The Identity Thieves

Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—two of America’s most prominent socialist politicians—have committed identity theft. No, they did not pilfer a Social Security number or swipe the digits of someone else’s credit card. They have done something more subtle: stealing the image of the oppressed for personal and political gain.

It’s an old trick. Just as Elizabeth Warren claimed Native American heritage as she ascended the ranks of academia, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez adopted the identities of the poor and downtrodden as they ascended the ranks of politics. Both built their political personas on a small kernel of truth: Mamdani claimed on his college application to be black because he was born in Uganda, despite being the son of two famous, affluent, and educated Indians; Ocasio-Cortez claimed to be a “Bronx girl” because she lived in the borough until age five, when she moved to a tony corner of Westchester County. Both have structured their identities around grand narratives of oppressor and oppressed, which they hope to convert into power and prestige.

The truth is that both Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez belong to groups—Indians and Latinos, respectively—that do not fit neatly into America’s deepest historical binary, that between white and black, colonist and slave. Though both could doubtlessly point toward some personal slight or past injustice against their ethnic group, neither Mamdani nor Ocasio-Cortez can lay a real claim to historical oppression. Indian Americans are among the most educated and affluent groups in America, and the vast majority of Latinos arrived in the United States after desegregation and the Civil Rights Act. The very fact that millions of people uprooted themselves from India and Latin America to try their luck in this country indicates that they considered America a land of opportunity, rather than injustice.

For Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, however, the myth of post-Civil Rights Act discrimination must be maintained at all costs. Both use their privilege—Mamdani, graduate of Bowdoin and son of a professor; Ocasio-Cortez, graduate of Boston University and daughter of an architect—to advance their narrative of oppression.

They do it because it works. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez have translated the politics of resentment to win political campaigns in Queens and the Bronx, respectively. They motivate anxious, college-educated left-wing activists, who run the ground game for their campaigns and harvest the support of working-class and minority voters in the outer boroughs.

It has always been thus. Marx and Engels were sons of affluence; Lenin was a lawyer; Mao was a librarian at Peking University. Left-wing radicals abandoned the theory of spontaneous working-class revolution not long after they hatched it. The “vanguard of the proletariat” has been their dominant concept since the Russian Revolution. And identity theft—claiming to represent the poor, the downtrodden, the oppressed—has been their dominant tactic.

How should opponents respond? Pointing out the fraud might be effective. After all, Warren never fully recovered from the revelation that she misrepresented her ancestry in pursuit of power. But it will be harder with the new generation of identity thieves, such as Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez, who are skilled at political agitprop and can rely on their racial minority status to make some critics reluctant to go after them.

The better approach is to frame the argument around two concepts: America and manipulation. First, critics should point out that millions of people around the world want to come to America for its opportunities, equality under law, and genuinely tolerant culture; the Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez families have become successful precisely because of this country’s system, which should be celebrated rather than condemned.

Second, critics should portray such politicians as dishonest and self-serving, public figures who misrepresent their backgrounds in pursuit of personal status and manipulate voters to advance destructive ideologies. Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez’s policies will yield the opposite of what they promise, as socialist policies have done in the past.

Regrettably, the identity-theft strategy will remain with us for the foreseeable future. When I was an undergraduate at Georgetown University, I noticed that many of the most affluent and connected students had prepared an oppression narrative or sob story—not out of modesty but ambition. They sensed, correctly, that a story of racial, psychological, or familial trauma would grant them status and a competitive edge. I saw the sons of Middle Eastern sheiks and the daughters of American moguls rehearsing lines about supposed oppression that are now familiar in the national discourse.

The trouble is that fake identities can yield real consequences. Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are elites masquerading as the oppressed. If they are successful, they will create a system that rewards people like them and punishes those below.

Photos: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images (left) / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images (right)