Politicians tend to be somewhat triumphalist in moments of triumph. So Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani could have been forgiven for a little exaltation as he spoke to his electrified supporters after winning the New York City mayoral election.
But his oration was more than that. He was downright sinister, glorying not just in his achievement but in having laid low his vanquished enemies and stuck it to others besides. He took off his smiling campaign mask and revealed his venomous self.
As even Democratic partisans, such as Van Jones, noted, the calm, embracing warmth of the Mamdani who courted votes with sweet words vanished. Here, instead, was anger and a chilling combination of lies and revealing truths.
Mamdani gloated, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” Actually, 60% of the city’s population is not immigrants, but he wanted to rub their faces in the takeover inflicted on them by an outsider. To them, his message was, “Suck it up, suckers, we’re in charge now.”
He pretended that his win would give power to hardscrabble workers in menial jobs, such as those with “fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns; these are not the hands that have been allowed to hold power … Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.”
But his “we” is a falsehood. Mamdani is not one of them. He’s a rich kid masquerading as a man of the people. It was not those at the bottom of the social scale who voted for him; it was college graduates. New Yorkers who never attended college, or who attended college and either didn’t graduate or emerged with only an associate degree, voted for former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent. It was because of the 58% of voters who have bachelor’s or advanced degrees that he won by a margin of 57% to 37%. Mamdani’s win was not broad-based, but a victory earned by stoking high-intensity enthusiasm and turnout by his own class.
The people who came out for him cling not just to their virtue, but also to their prestige and (often precariously) to their economic positions. Many are burdened with six-figure university debt, and they swoon for a new and magical economic system that promises free stuff such as universal childcare. Men under 30 years old went for Mamdani 64%-23%, and women in that age group, who are even more fancifully left-wing, voted for the hip socialist 81%-11%.
They think the democratic socialism Mamdani offers is akin to the cradle-to-grave care they imagine is administered by the gentle socialist governments of Western Europe — so cool, so virtuous, so pleasingly un-American. But the tenor of the socialism proffered by “Zohran the Magnificent” is the overweening, arrogant, and intrusive socialism that collapsed in Eastern Europe.
At his victory party, one of the happy celebrants was Hasan Piker, an online pundit who was asked by a jubilant reporter, “What do you think it means that this guy ran as a socialist, and anti-communism didn’t work to stop him? That’s big!”
Piker responded, “Yeah. We are in the heart of the imperial core. This is the country that defeated the USSR, unfortunately … There’s no class consciousness in the United States of America [but] Americans … are finally arriving at the conclusion that there is an alternative out there.”
The alternative promised by Mamdani, which he made clear is a future not confined to New York City but is being readied for all of America, is one in which “we will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
Wall-to-wall government is what Mamdani stands for, and it is a promise lapped up by the young, who have no memory or understanding of the squalor and failure of socialism. But wall-to-wall government, from which nothing big or small escapes, is not benign but arrogant. One might even say, borrowing terminology used by Mamdani himself, that it is despotic.
“If there is any way to terrify a despot,” Mamdani declared, geeing up his base while explicitly goading President Donald Trump, “it is dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”
FDNY COMMISSIONER ANNOUNCES RESIGNATION ONE DAY AFTER MAMDANI WINS ELECTION
He does not realize, or at least does not admit, that, as Christopher Scalia noted, there is a glaring contradiction between the expressed aim of dismantling the conditions that allow a despot to accumulate power, on the one hand, and on the other a government that thinks there’s no problem too big for it to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.
New York City’s new class of young, upwardly mobile, urban professionals — “yuppies,” remember them? — have just voted for the government to take care of them. Mamdani is going to give it to them good and hard.
