No doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that many powerful figures in the Democratic Party are more alarmed by Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary than by Donald Trump’s systematic shredding of the Constitution, his paramilitary force of masked deportation goons, or the Supreme Court’s piecemeal construction of a coup-d’état. But it’s a whole lot less of an exaggeration than it should be.
To be fair, prominent Cuomo-centric Democrats like Bill Clinton and James Carville and Rep. Jim Clyburn and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — the last of whom appeared on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” two days after Mamdani’s victory and strongly implied that he was a supporter of Hamas terrorism and “global jihad” — are not literally calling for him to be “denaturalized” as a U.S. citizen and deported to some foreign gulag, as a few right-wing Republicans have done. (Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of South Asian ancestry, and has lived in New York since he was 7.)
Such Democrats, along with the longer list of those who have, so far, tiptoed around the question of whether to endorse their own party’s nominee in the nation’s most visible mayoral election — we’re looking at you, fellow New Yorkers Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries — might steeple their fingers together in that special politician-on-TV way and tell you that of course they are concerned about many things at once, and reject “extremism” of all kinds. They might suggest, as some already have, that for America’s largest city to elect a 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist who wants to tax the rich, make bus rides free and fund wider social services is a gift-wrapped package of millennial wokeness that will only fuel MAGA paranoia and further tarnish the Democratic brand. If they claim, as Jeffries did this weekend, that Mamdani has used the phrase “globalize the intifada” and therefore needs to apologize for it, they are either mistaken or lying.
That anxiety was visible in an unsigned profile published Friday in The Economist — in effect, the house organ of global capitalism — and headlined “Zohran Mamdani, Trump’s ‘worst nightmare,’ may really be a gift to him.” But the first and most important thing to notice about that article is not what it says, but that it exists. I feel confident that The Economist did not publish a feature article about current Mayor Eric Adams when he won the 2021 Democratic primary. If Adams’ name has appeared in the publication since then, it was almost certainly because of his federal indictment on corruption charges and his birds-of-a-feather alliance with Trump. (Adams is admittedly a fascinating character; read this marvelous Salon profile by Bob Hennessy, who has known him for many years.)
Mamdani, in other news, has become world news virtually overnight. While his win is highly specific to New York in some ways, it also represents a symbolic challenge to the perceived global centrist renaissance, or what could be called the “neo-neoliberal consensus.” I don’t mean that as scare-quote name-calling: Trump’s return to power this year, as I’ve previously discussed, seemed to inject new life into struggling center-left and center-right parties in various liberal democracies. In Germany, Canada and Australia, for instance, along with a number of smaller countries, mainstream parties have staged comeback victories and fended off the insurgent far right, at least for now.
While Zohran Mamdani’s big win is highly specific to New York in some ways, it also represents a symbolic challenge to the perceived global centrist renaissance, or what could be called the “neo-neoliberal consensus.”
That modest string of successes ran out in Poland recently, and the British Labour Party looks to be in a deadly downward spiral just a year after its big election victory. But in a general sense, the pattern seemed clear, not to mention immensely reassuring to the practitioners of politics as usual. Mainstream parties could patch together winning coalitions with banker-friendly fiscal policies and modest doses of right-wing culture war — promising to get tough with immigrants, indulge anti-trans hysteria and crack down on rhetorical wokeness — without entirely going over to the Dark Side.
That sort of triangulation has, to varying degrees, been the Democratic Party’s standard modus operandi for more than 30 years. Even amid the carnage and destruction of Trump’s second term, that remains the Democrats’ closest approximation to a guiding principle: Kamala Harris lost by veering too far left, in some entirely unexplained fashion. (Maybe it was promising free puppies to violent criminals. Maybe it was being a Black woman. Who can say?) To defeat Trumpism, they needed to be tougher, meaner and indeed Trumpier — while also “playing dead,” in Carville’s immortal phrase, and waiting for MAGA fever to burn itself out.
Andrew Cuomo represented that tendency boiled down to its ugliest essence and then freeze-dried: Wake up and smell the bad Queens diner coffee, libtards! We need our own leather-faced, oddly-hued, manipulative sex-pest bastard to fight theirs, and so on. Internet memes suggesting that Cuomo could only make campaign appearances after dark hit awfully close to the mark. Mainstream Democrats could hardly have picked a less appealing or more obviously flawed standard-bearer, and as New York magazine’s Sarah Jones suggests in a marvelous piece of fulmination, that speaks to the “moral and intellectual rot of the Democratic Establishment.”
