The hot commies are coming to save summer

Illustration by David Foldvari

Mamdani is a rare thing for an American politician, rarer still for a politician running to lead one of the richest and least affordable cities in the US (and, indeed, the world). He’s a self-avowed socialist. “I have many critiques of capitalism,” the 33-year-old told CNN last week. “There must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children in this country.” Mamdani’s focus is on “dignity and tackling income inequality”. He wants fairer housing, higher taxes for the 1% of New Yorkers who make more than $1m a year, and increased support for mental health and homelessness. And he believes billionaires should not exist.

That none of these policies are strictly communist hasn’t stopped Donald Trump from branding Mamdani one: the president insists the mayoral candidate would make New York a “communist city”. “That’s a terrible thing for our country, by the way,” he added. “I can’t believe that’s happening.” Nor can New York’s uber rich, who are already threatening to flee to Florida if Mamdani is elected mayor in November. Wall Street bankers told local press there was a feeling of “terror” over this act of “class warfare”. “First they came for the billionaires,” wrote one on X, paraphrasing apparently without irony the second world war poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller (the irony being that the actual first line of the poem, often omitted these days, is “first they came for the communists”).

But the backlash from financial elites hasn’t exactly reduced the appeal of “hot commie summer”, in New York or outside it. Mamdani’s win was seized on and celebrated by the left not just in the US but here in the UK, which was, to some, slightly odd. Why does anyone in Britain care about the outcome of a relatively minor electoral process thousands of miles away? It’s simple: in the same way that we yearned for Megan’s Hot Girl Summer from across the freezing Atlantic, so too do we yearn for hot commie summer.

In frontline politics today, do we have an equivalent to Mamdani? Nominally, we have a Labour government. In reality we have Keir Starmer. Last summer, before Labour’s election win, Starmer, like Mamdani, was insistent that he believed in socialism. “I would describe myself as a socialist,” he told the BBC last May. “I describe myself as a progressive. I’d describe myself as somebody who always puts the country first and party second.” That his words didn’t inspire the same kind of fervour as Mamdani’s election campaign have little to do with the fact that Starmer is objectively not as hot as Mamdani (OK, it is perhaps also that). It’s because they don’t quite ring true.

A year on, nobody is having a “hot socialist summer” or a “hot Keir summer”, are they? Instead young people in Britain can enjoy “hot welfare reform summer”, a successor to “Kafkaesque disability cuts mean you can never ever get ill in spring”. We can rejoice at the prospect of “hot Rachel Reeves reduces your Isa tax-free allowance to £5k summer”, which will undoubtedly soon be followed by “you’ll never ever own property autumn”. On top of all that, by the way, you still have to pay a £7 entry to visit Marx’s grave.

Is it any wonder that the girlies hunger for communism the same way they hungered for carbs, convents and Megan Thee Stallion? The heatwave has broken, the rain is back, the politics are tedious and nobody’s even allowed to enjoy festivals any more. We’ve never needed a good season more. Give us the hot commie summer we deserve.