Zohran Mamdani by Bingjiefu He / Wikimedia
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, will likely be a shoe-in for the post of mayor of New York City, and many view that as a final nail in the coffin of what the Democratic Party in the US once was.
A 33-year-old state assemblyman, Mamdani handily defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo 43.5% to 36.4% in the primary on June 24, the New York Times reported.
“The national Democratic establishment on Tuesday night struggled to absorb the startling ascent of a democratic socialist in New York City who embraced a progressive economic agenda and diverged from the party’s dominant position on the Middle East,” the Times observed.
Mamdani’s election, the report continued, took the form of a “thunderbolt” because it amounted to New York City voters veering “away from a well-funded familiar face and famous name, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and in doing so made a generational and ideological break with the party’s mainstream.”
Conservative and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher also observed in a Substack column Wednesday that “[l]eft-wing voters in New York City, like their MAGA peers nationally nine years ago, lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past.”
“We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani, but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself, and the party’s style of politics,” he added.
Dreher shared a detailed analysis of the election results.
“If you look at the NYT map, you’ll see that the parts of the city that voted Mamdani are the whitest, those that voted Cuomo are, for the most part, the most non-white — except Long Island, which is suburban white (and went Cuomo), and the parts of Staten Island that are closest to Manhattan,” he wrote. “Note too that the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side — the wealthiest and, in the case of the West Side, the most Jewish, neighborhoods — also went Cuomo.”
“Otherwise, it was a rout for the socialist Muslim Mamdani,” he noted.
New York is a high-tax state run by a Democratic governor, and, according to the NYT, the election came about “[a]t a moment when Democrats are searching for an answer to President Trump.”
Mamdani “ran on an unabashedly progressive agenda, promising to make buses free, freeze the rent on rent-stabilized apartments and raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers,” the Times noted, adding that “[h]is promise of generational change appears to have resonated with large numbers of voters.”
Mamdani’s stunning victory, for some, is a sign the establishment Democratic Party in America – which has allowed itself to lurch increasingly left over the past two decades – is officially dead. The New York City mayoral primary race is the shot in the arm far-left Democrats needed to get excited about their party again.
Of course, while Cuomo may have been the establishment candidate, he certainly came with significant flaws, having declared his candidacy even with the heavy baggage of sexual harassment allegations and the Department of Justice’s opening this year of a criminal investigation into whether the former governor lied on Capitol Hill when he fiercely denied that he had input into a report on COVID nursing home deaths in New York State.
“Many establishment and centrist Democrats aligned themselves with Cuomo despite his controversies, as Mamdani was viewed as politically too far left by some,” noted The Hill. “But if Tuesday night demonstrated anything, it’s that Democrats aren’t shy about disrupting the status quo and rejecting powerful Democratic brands.”
Still, much of the excitement over Mamdani’s win is centered on Trump and on how to undo the “Trump effect.”
The election comes “against the backdrop of a party that is struggling with how to counter President Trump in his second term and giving its base reasons to be excited about voting for Democrats,” The Hill added.
Dreher’s column, “Mamdani’s Big Apple Intifada,” also spends a fair amount of time on the victor’s embrace, during his campaign, of the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada.”
That phrase is significant, said Dreher, the author of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.
To explain its importance, he drew attention to Jonathan Chait’s piece at The Atlantic in which Chait described an interview Mamdani had last week with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, an ex-Republican.
When Miller asked Mamdani about his use of the slogan “globalize the intifada,” he responded: “To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”
“New York City is home to about one million Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jews on the planet,” Dreher observed in apparent disbelief. “And the city has now, in effect, elected a mayor who embraces the slogan ‘globalize the intifada.’”
But Chait explained further the critical nature of the democratic socialist’s response.
“Mamdani may sincerely believe this, as do some of his supporters,” Chait wrote. “But he then delved into the semantics of intifada, citing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of the word as the translation of ‘uprising’ in an Arabic version of an article the museum published about the Warsaw Ghetto.”
“This comparison, to a Jewish armed rebellion against the Nazis, hardly dispels concern about the incendiary implications of the slogan,” Chait continued. “If the intifada is akin to the ghetto uprising, then it is a call for violence. If its theater of operations is global, then it is necessarily directed against civilians.”
The author then emphasized that “[w]hat makes the slogan so disturbing in an American context is not the intifada bit. It’s the globalize part.”
“Globalizing the intifada definitionally involves events outside that region,” Chait stressed.
That analysis drew Dreher’s attention.
“Imagine being a New York City Jew right now, knowing that after November, your city will be governed by a man who says he wants to ‘globalize the intifada,’” he wrote.
“Of course Mamdani could not have won without the support of progressive non-Muslim New Yorkers, many of whom — the young, especially — embrace globalizing the intifada,” Dreher explained. “But the more pressing concern for voters was the increasing unaffordability of life in the city. Why they believe that a politician whose economic platform, when not crazy (government-owned grocery stores, for example), would do nothing to make life more affordable — well, it’s magical thinking. But it worked.”