for governor flounders in polls
After President Donald Trump’s pick for governor in Iowa lost in the Republican primary earlier this month, the president argued that he “would have endorsed the other person” if he had “the proper information.”
Trump is taking no chances in the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. Over the weekend he rescinded his exclusive endorsement of Pamela Evette, the lieutenant governor, announcing instead that he would support both Evette and her runoff opponent, Alan Wilson, the state’s attorney general.
The move put Evette’s political future in jeopardy: Even before Trump’s dual endorsement, she trailed in limited public polling and was seen by political observers in South Carolina as a weak candidate with little to show besides the president’s coveted endorsement.
“Her chief distinction from Alan Wilson was that Trump endorsed her,” said Dr. Dubose Kapeluck, a professor of political science at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina.
Trump’s dual endorsement “was a kiss of death,” he told MS NOW.
Evette, who moved to South Carolina from Ohio to found a successful payroll and HR company in 2000, has been lieutenant governor since 2019, serving under Gov. Henry McMaster, who is term-limited.
In office, she has pursued meaningful but little-celebrated policies, like a key tort reform bill, according to Gil Gatch, a Republican member of the South Carolina state House and an Evette supporter.
But voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Evette besides the fact that Trump endorsed her, which he did just days before the June 9 primary. Visitors to her campaign website are greeted with a full-screen message labeling Evette as “Trump-endorsed.” The first line in her X bio states the same. Pro-Evette television ads are quick to tout the endorsement.
An accomplishment like tort reform, while noted on Evette’s website, “maybe could have been something that was highlighted more heavily,” Gatch told MS NOW.
The political makeup of South Carolina nearly guarantees the next governor will be whoever emerges on Tuesday between Evette and Wilson. They survived a crowded primary field on June 9, and nearly every challenger who fell short of the runoff publicly endorsed the attorney general.
“She’s just not a good candidate,” Josh Kimbrell, a state senator who failed to make the runoff and has since said he’d back Wilson, said of Evette.
“She kind of assumed this was a coronation, and that was never going to go over that well,” he added.
Even some pro-Trump voters were confused by the president’s initial endorsement of Evette, whom he called “a good friend, fighter, and WINNER” in a social media post in May.
“I have no clue why Trump would endorse Pamela Evette,” Leland Lemmons, a 30-year-old Trump supporter told MS NOW as he exited a polling site in the Greenville suburb of Easley on June 9.
“She’s served, you know, a decent time. I just haven’t seen much fruition of what she’s done in office,” he added.
In a post on Truth Social Friday announcing his dual endorsement, Trump wrote, “I can’t hurt one of them by only Endorsing the other, so, therefore, I am going to Endorse, for Governor of South Carolina, both Pam Evette and Alan Wilson!”
In a subsequent statement on X, Evette said, “I was proud to come in first as [Trump’s] endorsed candidate for Governor on June 9th. Looking forward to doing it again on June 23rd.”
After The Washington Post foreshadowed the dual endorsement last Tuesday, allies of Evette were quick to denounce the possibility.
“I would guess that’s fake news,” Suzanne Pucci, a member of Evette’s finance committee, told MS NOW of the chance Trump would also endorse Wilson. “She’s probably not real worried about it.”
Another close ally and supporter told MS NOW at the time the report was “a total, fabricated lie.”
“[Trump] is invested in Pamela Evette because she invested in him. He’s a loyal guy. That kind of stuff is important to him,” added the supporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“With or without Trump, I think she is going to win,” they said.
On Thursday, a senior campaign aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, brushed off the idea of a dual endorsement, telling MS NOW in a statement, “Pamela Evette has earned the complete and total endorsement of President Trump. She is the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race and we look forward to delivering a big win for the president on Tuesday.”
Roughly 24 hours later, Trump retracted the exclusive endorsement.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.
As last week’s G7 summit in France got underway, a reporter asked Donald Trump whether his purported deal with Iran was final. “No, it’s not final,” the president replied. Later that day — during a visit to Versaillesof all places — he signed the framework anyway.
But moments after signing his name to the memorandum of understanding, Trump offered an unsubtle hint about what he was thinking at the time. Amid applause from those around him, the American president pointed down and then up while saying“Oil down, stocks up.”
In other words, Trump’s focus had nothing to do with natural security and everything to do with the economy. What’s more, the four-word phrase was part of a larger and underappreciated pattern. The Washington Post reported:
In the more than 100 days since President Donald Trump launched a war with Iran, he has offered a shifting list of reasons for why he started the conflict. But in explaining his push for peace, he named a priority much closer to home: protecting the stock market.
“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe,” Trump told reporters gathered in the Alpine spa town of Évian-les-Bains, France, after the Group of Seven summit.
As the summit wrapped up, the Republican similarly said“I’ve studied presidents, some good, some bad, some great. Not too many are great and some really bad. … And the one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that and who knows what would have happened.”
He pushed the same point in an interview with Axios, which was released over the weekend.
“If I went further, the stock market would be much lower,” the president said. “Now think of this: I have one primary wish as president, in terms of people: I never want to be the late, great Herbert Hoover.”
The comments came days after Trump similarly argued“The alternative to this deal was a global recession. There are stupid people who want to see a global recession. They are just stupid people.”
Whether the president fully appreciates the implications of his own rhetoric, this string of comments doesn’t just shed light on his motivations for accepting a defeat, it also suggests he saw his failed policy in Iran as pushing the global economy toward a dangerous cliff.
In other words, based on Trump’s own comments, the war he started was poised to create an “economic catastrophe,” which he was desperate to avoid — and which led him to accept a framework that empowered Iran to get what it wanted in exchange for effectively no concessions at all.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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