Be careful what you wish for.

I’m not just referring to the enthusiastic Zohran Mamdani voters who believe that the failed rapper and nepo baby is the person best suited to run this city. Nor am I referring to the fashionistas at Vanity Fair who this week swooned over Mamdani’s apparently “Kennedy-like charisma.”

I am referring to some Republicans who are starting to see a silver lining in the socialist’s mayoral run.

Since Mamdami won the Democratic primary for mayor in July, it has been whispered in Republican circles that there may be a positive in Mamdani’s projected arrival in Gracie Mansion.

This week, that whispering became public conversation.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview: “I kind of like Mamdani winning, because the worst thing in a way would be when [Andrew] Cuomo comes back in, you just keep losing a little bit of altitude for four or eight more years, and they kind of hold it together, and more people leave. So if you could just say, ‘OK, he’s a shock to the system, and there’s a chance you can come back from it.’ ”

Conservative guru George Will has looked at things in a similar way. Speaking on Bill Maher recently, Will said of Mamdani, “I want him to win,” continuing, “Every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again.”

This week the commander-in-chief spun a similar line. Posting on Truth Social on Monday, President Trump said, “Self-proclaimed New York City Communist Zohran Mamdani, who is running for Mayor, will prove to be one of the best things to ever happen to our great Republican Party.”

To which I would again reply, “Be careful what you wish for.”

And I don’t just mean because some of us still have to live in this city, and don’t like the idea of being in a permanent political petri dish.

The president and others mentioned above have an uncanny ability to see around corners. Still, it is hard to see around several corners. Especially when it comes to the way in which young, socialist-leaning, poorly overeducated young voters might react to Mamdani’s undoubted failures were he to get in.

It is perfectly possible, practiced little demagogue that he is, that Mamdani will be able to portray any turning off of this city’s money spigot as being evil DC doing its thing. Or wicked Republicans punishing New Yorkers.

It is perfectly possible that when his free buses and free shops and free everything else don’t materialize, his voters will not blame him but “the system.”

Remember that one of the greatest evils of communism and socialism is that they can always pass on the blame for their own failings. That is why even now — after a blighted 20th century in which this evil ideology was tried out in country after country — the true believers still say, “But it hasn’t been tried yet.”

You will notice that there aren’t people going around saying, “Fascism is a perfectly good idea. It just hasn’t been tried properly yet.”

That is because — to understate matters a lot — fascism failed to produce the perfect societies that it promised. It led to catastrophe in country after country.

Yet the socialist and Communist myth is based on the idea that everywhere it has been tried, it didn’t have a good enough chance. Cuba — still the near-perfect society for the radical left — is not believed by its foreign supporters to have failings because of its system. Any failings that the left cannot explain they say are the fault of the American blockade or other foreign interference in Cuba. As though if it hadn’t been for the US, Cuba would be even more of a paradise than they believe it is.

And there is one other objection. Which is that I have seen this line of thinking before.

Last decade, the Labour party in the UK had a seismic shock when a rabid, socialist, anti-Israeli boor called Jeremy Corbyn ran for the leadership of the left-wing party. When he got through to the final round, a group called “Conservatives for Corbyn” boasted that they had joined the Labour party in order to vote for Corbyn as leader and thus consign the Labour party to the dustbin of history.

But Corbyn did win the Labour leadership election, and in a snap election in 2017, the radical, Britain-hating socialist came uncomfortably close to actually becoming prime minister. He came closer than any such person ever should have to real power.

Conservatives for Corbyn kept pretty quiet after that.

Besides which, the party did not learn the lesson that Bessent and others assumed American voters would learn. Having flirted with the worst of their side, the British left then did a quick change of makeup, elected somebody slightly less socialist who then — looking moderate in the eyes of the electorate — was promptly voted in as prime minister. Since Keir Starmer’s election, there has been a massive flight of capital and talent from the country.

So as I say, be careful. Because electorates don’t always come to the conclusions you think they will. And people who have learned nothing from history aren’t necessarily going to learn anything from the present, either.

I was pleased to see Secretary of War Pete Hegseth address a gathering of American military top brass this week. His speech caused fits of the vapors in all the usual places, with talk of an address to the troops being somehow ominous.

His speech was a call to return to the highest standards of dress, fitness and performance in the US military. That it proved controversial tells us something about Hegseth’s critics and nothing about him.

During the Biden years, there was a meme online, sticking Russian army recruitment videos (tough guys, discipline) alongside our own transgender admirals and a CIA recruitment ad featuring a woman boasting about being a “cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

I’ll take Hegseth’s vision for the military over that crap any day.