Buckle Up, America, the Zohran Era is Here
Zohran Mamdani became New York City’s Mayor last night. At the victory party, his once-pal, podcaster Hasan Piker – who was also seen last night embracing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – said this in an interview:
“We are in the heart of the imperial core*. This is the country that defeated the U.S.S.R., unfortunately.”
Piker has said so many ostentatiously crazy things that even Mamdani had to denounce him, so he can be left aside. Look however at the beaming face of the young woman interviewing him. She has no clue what he just said. That’s why last night was a prime historical horror story.
Like Donald Trump’s first election, Mamdani’s win spoke to the deep failures of 21st-century American politics. By 2016, Republican voters had tired of throwing votes away on McCains and Romneys and Bushes who promised to reduce federal spending and protect “family values,” but were unmasked finally as mannequins for donors who mostly brought war and exported jobs. Mamdani’s win similarly signals the beginning of the end for the old Clintonian Democratic Party, whose original formula courted Wall Street and relentlessly sought a “business-friendly” neoliberal middle, while retaining a patina of progressivism through social issues like choice.
Both parties took their voters for granted to obscene degrees. If they and their donors had been just a little less greedy, shown a little more foresight in anticipating how difficult the transition to a global economy would be for working-class people, they’d still be in business. As it is, “never Trump” Republicans are dead as doornails and the party Hakeem Jeffries thinks he still captains has officially struck its historical iceberg. “Democratic Socialism,” the actual left, is the only political movement on that side with any energy, and looks set to take over. What does that mean? Nothing good:
If this happened eight or even four years ago, when the Bernie Sanders campaign spoke in the language of FDR and the New Deal, this might have been a more optimistic moment. Unfortunately, just as the Democratic and Republican Party bureaucracies atrophied and grew dim-witted from overconfidence over the years, the new book-averse, Tik-Tok raised population has lost touch with history. The version of the left that’s finally ascendant in American politics is the real thing, the hearts of its followers a-flutter for the rhetoric of Che and Lenin and Marx (Mamdani gave a shout-out to Nehru last night), animated by a vision of their own country as a superpower villain of imperialist oppression.
The major difference between Mamdani-style socialism and the leftism that swept over much of the globe in the last century is that this version is even dumber. It remade itself according to an ideology based less on class than a new intersectional theory of oppression that’s ridiculous, fantastical, grossly racist, and allows the old bourgeoisie to play leading roles. It’s hard not to admire the innovation, which solves the problem Marxists have always complained about when it comes to the United States: a consumer economy that makes life just tolerable enough to discourage the masses from revolting. Now that rich people can be revolutionaries (by claiming gender confusion or waving some other intersectional flag), there’s no longer a need to wait for deplorable support for left revolution. Anyone can be oppressed, and they’re all welcome to join the cause. It’s brilliant!
What’s particularly ironic about last night is that the old, Clintonian version of the Democratic Party would probably be sitting in the White House right now if it hadn’t submitted to so many of the (deeply unpopular) tenets of this new ideology. The most humorous example involved last night’s loser, Andrew Cuomo, who gave Donald Trump years of ammunition when in an attempt to clown the MAGA slogan he said America was “never that great.” Trump probably wouldn’t have won many of the crucial swing states last year had it not been for the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ad. Similarly, Trump’s relentless attacks on DEI – a radical re-think of civil rights ideas that substituted the organic quality of equality for the bureaucratic concept of “equity” – were highly successful, and for good reason. Even the preposterous attempts to explain Trump’s success as a reaction to “whiteness under threat,” uttered by people who didn’t see anything odd about the proliferation of “whiteness studies” classes at universities, put wind in Trump’s sails.
The 1990s version of the Democratic Party would have wasted no time in triangulating against such moronic intellectual excesses within its own voter base. In the 2010s and 2020s, however, it couldn’t afford to do that, for the obvious and sensible reason that they under-performed to a degree that made an intramural challenge like the 2016 Sanders run inevitable. Without Barack Obama’s decision to double down on George W. Bush’s 2008 bailout policies to save Wall Street, while selling out to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in his much-ballyhooed grotesquerie of an attempt to fix this country’s health care system, the Democrats would never have lost control. They held off the first Sanders campaign in 2016, then squeaked though by a hair the second time in 2020 (employing some questionable back-room politics), but the stillborn Biden presidency was the last straw, making the beating they took last night a foregone conclusion.
I thought long and hard about what to say when Mamdani won and concluded history is now so far in the rearview mirror, there’s nothing to say, not to this crop of new believers. Years ago I read a book called Socialism… Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation that appeared to be genuinely clueless about how past socialist revolutions unfolded. At anti-Trump protests I ran into people waving hammer-and-sickle flags and found in talking to them, they had no idea what they were celebrating. Western tourists visit places like Auschwitz en masse, but nobody goes to Solovki or Vorkuta. Like Piker, they think the Soviet Union is just misunderstood.
To people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, Mamdani is an immediately recognizable type, a disciple of the Leninist school of agitation that teaches effortless insincerity as a necessary means to reaching power. They would know that time and again, peasants and workers supported some general aims preached by visiting city revolutionaries but were extremely reluctant – like the mare Mollie with her ribbons in Animal Farm – to give up their hard-fought little farmhouses and slices of land, or Sunday mass, or a host of other worldly things. That reluctance is what led to the vision of Mamdani-like intellectuals like Grigory Zinoviev, who explained an educated vanguard was needed, because “the working class does not understand completely today, but will understand tomorrow.” As we all know, nothing bad ever comes from an upper-class vanguard placing itself in charge of things.
Mamdani’s victory speech was almost Trumpian in its trolling aims. It’s impossible to believe he didn’t slip the word small into his headline quote – “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about” – as a way of freaking out people who were raised in societies where there was no such thing as a private conversation, let alone private property. His apparently total disdain for American history seems to be a selling point for his fans, which again speaks to the failure of the recent generation of American politicians. It also points to the corruption of universities, which apparently haven’t taught a few generations of students that most societies are too hungry and stressed to even think about “gender-affirming care,” much less spend $65 million on it.
At minimum, the future just got a whole lot more interesting. Has Francis Fukuyama been reached for comment yet? Are we officially at The End of The End of History?