Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Zohran

Politics

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Zohran

If the American economy undergoes a serious downturn, the harder-edged elements of Mamdani’s platform could find real support.

My sense of Zohran Mamdani came through two windows: First, his positions, which are a combination of softcore socialist (more free stuff from city government) and harder-edged Third Worldist positions like his anti-Zionism, which he never tried to downplay or temper. And, second, his campaign demeanor as seen through his various social media videos, which seemed light-hearted and whimsical, products of a charismatic young man able to enjoy life. Sohrab Ahmari focuses on this in his depiction of Zohran as part of the “gentry left”—something middle-class New Yorkers are very familiar with.  With his upper-class, private-school background, Zohran has came across as so personally unthreatening, so similar to guys one has met at a hundred parties, that it not only blunted the charges (from Trump and some edges of the Cuomo campaign) that he was a communist and radical jihadist but made those charges seem somewhat ridiculous. 

Zohran’s victory speech, hard-edged in its rhetoric and nasty towards Trump, Cuomo, and the “despots” who keep good working class New Yorkers down, tilted one’s sense of him away from the cheerful figure of the campaign social media videos. He did not give a “let’s see what we can accomplish together as New Yorkers” speech, nor a “even if you disagree with me speech my door will always be open to you and I want to hear your views” speech. It was more a “we won and we are going to crush you” speech. 

I do think Mamdani’s win—not by the crushing margin many people anticipated in August, but nonetheless a substantial victory, with slightly over 50 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race—is a historical marker far more significant than the moderate boss-lady victories of the newly elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey. (Fittingly, they were once roommates and actually hail from each other’s state.) Those were widely anticipated last year; the ascension of a Muslim DSA candidate to the New York mayoralty—certainly one of the half dozen most important elected offices in the United States—was an event no one foresaw a year ago. 

There are a lot of people with not insignificant influence vested in the idea that Mamdani must fail and be seen to fail. My surmise is that the more-free-stuff wing of Mamdanism will falter inevitably: He will be unable to secure the funds for the more elaborate of his programs, like free childcare, and some, like government grocery stores, will soon seem silly and unfair competition for a lot of mom-and-pop grocery stores. Free buses will turn into mobile homeless shelters before being scaled back. A rent freeze will work for a while, until people who need help with heat or plumbing notice that it isn’t forthcoming. 

But a big part of the objection to Mamdani comes from his anti-Zionism: He and the political movement which sponsors him want not to force Israel to make peace, or tone down its militarism—that is to say, positions shared by Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush—but quite literally to destroy it, at least as a Jewish state. A not inconsiderable number of people will not compromise with that point of view at all, and will do everything they can to ensure Mamdani’s failure as a politician.

There is a window for Mamdani and the DSA movement that supports him to prevail nonetheless. The financial news is now full of speculation about an AI stock-price bubble, whose breaking could at the very least precipitate a large stock-market drop. The Mamdani campaign seems to have benefitted from a lot of educated young people desperate for community and meaning; what it hasn’t really had yet is a vibe of angry young people—mobs in other words. A great part of the campaign’s success came from the seeming good humor that surrounded it. But if the economy goes south, there will be a lot of anger, and both Mamdani and the DSA seem a plausible place for it to flow. 

The affordability issues Mamdani campaigned on are real, and quite vividly experienced by the youngest voting generation. Mamdani and the DSA do not have good answers for it—that socialists do not is more or less an axiom. But if the perceived alternative is a Trump administration generating headlines about nepotistic crypto deals yielding tens of millions of dollars to family and friends, the political winner isn’t obvious. Or maybe it is.

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