Lots of ink being spilled right now about Zohran Mamdani’s overthrow of the Democratic Party leadership in New York City. Any time there’s a rupture like this, it panics the establishments and hive-swarms the hot takes. I’ll limit myself to a short list of speculations and reflections based on what we know and stay away from ideological dismay on the one hand and wish-casting on the other.
The first and most essential fact is that he won. Everything else proceeds from that. A young social democratic brown man with a funny-sounding name will now be responsible for running the most demographically diverse city in the world, a city with the population of Switzerland.
Yeah, he only won the primary, but if Democrats try to pull another India Walton, they will hemorrhage their last last remaining drops of credibility and be pummeled (even worse than they already are) in 2026. They can say goodbye to the Senate until long after many of us are dead. I’m making an educated guess that they’re not quite that stupid . . . admitting they’ve cleared the stupid bar pretty regularly. My canary on this is our very own Michigan Democratic US Senator, the slippery Elissa Slotkin, who, when asked by reporters who wanted to elicit a denunciation of Mamdani, disclaimed any knowledge of “New York politics” (as if every Democrat in the country wasn’t laser-focused on this), but said, in Democratic weasel-tongue, that the lessons learned are “people are really focused on costs and the economy,” and “looking for a new generation of leadership.” (These people are liking trying to catch a greased pig.)
Two questions arise from the fact of Mamdani’s victory. How? and What now?
First of all, I’m not a New Yorker. I used to make semi-regular sojourns to Harlem and Brooklyn when I was more active in politics many years ago, but all my impressions are from afar. I live in a Corn Belt county seat now, where you can drive your rusty pickup from the northern to the southern city limits in ten minutes.
Second of all, I’m utterly uninterested, in fact I’m averse to, triumphalist cock-whooping, Olympian clarion calls, the perpetually sour grapes of infantile leftism, and ideological pantomimes.
My own initial remarks about the how have to begin, relying on my own old-military tactical templates, with analysis of the enemy. Who was Mamdani running against, and how was that opponent situated? In a military operations order, the “situation paragraph” identifies “enemy location, size, composition, disposition, strengths, capabilities, most likely courses of action, and morale.”
For target selection, we used the CARVER formula: Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect (on enemy and local population) and Recognizability.
We also needed to understand the terrain we were operating on, astronomical data (sun/moon rise/set. etc) and access to timely weather forecasts.
You can put the analogs together for a political campaign with minimal imaginary effort.
The enemy, in this case, was the Democratic Party establishment (which was desperately drawn in from the national level to blunt Mamdani’s momentum). In my view, the single most salient reason for Mamdani’s well-calculated success was the New York face of that establishment: the irrevocably-tainted duo of Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. To repeat Mamdani’s success anywhere else, this glaring weakness has to be taken into account. The fantastically corrupt Adams has the lowest approval ratings of any Mayor of NYC since they started polling this stuff, and Cuomo—a degenerate entitled brat in a dying political dynasty—is know on the national stage as Wall Street sycophant, a lying-ass crook, and a sexually incontinent masher.
In the CARVER formula, Vulnerability. In spades.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is now held in its lowest favor by Democrats themselves, after years of insulting its members’ intelligence with disingenuous rationalizations of its own highly undemocratic practices, i.e., rigging primaries, going all the way back to 2016 when they faced the Sanders challenge. Even DP tool Donna Brazile admitted it was true; and this was particularly egregious in New York, where the DP excluded independent voters from the primary when it became evident Sanders would win. This treachery most recently in evidence with the ouster of David Hogg as vice chair for having the temerity to suggest that some Democrats needed to be primaried.
This was one aspect of the situation that allowed for a South Asian-American Muslim, a self-declared socialist, and a vocal supporter of the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement against the State of Israel to win an election in a Blue city with nearly a million Jewish residents.
