A far-left socialist who has supported defunding the police and replacing them with social workers, abolishing prisons, abolishing private health insurance, banning guns, decriminalizing pretty much every drug, and creating government-run grocery stores won the Democratic Party mayoral primary in New York City on Tuesday.
The race is about more than New York. It’s a harbinger of what’s to come for Democratic Party politics.
Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who made a name for himself by screaming like a raving lunatic at Trump administration border czar Tom Homan, pulled off a “surprise” victory over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani was endorsed by self-described socialists such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Here’s the video of Mamdani screaming at Homan, by the way. Great temperament for an executive, right?
Mamdani, who is 33 years old and only recently became a citizen of the United States, has embraced basically every failed far-left policy of the last century.
Even just calling Mamdani a “socialist” isn’t quite correct. He’s basically Lenin, if Lenin was a 21st century Bowdoin College theater kid LARPing as a revolutionary, taking it to the “man.”
Mamdani came from a well-to-do background. His mother is a famous Bollywood producer. His father is a Columbia University professor who specializes in “postcolonialism.”
Some have pointed to Mamdani’s lack of roots in America as an example of how immigrants are driving left-wing politics, but that’s only part of the story. Mamdani doesn’t quite represent foreigners. He represents a particular kind of left-wing, post-national globalist mindset that infects foreigners and native born alike.
Mamdani’s most fervent supporters tended to be transient white progressives.
One thing was certainly settled by his election.
The Cuomo dynasty is truly dead in New York. It was already very much on life support after the former governor badly mishandled his COVID-19 policies then got run out of town after sexual assault allegations that seemed like an excuse to get him out of the picture.
Though Cuomo was wildly and unduly praised by the New York and national media for his initial response to the pandemic, it’s now clear that his decision to release thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients into retirement homes led to countless deaths.
He was like the mirror image of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was praised by the media for “trusting the science,” while DeSantis got trashed as a murderer for being more prudent about lockdowns. The truth was nearly the reverse. What a surprise.
Cuomo ran a lackluster, seemingly exhausted campaign. And this accurately reflects the state of the Democratic Party establishment. They went all in on institutions, on the “bipartisan” consensus of the last few decades. That old order truly collapsed with the fall of President Joe Biden and election of President Donald Trump in 2024.
Trump and Republicans have almost fully captured the Democrat working class base.
Now the Democratic Party is lifeless.
Democrat elites hold onto institutions that despite being powerful have lost all credibility. The only thing they have right now is knee-jerk anti-Trumpism and the hopes that establishment-left influencers like Ezra Klein can peddle stories about their party being about “abundance.” They think this will get voters to trust them with power again. In the near term, that seems unlikely.
The party has been relegated to maximizing the votes of the wealthiest zip codes and those with postgraduate degrees. That’s hardly a winning electoral combination.
Not only is the Democratic Party message failing to resonate with the vast majority of Americans, but the base of the party also simply refuses to play along. They don’t want triangulation or moderation. They want confrontation, they want stridence, they want purity.
The New York Times, the guardian of respectable liberal opinion, ran a nearly 2,000-word essay on the mayor’s race that suggested Mamdani’s agenda relied on policies that “proved damaging to city life.”
How did Democrat voters respond?
They went with that old meme of Spider-Man talking to a super villain and asking why he doesn’t use his powers to cure cancer.
“But I don’t want to cure cancer,” says the villain who has turned into a dinosaur. “I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”
The sinews of the modern Left, the activists, the anti-Western woke radicals, don’t care to return to “normalcy.” They don’t want to appeal to working class voters who have largely exited the coalition. They want to double down on DEI and sanctimony. Voting for Mamdani is for them a catharsis. They can recapture the feeling of history being on their side, of being the party of the young and fresh rather than the old and stale.
In that sense, Mamdani fits the moment. Sure, his governing ideas have been thoroughly discredited in the last five years. Heck, the last 100. But he talks well. He isn’t afraid to appear on hostile media, and he can hardly be accused of not being a pure enough leftist.
So Mamdani’s election shouldn’t be a surprise. It was predictable. Blue city bastions are going to zig as the country zags.
Do the people of New York City want to throw that away for sanctimony?
Maybe.
Plenty of people don’t want crime and dysfucntion. Working class voters can’t just pick up and leave the rubble when leftist policies fail. But Mamdani’s movement isn’t really about the working class. It’s about reviving the spirits of the globalist, left-wing managerial and activist class that feels impotent on the heels of Trump’s victory.
New York may be too big to fail, but it may fail a lot of people if it repeats this mistake. Real socialism may be tried once again.
