The polls said it wasn’t going to happen. The polls were wrong. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani took the primary and will be the candidate for Mayor of New York City. Was it his policies, free everything and tax the rich? Was it his position on Israel, which wasn’t at all antisemitic but supported globalizing the intifada, which totally didn’t mean kill Jews? Was it defunding the police and warehousing the homeless in the subways?
Was it the fact that he was a young, charismatic, well-spoken, good-looking millennial who knew how to use social media?
At a time when the Democratic Party searches its soul for its inability to prevail over the likes of Donald Trump, where the schism between liberals and progressives is clearly insurmountable and yet totally denied, there appears to be a new lesson on the table stemming from Mamdani’s win, applauded by his endorsers, AOC and Bernie, as the real future of the alternative to MAGA.
Is it conceivable that New York can offer free universal day care, free subways and buses, city-owned grocery stores and low-cost housing by taxing “the rich”? Is it conceivable that New York can become the socialist Utopia nepo baby Zohran imagines? Have liberals, believers in both equality and capitalism, been wrong all along, and this is the real option to Trumpism and MAGA?
What is the lesson to be learned here? What does that lesson mean for enlightened liberalism, for whom there is no savior in the Democratic Party, at least as far as New York City goes?
*I know it’s not Tuesday, but be a bit flexible. TT rules apply.