Newsletter #43: ‘Little’ Zohran Mamdani and the future of the Left

PLUS: Trade Strategy announced

Good morning.

This newsletter is as late as it possibly can be without failing to publish it this week. I know who is to blame (and surprisingly, it isn’t me). Today, a guest contributor (the person to blame) writes about ‘Little’ Zohran Mamdani in New York; and I give a brief overview of the Government’s new ‘Trade Strategy’.

As for all the major developments this week (Rachel Reeves crying, James McMurdock suspended from Reform, and so on), that will have to wait for next week’s newsletter. Stay tuned.

This newsletter’s agenda: ‘Little’ Zohran Mamdani and the future of the Left (free/paid); Trade strategy published (paid).

‘Little’ Zohran Mamdani and the future of the Left

Is New York going red? The Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated Zohran Mamdani unexpectedly won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, held last week, against old-guard DNC candidate Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani, the son of a Muslim Ugandan Indian doctor of postcolonial studies at Columbia, has advocated a platform that includes steep increases to the minimum wage, state-run grocery stores with subsidised prices, the introduction of a state-run authority that would massively expand affordable housing in the city, and defunding the police. He is also opposed to the idea of billionaires. He began his career specifically assisting non-white homeowners in Queens to avoid eviction, and last Sunday, he defended one of his campaign promises to shift the tax burden from ‘overtaxed homeowners in the boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter areas’.

The incumbent, Eric Adams, is running as an independent and is marred by accusations of a quid pro quo with the Trump presidency absolving him of his federal corruption charges. There remains the open question whether Cuomo will also run as an independent and receive tacit support from the DNC, which does not seem impossible given Mamdani’s radicalism, including his position on Israel and endorsement of the phrase ‘globalise the intifada,’ which has a particular ring in the particularly Jewish state and city of New York. There is also the question of what the official Republican candidate will do if MAGA effectively endorses Adams.

This primary is being treated as a window into the future of Democratic politics, and by extension, the country as a whole. The Democratic old guard does not know where to stand. Andrew Cuomo’s brother and NewsNation anchor Chris has declared the Democratic Party ‘dead’. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries have taken a softer line, praising Mamdani’s campaign without offering full endorsements. Republicans have been just as energised by this development. Trump has made the empty suggestion that he would cut off the city’s funds in the case of Zohran’s victory; others have flirted with the idea of Mamdani’s deportation (for his ‘antisemitism’, of course). Zohran has become a lightning rod because everyone knows this is the future, regardless of whatever happens in November.

In the flurry of interpretations thrown out on X, we have seen some American conservatives arguing that Mamdani’s victory is the product of Woke having captured the universities and corrupted the youth, viewing him as a ‘nepo-baby,’ the champagne socialist candidate of college-educated white elites. Others, including Stephen Miller, have pointed towards replacement migration as the source of the lurch to the left in the New York Democratic electorate.

There is some truth to both general interpretations. The briefest description of what happened is that Mamdani won over college-educated, middle and upper-middle-income, Hispanic, Asian, and young white voters with a primarily online messaging strategy, while Cuomo mobilised those on a low income and blacks into a coalition with the wealthiest through old-fashioned Democratic machine politics. There is also truth in this distinction in the person of Mamdani himself. Indeed, American universities have long been home to this brand of third-worldist socialism, and his background and politics are characteristically representative of the Indian ‘Brahmin Left.’ The real novelty is that since about 2020, explicit politics of this kind have found increasing purchase with (new) voters. New York City is now approximately 40% foreign born, and regular, lower and middle-income white Americans are now a tiny fraction of the population, the city losing this cohort over decades outward flows of these people to other states. This also explains the diminishing relevance of the black vote.

Mamdani (alongside AOC, Ilhan Omar and the progressive ‘Squad’) represent constituents probably much like themselves had they not chosen to enter politics — educated urban professionals and elite aspirants, often with relatively shallow roots in the country, who feel economically precarious due to the transformations of the graduate economy and burdens of student debt and spiralling rents. The position of some on the Right, that the support for this kind of politics will disappear following its successful extirpation from American institutions, is, in my view, rather naïve. While actions by the Trump administration and Supreme Court take the first steps towards dismantling the Civil Rights/DEI regime, there is a colossal gap between where we are and what the deinstitutionalisation of these people and ideas would mean in practice. Even if colourblind meritocracy were achieved on the institutional level, the genie will not be put back in the bottle in the electoral demands of the left.

(For more on the demographic makeup of Mamdani’s support and on the election itself, I recommend you read Scott Greer’s Substack as well as the X poster Arctotherium.)

Since Mamdani’s combination of ethnic grievance politics with socialist redistribution is here to stay, we should begin to think about some of the implications for us on the right and in Europe.