The next “situation” subset is economics. Plenty of corrupt mayors have survived and even maintained their popularity, but Adams had facilitated a dramatic rise in the cost of living for already-precarious and over-strapped New Yorkers, especially Trump voters. When Mamdani’s people surveyed and interviewed people in every Burrough, they heard the same complaints. Rent and food prices were killing them. Child care was eating half their checks. People no longer felt safe on NYC’s once exemplary subways and buses. The subways had come to shelter the indigent and the mentally ill. This was his main message, and his main proposals were higher corporate taxes, rent-freezes, a $30 city minimum wage, free child care, and a city-run network of grocery stores. He proposed dipping into the billion-dollar police overtime payout and use unused real estate to care for mentally ill and homeless. He wants to run the buses for free.
I saw in interview with him from seven or so months back, when he wasn’t yet taken seriously, and then I looked at his later stuff as he gained momentum, and the message stayed on point throughout. Tangible solutions to tangible problems, and a simple plan for delivery. Fuck the technocratic double-speak.
I’ve not seen any detailed breakdown of his campaign organization, but generally speaking, a campaign needs finance, publicity, and a ground game. Under publicity falls recognizability, messaging, and debate (direct and indirect)—the latter of which has an offense and a defense.
Anyone who has details about Mamdani’s hows on these, pile onto a thread.
I know one thing he had was the Democratic Socialists of America, about whom I leveled many criticisms; but in my rural Republican town a few years back, a young DSA member named Will Garcia ran for mayor against a well-known, well-connected incumbent. The Huron Valley (Ann Arbor) DSA is about fifty minutes north of here, and they decided to come down and help. In Ann Arbor, they’re a blip; they do things like fix tail-lights to prevent police stops. In this town, they came down as a canvassing force of almost a hundred bodies in the final two weeks of the totally underfunded Garcia campaign, and brought Will within 153 votes of an noncontroversial sitting mayor.
The NYC DSA is the biggest in the country, over 5,000 strong. The DSA is a hot mess and in most places about as effectual as a flyswatter in an air attack. But in NYC, with these numbers for fundraising, manning makeshift offices, recruiting volunteers, performing a host of necessary scut-tasks, canvassing, and running phone banks—pulling together 50,000 multi-lingual volunteers—they were the fucking 82nd Airborne Division. Can you spell “ground game,” boys and girls?
My message to the DSA: this is your forte. Keep refining the techniques and tactics, and find ways to marshal and concentrate your forces. Get out of the cultural warrior business. You suck at it, because you’re so often wrong.
Back now to the Democratic Party, because at this point and with very limited knowledge of the granular realities of the Mamdani campaign there’s little to contribute but speculation on my part. I certainly won’t speculate about how much Mamdani can deliver on the expectations raised by his campaign. Just as political Nostradamii are always punching above their weight (because no one can know these granular realities or predict contextual changes and human behavior), there are likewise too many variables in a place like New York for political precognition. Nonetheless, there are some things we can add to what we already know about the degraded and deterioriating Democratic Party.
Mamdani kicked y’all’s ass! (Sorry, said I wouldn’t do that . . . my contempt for the DNC runs so deep you can touch the Mariana Trench.)
Mamdani spent $6 million, and the DP spent $31.5 million (and had the media in its pocket!). Independent spending on behalf of Cuomo amounted to $13.5 million, whereas Mamdani received $371K. Cuomo pulled out the anti-semitism card, the socialist card, and even went in for some Islamophobic dog-whistling. Mamdani still wiped the floor with Cuomo. Every Democratic Party tactical assumption was proven wrong.
Speaking of the chart above, ranked-choice voting was certainly a factor that worked in Mamdani’s behalf.
Apart from the Democratic Party apparatus, the next two biggest losers in this election were Zionism and Wall Street.
The political wisdom everywhere said that one cannot get elected without pandering to Israel. Support for Zioinist atrocities is waning, even among many Jews. Bread-and-butter issues eclipse foreign policy (especially in municipal elections). The old “political wisdom” is no longer true.
