by Edward Ring
Mamdani and Newsom sell rival myths, but their shared model—big government fused with big corporate power—centralizes control, inflates costs, and leaves ordinary Americans paying the price.
California Governor Gavin Newsom wants to be the 48th President of the United States. In pursuit of that lifelong ambition, Newsom has positioned himself as principled but practical.
Even if Newsom’s positioning is genuine, his career conflicts with the promise of his new image. California’s considerable remaining economic vitality is in spite of Newsom, not because of him. On every issue that might differentiate him from the Democratic machine that runs California, Newsom’s pronouncements have been suspect. Either they have been completely fraudulent—his claims to have alleviated homelessness are a perfect example—or they have been flip-flops necessitated to avoid disaster.
And in those cases where Newsom actually flipped into doing something right, however incremental and inadequate it may have been, “disaster” to his presidential ambitions has been his primary concern. Avoiding the disastrous impacts his policies are having on California’s law-abiding citizens, working families, and beleaguered businesses is a secondary concern, only motivated by Newsom’s desire to avoid the first.
Newsom is also counting on his charm and charisma to propel his candidacy ahead of his competitors. Being 6’3″, telegenic, photogenic, effortlessly glib, and sporting a world-class pompadour should be worth at least five to ten points in the polls. In a democracy awash with low-information voters, races are won or lost with soundbites and clicks. Appearances have an outsized influence on results, no matter how shallow and deceptive they may be.
Another advantage Newsom brings with him is being born into extraordinary privilege. Newsom is an intimate member of California’s ongoing, firmly entrenched political aristocracy. When Governor Brown left office and Gavin Newsom began his first term as governor in 2018, noted political columnist Dan Walters had this to say about his family connections:
“Newsom is succeeding someone who could be considered his quasi-uncle, since his inauguration continues the decades-long saga of four San Francisco families intertwined by blood, by marriage, by money, by culture, and, of course, by politics—the Browns, the Newsoms, the Pelosis, and the Gettys.”
On the other side of the country, a rising political star has been elected mayor of New York City. Zohran Mamdani also has a privileged background. His father is a professor at Columbia University and considered an “influential postcolonial scholar.” His mother is a noted filmmaker with an international reputation. Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin College, where the annual tuition exceeds $70,000.
While Mamdani’s lineage doesn’t quite match Newsom’s, it’s certainly opened a lot of doors for him. And in the charisma department, Mamdani is also collecting votes beyond the mean. Just over a month before the election, Vanity Fair described him as a “suave and handsome upstart.” The influential New York quarterly Jacobin, an openly communist publication, had this to say about Mamdani: “In every New York Post photo, as well as in this new TV ad, he looks fantastic and is smiling radiantly.”
Newsom and Mamdani are both “radiant,” and they both had well-heeled, influential parents. But it would be a mistake to say the comparisons end there, even though at first glance it might appear they embrace competing versions of Democratic Party ideology. Newsom’s latest political value proposition is to present himself as a moderate, practical policymaker. Mamdani was elected promising free housing, free food, and free transportation.
The reason these ostensibly competing visions of the future are not in conflict, however, is because Mamdani’s socialism and Newsom’s corporatism are two sides of the same exploitative coin. The growth of socialist benefits and bureaucracy is synergistic with the centralization of corporate power. The creation and encouragement of a population dependent on government doesn’t destroy big corporations; it empowers them.
This fact is probably the biggest irony in politics and the biggest deception that Democratic politicians (with more than a little help from many Republicans) have successfully perpetrated on American voters. Gavin Newsom’s California is the proving ground for this deception, with New York poised to go from a close second to taking the lead.
In California, Gavin Newsom recognizes that public sector unions exercise nearly absolute political power in his state. These unions collect and spend more than a billion dollars per year, with about one-third of that donated explicitly to political campaigns and roughly another one-third allocated to “nonpartisan” public information campaigns. These unions control state and local government bureaucracies, which, while technically prohibited from political advocacy, also spend additional hundreds of millions of dollars on “information” campaigns to obliquely argue for increased taxes and spending.
The corporate role in California is one of a partner to this political machine. The biggest corporations in the state almost never challenge the growth of government, the tax increases, or the smothering avalanche of new regulations every year, because the bigger the corporation is, the more they benefit from all of this. Reports of California being hostile to business miss the point. The state is only hostile to small- or medium-sized businesses that can’t afford the regulatory overhead. The big corporations mop up the pieces and consolidate their markets.
Completing the picture are powerful NGOs that have invaded and influenced policy in every sector of the state’s economy and institutions, including energy, housing, healthcare, agriculture, hospitality, and media. Focused on environmental protection and “equity,” these NGOs have added their weight to the trend. More regulations and rules. More subsidies. Higher taxes.
The emergence of NGOs underscores a transformational shift that has deepened the alliance of corporations and socialists. Corporations used to support unrestricted immigration to have a source of cheap labor. But in recent years, corporate vendors and NGOs have profited by collecting tax dollars to provide benefits to immigrants regardless of their employability. The economic incentives have shifted from prioritizing more cheap labor to just maximizing how many warm bodies we can import.
The corporatist/socialist axis represented by Newsom and Mamdani, incarnate in California’s political economy, explains why the state now has the highest cost of living in America. For every essential, certainly including housing and energy, healthy capitalist competition has been suppressed, reducing the available supply at the same time as an exploding population of marginally employable residents has magnified overall demand.
The common thread that unites the biggest, most politically connected corporations (Newsom’s base) with the socialist goal of big government (Mamdani’s base) is centralization. To achieve these ends, they employ rhetoric of shocking hypocrisy. Because all of it, from the “climate emergency” to “systemic racism” and every other seductive avenue on which to promote panic and extremism, leads to the same authoritarian destination.
When the cost of living is elevated, household discretionary cash evaporates. The earnings of ordinary workers go to the corporate monopolies that control markets and prices for every essential good. On top of that, middle-class wage earners face a crippling tax burden, causing their own economic prospects as well to descend to subsistence. And all the while, the phony antagonism continues between socialist saints and capitalist ogres, painting a deceptive drama that nonetheless manages to captivate a majority of desperate, disenfranchised voters.
This is the world of Mamdani and Newsom. This is the political model they personify. An alliance of big corporations and big government. Some might call this fascist, but they’ve co-opted that word, too, using it to describe their political opponents. Newsom could ride this train all the way into the White House. Mamdani will preside over New York City, wondering if someday his charisma could carry him to the pinnacle of power as well.
There is no easy way to debunk the false promises of socialism. But we can begin by recognizing that socialists in America are not fighting capitalists. They are allied with the world’s biggest and most powerful corporations and financial institutions to destroy emerging competitors, centralize power and profit, and engineer the biggest transfer of wealth in history, from poor to rich. The next time Newsom or Mamdani flash their radiant smiles, remember who they really represent.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the
director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center,
which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is
the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021)
and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/02/11/mamdani-and-newsom-the-democratic-partys-fraternal-twins/
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