Donning a world champion New York Knicks jersey, Mamdani took the podium at a primary-night watch party in Brooklyn for Claire Valdez, who’d just routed Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn Borough president, in New York’s 7th Congressional District.

“A year ago, it was not the end of a political movement,” he said, referencing his own primary victory against a Democratic powerhouse. “It was the beginning.”

The crowd went mad. Mamdani’s foot soldiers across the five boroughs partied as if student loans had already been canceled and the minimum wage for baristas had tripled.

The Left hadn’t looked this alive since Barack Obama shouted “fired up!” and his audience responded “ready to go!”

Democratic congressional leaders emerged from Tuesday night visibly shaken — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who’d backed the losing candidates, spent Wednesday trying to explain away results that needed no explanation. He, and his party, had been rolled.

But the young socialists didn’t appear surprised by their strength. Not at all. They were swaggering, certain of themselves, fully in possession of something Democrats haven’t had in years: belief.

It all looked a lot like MAGA circa 2016. Historians will debate what sparked the MAGA movement for decades, and one element is certain to be underrated: the sheer fun of it. The party, the rallies, being in on the joke, the reveling in communal transgression.

The intoxication of belonging, of being a part of something wild and free.

“You’re next! You’re next!” chanted the watch party in Brooklyn as a picture of Jeffries appeared on the screen behind Mamdani.

A decade earlier, MAGA rallygoers shouted “Lock her up! Lock her up!” at a different Democratic Party leader, drunk on the feeling that old rules no longer applied.

Similarities between the movements don’t stop at the vibes. A decade ago, MAGA attracted its own downwardly mobile following: blue-collar workers, many in the Rust Belt, who had watched their factories close and their jobs shipped overseas where the labor was cheap. 

These working-class voters spurned the coastal elite and aligned themselves with a street-smart New Yorker who made a fortune off the system and promised to use his knowledge to negotiate a better deal for the little guy. It was a historic realignment.

The socialist uprising emerges from similar grievances, felt by a different kind of displaced worker: the overeducated and underemployed young urbanites whom Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone memorably dubbed the “barista proletariat.” They didn’t lose their jobs to China. They lost their futures to a system that told them an expensive degree was a ticket and then didn’t honor the fare.

They did everything right — the college, the internship, the graduate program — only to discover the degree was worthless, the rent had doubled, and the career they’d envisioned had failed to materialize.

Their factory never closed. It just never existed in the first place.

To make matters worse, the AI revolution swallowed up what avenues to prosperity remained, including the entry-level white-collar jobs college graduates relied upon for advancement for decades.

The result is a generation defined, if nothing else, by palpable resentment. Toward capitalism, toward Israel, toward the invisible systems of oppression that, they have been assured, conspire against them at every turn — even when, especially when, no conspirator can be named.

The socialist uprising is this generation’s answer to their resentment. Trained in hardcore Marxist ideology since the moment they stepped on campus, and sometimes years earlier, this is the political moment they’ve long been conditioned to meet. And they are meeting it with everything they’ve got.

Another similarity between MAGA and socialists is uncomfortable for the latter group: Both movements are overwhelmingly white. The watch party chanting “You’re next!” at Jeffries — the highest-ranking black Democrat in the country who is on the cusp of becoming the first black speaker of the House — was a sea of white faces. 

Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) in the primary last week, saw her largest margins in wealthy and highly educated majority-white precincts, while Espaillat carried low-income, low-education minority precincts.

It’s not a historical aberration for the revolutionaries to be rich. They, not the poor or the oppressed, have the time and energy to involve themselves in such movements, as well as the safety net of family wealth to fall back on after they inevitably fail, leaving the communities they purported to rescue worse off than before. The working class is simply too busy working and building better lives for themselves and their families.

What unites them most, finally, is the education — to use too grandiose a word — that enables them to transform their individual resentments into righteous, collective crusades. They’ve been taught to fiercely loathe the United States of America, which, in their telling, is not merely flawed but the root cause of universal oppression itself.

Behind the joy in their eyes on election night was the spark of hope that America, beyond saving, is finally being replaced. 

This is where the socialism phenomenon diverges from its MAGA precursor — and it’s no small difference. MAGA, for all its moral flaws, sought to restore something that was once great, while the socialist revolution seeks to bulldoze it and build something new from the rubble.

A 2019 Avila Chevalier post on Twitter captures their relationship with the country they seek to govern: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

WILL THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT STRIKE BACK?

Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment looks as helpless as the Jeb Bush Republican Party of 2016 to stop the baristas from storming the castle and setting their torches to the walls.

The spent Trump-era Democrats are on their own. No distant army is riding to save them.