Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary opens a new era in American crazy.

Et voila! New York City’s mayoral race has been won by Zohran Mamdani, no Bernie Sanders-style imitator but the real thing — son of a famed socialist scholar and Marvel superhero to every Jacobin-reading, keffiyeh-wearing student activist huddled in Judean People’s Front-type confabs, between bell hooks readings and visits to Mom and Dad on the Upper West Side. In this country, it’s the most significant movement victory in a century, almost certainly presaging in the near future an epic clash at the summit of American politics between socialism and, well, anything else. As Michael Buffer would say, “Let’s get ready to rum-m-m-ble!”

In a comet-like ascent Mamdani has become a bête noire for conservatives, many Jewish New Yorkers, and moderates thanks to a list of controversial statements, including a quasi-defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada” (in fairness, after a gotcha question), not signing a State Assembly resolution recognizing the Holocaust, and leading efforts to boycott Israel and slow Israeli charities. If it’s your thing, feel free to flip out over those, but the true red flag is Mamdani’s economic platform.

It’s a yummy pu-pu platter of rent freezes, free bus rides, free child care, and subsidized city-owned grocery stores that will “buy and sell at wholesale prices” and “centralize warehousing and distribution,” clamping down on those evil bodega owners and private supermarkets that force overpriced Fritos and soda on the poor. This will be the AOC theory of inflation caused by “price gouging” deployed in life, via a program to reverse ongoing harms of colonialism by liberating humans and non-human food animals from industry-driven food myths that compel us to harm our bodies, and — have you stabbed yourself in the face yet? ¡Viva la revolución!

Colleges used to subtly pull students back from this ledge before graduation so as not to freak out actual tuition-payers, but now the parents are socialists, leading here. Anyone tempted to laugh shouldn’t. This is the flip side of Trumpism, inevitable for similar reasons, and absent full catastrophe in coming Mamdani-ruled Gotham (not impossible), the electoral mainstreaming of dingbat campus socialism has only begun.

Many will argue we saw movement in Mamdani’s direction with the rise of chief backer Bernie Sanders. Bernie nearly captured the Democratic nomination in 2020 despite self-identifying as a “democratic socialist,” unimaginable as recently as the Obama years. While Sanders infamously went on a “very strange honeymoon” in the Soviet Union and authored books with titles like Our Revolution and It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, his politics by the time he reached Washington were closer to Eisenhower than Marx, as he pushed ideas like an increased minimum wage, single-payer health care, and drug reimportation to fit the framework of traditional free-market America. Sanders grew up dirt poor in Brooklyn and never lost affection for the party of the New Deal, perhaps to a fault; loyalty to the DNC and figures like pal Joe Biden were a big reason he never reached the White House.

Mamdani is different. Born in Uganda to a postcolonial theorist and a future Hollywood director, he’s a fancy prep school kid like me (Bank Street in Manhattan) and a recent immigrant — in itself not bad, but the crises of America’s past aren’t in his political muscle memory. You’ll get a better sense of his beliefs reading father and Columbia prof Mahmood Mamdani’s impenetrable Citizen and Subject than you will watching docs about Mario Savio or Woodstock.

Also unlike Sanders, he’s as polished as they come in the conventional-political-skill department, able to adjust his style for any situation and never losing his cool before crowds or a camera. Ironically in this he’s not unlike Barack Obama, a politician about whom he once tweeted, “Hasn’t Obama shown that the lesser evil is still pretty damn evil?” (I wonder how Mamdani feels about Letitia James breathlessly comparing him to the Evil One.) Then there’s the rap. Donald Trump needed South African artist The Kiffness to immortalize “They’re Eating the Cats,” but Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a no-shit “Queens MC” who performs by the name Cardamom.

