LA, don’t go Mamdani on us

The sudden entry of City Council member Nithya Raman into the mayor’s race is a warning sign that LA is lurching dangerously to the left.

Four of the council’s fifteen members are also members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — just like Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City.

The DSA has long set its sights on taking a majority of the council. And now it hopes to capture the mayor’s office.

Nithya Raman, Los Angeles City Councilmember, speaking at a press conference. MediaNews Group via Getty Images

Another DSA candidate, Rae Huang, is already in the mayor’s race.

They could split the vote. More likely, the DSA will rally around Raman, the first DSA member successfully elected to the council. 

And there is a real chance that Raman could win, given that moderate Democrats like Rick Caruso and Austin Beutner won’t be running.

Bass, ironically, represents the Democratic Party establishment — despite representing the far-left of her party for much of her career in Congress.

It is a party establishment that has failed to deliver basic services to residents, and that has failed to inspire its own rank-and-file.

DSA candidates have been advancing within the Democratic Party, picking up where socialist Senator Bernie Sanders left off in his two energetic, if unsuccessful, presidential campaigns. 

Voters should understand what the DSA stands for, in its own words.

The DSA-Los Angeles website argues for defunding the police and abolishing prisons — in other words, letting criminals run wild in the city.

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DSA-Los Angeles also supports “international solidarity,” which means backing Hamas against Israel. 

It opposes the Olympics, saying the event would “place our already vulnerable communities at higher risk of death, displacement, deportation, and detention.”

DSA-Los Angeles also supports “Medicare for All,” a policy so expensive that California had to abandon it after Gavin Newsom tried expanding Medi-Cal to the “undocumented.”

And the group also backs the “Green New Deal,” a push for solar and wind power, which simply do not exist at the scale needed to keep the lights on in LA.

New Yorkers, under the DSA’s Mamdani, are finding out what the “warmth of collectivism” means, as 17 homeless people die in wintry temperatures, thanks to the mayor’s new policy of tolerating encampments.

Mamdani hasn’t bothered to shovel the snow or to pick up the trash, either. As Michael Goodwin observed at The New York Post: “The socialist way of picking up the garbage and cleaning the streets is not to pick up the garbage or clean the streets.”

It could happen here, too — in our own California way.

Raman voted against a ban on homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools. She also voted against raises for new police officers, and blamed Toyota — not thieves — for the fact that catalytic converters are stolen so often from the company’s cars.

Raman could yet surprise us by recanting some left-wing views. She recently proposed overhauling the city’s failed “mansion tax,” Measure ULA, for example — drawing criticism from “progressives.”

But voters, be warned: socialism won’t solve LA’s problems. It is already the cause of so many of them. And it will make them much worse.