I’m not convinced, however, that the Mamdani moment amounts to a death blow for centrism, whatever we take that term to mean. (I’m not sure Jones is making that argument either, despite her headline.) Given the specific qualities of the New York race and his uniquely ghastly opponent, it’s not clear how much Mamdani’s startling victory was driven by ideology and how much by his old-fashioned retail politics and his relentlessly upbeat and disciplined messaging. Some of both, I would say.
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Despite its note of alarmism, the Economist article mentioned above asks that question in entirely reasonable terms. Indeed, it’s more judicious in tone, and far more fair-minded, than most of the Zohran freakout among centrist Democrats and mainstream U.S. media pundits, let alone the virulent racism and Islamophobia of Republicans.
Mamdani’s personal immigrant history, as the article observes, was clearly an advantage in a city where about 40 percent of residents are foreign-born. Contrary to what Stephen Miller and his xenophobic online shock troops may claim, that’s a pretty typical proportion for New York in historical terms, not a recent shift or, ahem, a great replacement. What the MAGA trolls actually mean — and occasionally say out loud — is of course that a century ago the foreign-born population of New York was largely “white,” meaning Jewish, Italian and Irish, and today it’s mostly darker-skinned people from the “s**thole countries” of Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We don’t have space to explore the multiple levels of irony, stupidity and viciousness at work here, or to mention that Miller and Trump, like a large proportion of white Americans (like me, for example), are themselves no more than two generations removed from immigrants.
Mamdani is left-wing “but likeably so,” the Economist article reports, and steered away from his potentially controversial past statements about Israel-Palestine to run a media-savvy, positive campaign focused on affordability issues in one of the world’s most expensive cities. That’s entirely fair, and indeed the central Mamdani paradox, at least in terms of domestic politics, is accurately framed:
He’s the sort of refreshing politician that Democrats have been looking for as an answer to the Visigothic vim of the MAGA movement. But Republicans may be as delighted by his victory as progressives are.
High-five on “Visigothic vim”! I wish I’d come up with that. But as I’ve suggested, the Mamdani moment’s larger significance will be found in its long-term global repercussions, not in this year’s or next year’s electoral calculus. It’s too soon for elaborate game theory about whether Zohran-mania is good or bad for the Democrats — first of all, we’d have to decide what that question means.
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For that matter, it’s too soon to know whether Mamdani will actually be elected mayor. The Republican Party in New York City is tiny, weird and utterly dysfunctional, and in more normal circumstances the fall election would be a formality. Not this time: The fabulously corrupt Mayor Adams is running for re-election as an independent, and hopes to build an impromptu anti-Zohran coalition funded by hedge-fund bros, real estate tycoons and a similar handful of the worst and wealthiest people in the world. We can expect to see countless millions poured into a scorched-earth negative campaign depicting Mamdani as an antisemite, a Muslim extremist and/or a Marxist revolutionary.
It’s too soon for elaborate game theory about whether Zohran-mania is good or bad for the Democrats — first of all, we’d have to decide what that question means.
Could that work? Sure it could; progressives with long memories can tell the scary campfire stories: How the empire struck back at socialist India Walton in the 2021 Buffalo mayoral election, or at Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut U.S. Senate race. Or, for that matter, how Bernie Sanders’ momentum was short-circuited after the 2020 Nevada caucuses, and how Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who had themselves primaried “moderate” incumbents, were in turn demonized and defeated by lobbyist-funded opponents.
I suspect this one will be different, in large part because Mamdani knows what’s coming and because the whole world is watching. Furthermore, I suspect that City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has gone from Mamdani’s primary opponent to his highly enjoyable tough-guy wingman, is correct in saying that the key distinction here is not “between progressives and moderates” but “between fighters and folders.” The Mamdani model is not about ideological purity; it’s about speaking to real people’s concerns, standing on core principles and refusing to concede ground to despicable enemies based on political witchcraft.
Let’s not insult Mamdani and his supporters with the truism that he has already won, because he hasn’t. But he has already electrified a generation, and challenged the core principles of the neo-neoliberal project, by suggesting that you can fight fascists without getting on your hands and knees, crawling onto their back porch and drinking just a little dirty water from their doggie-bowl.