Depending on your point of view, now is the exact worst time for someone with these skills to appear in politics. Trump had different media strengths, but his path was cleared when the GOP put up a clown car of yammering zeroes as his opposition, dolts like Jeb Bush who couldn’t find their asses with a map generally, and walked face-first into every trap set by Trump. Mamdani similarly is up against a Democratic Party that’s achieved a rare total bankruptcy of appeal, unable to rise in polls above Trump despite supposedly historic opportunity. In fact, forget stopping Trump: the best idea traditional Dems could muster to suppress the Zohran challenge was disgraced gorgon Andrew Cuomo, a figure so loathed even a clearly desperate New York Times couldn’t bring itself to endorse him. Instead, the paper ran a verbose editorial decrying Mamdani as “uniquely unsuited,” the kind of old-head media condemnation that surely played in the Manhattan socialist’s favor as their disdain did for Trump.

Trump rose because the traditional Republican Party strangled itself by enmeshing the country in lengthy foreign wars, sent the economy to mass collapse in 2008, and landed in the post-Bush years without any ideas that went beyond waving the flag and issuing vague bromides about “opportunity.” As they floundered, Trump oozed confidence and claimed to have answers. Mamdani does too, at a time when the heads of the traditional Democratic party look either ancient or dead and have no ideas beyond bleating about democracy and denouncing critics as Russian traitors. A confident salesman will win in this moment. The difference between Trump and Mamdani, of course, lay in their respective “answers.”

This is the portion of the program where the progressive-minded reader protests. Hey, he or she says, what’s wrong with free child care and free buses and rent freezes and lower grocery prices and a kindler, gentler “Department of Community Safety” instead of the NYPD? What’s wrong with building public housing and cracking down on evil landlords? Whose side are you on, anyway? It sounds like a good question, if you haven’t visited the source of this particular Nile.

Twenty years ago this all seemed impossible. At the time I was one of those East Coast liberals who howled with laughter at Michael Savage’s rants about the creeping danger of New York and its “red diaper doper babies.” Much of conservative media then couldn’t tell the difference between a communist and a Woody Allen fan, so modifiers like “red” and “Marxist” lost all meaning. Also, if you listened closely, you realized even Savage knew his infamous RDDBs weren’t real revolutionaries.

There were few true Marxists in America then even among college grads, since we’d been through The Discussion. 17-year-old males of my generation reached college trained to see the main logistical challenges of life as scoring beer, scoring weed, and chasing girls. If you went to a certain type of school (Mamdani’s Bowdoin definitely qualifies), there was pretty much always beer and weed somewhere in your dorm, and often girls too. The only admission price was The Discussion. I went to Bard, where a handful of dudes I envied deeply wore Daniel Ortega jackets and Che-style facial hair and talked about Systems of Oppression until women threw themselves at them. It was a great rap. Human problems would disappear if society would just meet citizen needs, not force people to fight for resources, and eliminate sociopathic mechanisms like the corporation that profit from war, disease, and addiction. You can make it sound awesome even now!

If the concept only has to hold up long enough to get a college student laid, socialism works. You only land in the big lol once you take the step New York just has, into reality. The part no one mentions at campus parties is that the replacement for markets in socialism is not just human authority, but dumb authority. Yes, prices can be oppressive, but try swapping out organic pricing for committees of sociology majors and AOC types deciding how much they think shoes or ice cream or a house should cost. Assuming Mamdani wins, this is going to be a hilarious surprise to voters eager for city-run stores and the fantastic services we’ve been told, apparently falsely, need to cost something. Why, just look at the Staten Island ferry:

Billy Mays graphics notwithstanding, Mamdani doesn’t inform us that the MTA is running an annual $3 billion deficit, which won’t improve once Mr. Mayor cuts into the 25% of revenues the Authority earns from fares and tolls. Ferry rides are free, somewhat randomly and for political reasons, but the service is obviously not devoid of cost. He just proposes to make up for lost revenue elsewhere (well, lots of elsewheres). Same with food, where Mamdani wants to “redirect funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores” to provide the healthy, appropriately-priced food ripped from poor neighborhoods forced to eat McDonald’s. These stores will also be exempted from rent, taxes, and some utility costs, which will provide New Yorkers the dual benefit of removing a significant source of city income while placing downward price pressure on the corporate markets that, remember, are paying the freight for these new competitors.

