The major election year 2026 kicks off with a new mayor taking over NYC on January 1st.

From Sacramento to Minneapolis to New York, some candidates are peddling Karl Marx.

The most glaring example is Zohran Mamdani, who pledges innumerable freebies and has called for “seizing the means of production.”

What are we to make of this “pop Marxism” and its appeal?

It is “pop” in two senses of the word.

It is popular in that it is shallow while presenting as novel and exciting.

It is populist in a braying pretense of familiarity, its calls for costless gratification and its gratuitous attacks on the status quo.

Underneath the ‘pop’ lies a dangerous ideology.

Call it Marxism, socialism or communism – they aim for the same result.

Marx and his disciples foresaw an “inevitable” future, prophesying that democratic capitalism would give way to statist socialism, followed by full-blown communism.

In the first step, the unaccountable, indomitable administrative state takes control of all aspects of economic life.

All aspects include what type of work you will be allowed to do, where you shop and what you shop for, where you live, whether you receive an inheritance or it is ‘redistributed’ to the faithful, and a thousand other economic matters.

That is just phase one.

Communism, the second step, means totalitarian control over not just where you go and what you do, but what you think and believe.

Schools and universities, therefore, are the epicenters of indoctrination.

Many seem to have done their job.

In a survey earlier this year, 62% of young Americans have a positive view of “socialism,” the ideology that murdered 100 million people at the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Mao and others.

What is the appeal?

Young Americans are not poor, hungry, or oppressed, rather extremely well-off by historical and contemporary standards.

Gens Y and Z are, to put it plainly, privileged, and yet seduced by Marxism.

Two things conspire to delude them: revisionist education and inappropriate guilt.

The first problem is flimsy, ideologically-driven history education.

Each year, many high school classrooms barely make it to World War II.

Then, exhausted teachers skip over the Cold War, the crimes of communism, the heroic tales of resistance, and the vigilance of the Western democracies to end the school term with their preferred version of “current events,” such as the purported bravery of eco-terrorists.

At the same time, the curriculum young people receive from grade school on up has been ideologically reconstructed.

They were taught to view all of history through the neo-Marxist lens of oppressor vs. oppressed.

U.S. history and literature are framed around race, gender and wage slavery.

America is guilty of exploitation and domination.

Second, pop Marxism perpetuates a twisted sense of guilt.

They have been lectured that their blessings were not earned by their grandparents and parents, but, rather, stolen from the underprivileged.

The Greatest Generation became white men advancing America’s imperial agenda.

The same for Cold Warriors from Berlin to South Korea.

America’s wealth is ill-gotten, not the fruit of a free society that has encouraged innovation from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison to Carver, Einstein, Copland, Salk, Gates, Jobs and Musk.

Here is the great irony: these young people simultaneously hold anti-institutional views and a gross sense of entitlement.

They call for a revolution against corporations and slow-moving government institutions but demand a subsidized first-world lifestyle.

They want benefits without work and security without responsibility.

After all, doesn’t equality mean free health care, free college, free transportation and guaranteed incomes?

Then again, what have we taught them?

They learned from the COVID lockdowns that money rolls off the state’s printing press, citizens could be paid to lounge at home, and passing grades were “earned” just for showing up on Zoom.

Losing a majority of young Americans to pop Marxism is not just unacceptable, it is dangerous.

Pop Marxism’s leaders are rabidly political, and their young followers can get caught up in the destructive idealism of the moment.

In contrast, today’s silent majority of young adults is far less political, being concerned with earning an education, starting a family, and responsibly paying his or her way.

With 2026 being both an election year and the 250th anniversary of our nation’s birth, it is an appropriate time to be grateful for our blessings.

We must tell the truth about American history, recommit to our founding principles of ordered liberty, and confront the lies of communism.

The stakes could not be higher for America’s future.

When 62% of young people embrace an ideology that has consistently produced mass murder, poverty, and oppression throughout history, we face a crisis of education and values.

The seductive promises of socialism have always led to the same tragic outcomes.

Yet each generation seems destined to learn these lessons anew, often at tremendous human cost.

America’s youth deserve better than the false promises of Marxist ideology.

They deserve to understand the true history of freedom, prosperity, and human dignity that capitalism and democracy have delivered.

The time for action is now, before another generation falls victim to socialism’s deadly allure.