The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral primary swiftly moved Democrats to denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, but not acceptance.

From old friend Philip Bump in the Washington Post:

Cuomo was a better candidate for the middle-ground, don’t-rock-the-boat national play… Democrats in Montana weren’t going to have to worry about potential red-state voters seeing negative Fox News segments about the liberal excesses of Mayor Andrew M. Cuomo. Elect a Muslim immigrant socialist with an unusual name? Fox would have a field day. If younger voters didn’t remember the era when the right accused Obama of all of those things, Democratic Party leaders sure did.

Only in America could a pundit look back on the example of Barack Obama and think, “We’d better not try that immigrant-with-a-funny-name thing again!”

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary is fascinating on many levels, including the one involving consternation he inspires among ostensible supporters of his party. The same people whose epic misreads of Donald Trump twice helped elect him have been taking turns working through Stages of Grief over an intramural challenge. For sheer humor value, worth noting, at least in brief.

The most common theme among the Democratic old guard is that Mamdani is too radical, one whose “esoteric positions” (as longtime strategist James Carville calls them) will rally voters in other states to oppose Democrats. Take New York Democratic House member Laura Gillen, who wrote Mamdani is “too extreme to lead New York city,” adding: “Mr. Mamdani has called to defund the police.” Freshman Democrat George Latimer told CNN, “It’s going to be tough for front-liners because they’re in districts that have a lot of Republicans in it that would look at a Democrat and want to hear the narrative, ‘Oh, this guy’s radical.’”

Centrist Democratic group Third Way fretted at Mamdani’s “proud affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America,” whose platform, they say, reveals “ideas so extreme… that they sound like they were cooked up in the offices of a Trump-aligned ad maker.” Topping Third Way’s list of concerns is “defund the police.”

I obviously have my own issues with Mamdami, exacerbated by overexposure to the upscale pseudo-intellectual progressive types who most ardently worship him. Still, Democrats decrying him for embracing “defund the police” or state-funded gender-affirmation treatment or “re-examining” ICE or any of a dozen other goofy things should hop in their DeLoreans and fly back in time nine months or so, when they backed a candidate for president who espoused all those things. There’s no need to beat up Kamala Harris anew, as fate has battered her enough already, but it’s comical watching Philip Bump and others wringing hands about “liberal excesses” when for years they wrapped arms all the way around far nuttier ideas than state grocery stores.

It’s comedy is of the Claude-Rains-Shocked, shocked variety. Through the Trump era national Democrats worked hard to shoot themselves in the face (or balls, in the case of Tim Walz) with “potential red-state voters.” The pattern is consistent. When a wedge issue seizes media attention, Democrats flock to whatever side Trump is not occupying and do the righteous-shriek from scripts prepared by the most glue-addled activists available. “It’s time to abolish ICE” appeared when Trump imposed a “zero-tolerance” border policy in 2018, while “Defund the police” was everywhere after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and so on. Time passes after each case, and the party is slow first to realize, then admit these positions cause political damage — after which it sends spokesgoons on media tours to renounce them. Here’s Biden campaign flack Cedric Richmond repudiating “defund”:

This dynamic has been a head-scratcher since 2015, when Hillary Clinton responded to a possible cure for Democrats’ moribund youth-support issues in the form of the Bernie Sanders campaign in odd fashion. Instead of doing what centrist politicians have always done and simply ripping off Bernie’s resonant ideas about income inequality and the “rigged” economy, Hillary attacked from the left, with a full-on Kimberle Crenshaw-inspired idpol media blitz. She tweeted charts about how she alone would tackle “intersectional challenges” to help “communities of color,” while acolytes like Gloria Steinem went on Real Time With Bill Maher to say young women only supported Sanders because “that’s where the boys are.”

After Clinton lost in 2016 she went to India and explained “we don’t do well with married white women,” because they submit to “ongoing pressure to vote the way your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.” Party figures keep apologizing for this stuff, but others keep doing it, as in Barack Obama’s lecture to “the brothers” last year or Michelle Obama telling Michigan women to “demand that the men in our lives do better” at the ballot or Joe Scarborough and Mamdani pal Al Sharpton explaining on MSNBC last Election Night that Trump won because of black misogyny and Hispanic racism.

I bring this up because although Mamdani’s free-ride economics likely will be damaging to the party nationally, especially if they flop, Democrats already screwed themselves a thousandfold harder by spending the Trump years on-boarding the much weirder and more disturbing social mantras of the academic left, which include those constant efforts to “center” race and gender that annoy just about everyone. Often (as in the case of Hillary’s mid-campaign broadsides against Sanders) these decisions have appeared more reactive than strategic, with Democratic pols rushing to embrace notions about everything from trans sports to destigmatizing shoplifting to wearing kente cloth scarves, almost always in the midst of a media mania. This has led the public to associate Democrats with everything from Indigenous Land Acknowlegements to Emotional Support Peacocks to Woke Snow White, and the party certainly suffered (and will continue to suffer) far more from those hegemonic social irritants than Mamdani’s proposals for subsidized eggs or free bus rides.

Commentators who didn’t decry Mamdani’s “extremism” deployed standard party lines of “it’s not happening” or “it’s happening but doesn’t matter.” Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post reminded readers New York politicians have dubious relevance because historically, “once they got west of the Hudson River, their presidential aspirations turned to dust.” Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen said he loved New York but it’s “a very liberal place” and besides, the primary was really just “an indictment of Cuomo.” Democratic “data expert” Lakshya Jain said she didn’t think Mamdani’s win was “about ideology” but “something that’s new and fresh,” while strategist Tim Lin summed up in part by saying “Mamdani ran a great campaign against a sex offender.”

My favorite reaction came from Carville, who increasingly resembles the love child of Elmer Fudd and Hunter S. Thompson (yes, I’m aware this might be my own future). He cautioned not to overreact as there’s “a lot of baseball left to play.” referencing a sport popular among young voters in the Clinton years. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers seemed to be thinking about dinner when he warned Mamdani’s election might be a victory for the politics of “shellfishness”:

Being serious for a moment, while mainstream Mamdani commentary has so far mostly offered shows of denial and self-delusion, some reality crept through. Look at the “party identification by age in the U.S.” graph in Bump’s piece, based on voter registration data through June. A full 39% of 30-year-olds are listed as independent/other now, but the number shoots to 44% for 19-year-olds and 49% for age 18 voters. It’s clear that traditional Democratic and Republican bureaucracies are staring at total irrelevance in the very near future. After its flouting by Trump, the old GOP was forced to go through all five stages of the DABDA grief paradigm, but this is new for Democrats. To the youngest voters, the party of Carville and Summers now has the appeal of a Lawrence Welk rerun, and the Trump caucus likely won’t do much better. Will we need two new parties soon?

https://www.racket.news/p/a-pause-to-chuckle-at-the-democrats