This hilarious concept is premised on the notion that private food chains are “gouging” customers, a crime that will be punished by just enough extra tax and price pressure to remove the excess-profit incentive, but not so much that Gristedes and Whole Foods pull up stakes and stop subsidizing Chez Mamdani. So, it has to be just the right amount of pain. Hurts So Good — sing it, New York! Of course I lived in a world of state-run grocery stores, experiencing the joys of shopping at “Meat №6,” where food Soviet committees decided was good for me tasted suspiciously like dogshit, but miraculously the same dogshit everywhere, across 11 time zones! Shortages were constant, no matter how many Agriculture and Transportation Ministers were disappeared, and this despite abundant labor and all the arable land anyone could want. This system doesn’t work and has always made a significantly more massive mess of things than capitalism, but the Mamdanis of the world won’t be talked out of it until they get to blow $78 million on a borough co-op that sells alley tomatoes and halal Oreos before going under.

When I started to read some of the elder Mamdani’s books, I was amused by an old passage about the Marxist-Leninist government of Mozambique, which overcame its colonial legacy thanks to what another writer called a “flexible and non-coercive relationship between the formal and the informal sectors of justice.” The elder Mamdani praised an “eloquent defense of the Mozambican road” by two authors, who said the secret to reform “lies in understanding change as the result of a ‘process,’ a ‘protracted struggle,’ in which ‘the objective is never seen to be that of destroying the old, but of transforming it, of developing the aspects that are positive and eliminating the aspects that are negative.’”

I chuckled a little at this, because I went to school with Mozambicans in the Soviet Union and had a good friend from there with whom I played chess regularly. He would have laughed at the “non-coercive” line, because his family’s land had been nationalized and he’d been sent to Soviet Russia to study refrigeration even though he hated working with machines of any kind. He described life at home as being “like getting done in the ass over and over” and must have meant it, because he schemed to stay living on a meager stipend in freezing Leningrad for years by strategically flunking key classes, even after liberalizing reforms took place while we were at school. He may still be there for all I know.

To the extent that the elder Mamdani’s text about “protracted struggle” is readable, it sounds like what his son is proposing to do with New York: revitalize neighborhoods through new socialist mechanics while eliminating the bad old New York, where the market is the “sole determinant of the distribution of dignity”:

The attraction of America for centuries of foreigners has been the idea of coming to a place where you can do anything from pushing a hot dog cart to inventing bubblegum flavors to being a pool hustler, and no one bothers you. They do not come here for social safety nets or masses of regulations to formalize GrubHub or DoorDash delivery earnings, another of Zohran’s ideas. In a vacuum, America would never go for it, but at a time of limited options and extreme instability, a political talent like Mamdani — how many modern Democrats do you know could inspire a “Hot Girls for Zohran” group? — is going to turn a lot of heads.

One of the infuriating surprises of the otherwise salutary development of a thriving alternative media sector is the fact that a sizable proportion of these entrepreneurial media voices claim to be socialists. These are people who’d scream murder if you suggested they share profits with lesser sites or sacrifice any autonomy, but don’t tell them they don’t believe! They have fetishistic attachments to global resistance movements even though most come from wealthy families who’d be among the first to have their “dignity” surpluses hoovered up under a real proletarian revolution. Most irritatingly — I’ve seen this — they feel total impatience with any actual underclass people who resist their vast wisdom on anything, from economics to education. These new media pioneers worship ZOHRAN! Don’t be surprised if his career becomes the avatar that galvanizes them behind his quest to Lena Dunhamize world attitudes.

America’s only just getting to know Zohran. My guess is that while he’ll take hits for not-infrequent outbursts of bullhorn goofery (pledging to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York was classic) and for his embrace of every hot-button wokism Americans learned to groan over years ago (free bus rides to free gender-affirmation treatment for minors!), he’ll succeed as a political phenomenon in ways Bernie and AOC never did. The camera loves him, he’s not Trump, and he’s sure, which counts a lot in the Internet age. He is the perfect person, at the perfect time, to sell the one thing America’s never bought on impulse. What a prize this country would be for international socialism! Are we dumb enough for this, too?

https://www.racket.news/p/socialism-wins-its-american-normandy