As to Wall Street, a bit of history is in order. The Democrats and Republicans played the neoliberal hot potato game of Reagan, then Carter, then Bush I, then Clinton, then Bush II, then Obama, until the whole thing went into the shitter in 2008. Pump things up enough to pass the baton to the next sociopathic bastard. Meanwhile, there was so little to distinguish them economically that they had to fall back on cultural issues. When the system’s capacity for tweaking itself through the next electoral cycle ran out, so did their already waning plausibility. Unfortunately, the brain-numbed American electorate—across the mainstream spectrum—still retained its credulity, and so we ended up with a choice between a particularly unlikable sociopath named Hillary Clinton and a New York real estate huckster cum TV personality. The rest, as they say . . .
Clinton’s team, the insular DNC, believed its own bullshit and went with the pied piper strategy of getting Trump nominated. From the 2016 Salon article:
On April 23, 2015, two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a group message with information for a “strategy call.” The email included as an attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”
The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”
The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”
It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”
At the time, there were more than a dozen Republican presidential candidates. The “variety of candidates is a positive here,” the Clinton campaign said.
“Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right,” the memo noted.
“In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” the Clinton campaign wrote.
As examples of these “pied piper” candidates, the memo named Donald Trump — as well as Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson).
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the Clinton campaign concluded.
This document was part of the tens of thousands of emails to and from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which were released by WikiLeaks.
Other messages published by the whistleblowing organization show how, while the Clinton camp was facilitating the rise of Trump, it was systematically undermining the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s left-wing opponent.
Leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee show that the organization, which is supposed to be bound to impartiality, sabotaged Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign, which had mobilized millions of people and inspired a massive grassroots movement.
The political incompetence of this party has only continued to worsen. They’re the captives of a tactical delusion (exemplified by the Clintons, Obama, James Carville, and Matt Iglesias) that the way to win elections is to run a three-card monte scam on the electorate, which they’ve divided into a diaphanous and anachronistic left-center-right.
As a result, the Democratic Party has become the one thing no political party can long survive: a single issue coalition. That single issue is its own Frankenstein creature, Donald Trump.
What voters who are living through precarious times under constant threat of being declassed want is not technocratic fodder, it’s red fucking meat. Trump gave that to them.
So did Mamdani.
Earlier in June I saw his debate with Cuomo, where Cuomo said, ““To put a person in this seat at this time with no experience is reckless and dangerous.”
Mamdani responded—to raucous applause—“I have never had to resign in disgrace. I have never cut Medicaid. I have never stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the MTA. I have never hounded the thirteen women who credibly accused me of sexual harassment. I have never sued for their gynecological records.”
I knew, as soon as I saw it, that Andrew Cuomo was toast. (This is the aggressive manner Sanders was never willing to use against his rivals, which in a sense speaks well of his character, but not his tactical sense.) Mamdani had the program, but he served it up with a ferocity that matched the mood of the voters.
Let’s talk about Michael Bloomberg, as representative of America’s and New York’s haute bourgeoisie. He was by far the biggest single contributor to Cuomo’s campaign, donating $8.3 million to Cuomo’s Super-Pac. Bloomberg hates social democrats almost as much as he hates critics of Zionism, so Mamdani was a two-fer.
During the 2020 Democratic Primary, in an effort to derail the Sanders campaign, and knowing he could not win, Bloomberg, the ethically rudderless former Mayor of NYC joined the 2020 race and spent a billion—with a B—dollars, the singular goal of which was to beat back Bernie Sanders.
Bloomberg made his financial bones on Wall Street, the Democratic Party center of gravity since the Carter administration. But what he accomplished with Sanders, aided by the Southern black political class (BPC), he failed with Mamdani.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.
—William Faulkner, ‘Requiem for a Nun’
Which brings me to the BPC, whose history I described in the American black history & political strategy series. The BPC’s relation to the Democratic Party is complicated. The reason the Obama-Clyburn option worked against Sanders is that the DNC determines nominations in the South, where black voters do determine primary outcomes but don’t win General Elections. I won’t belabor that here (see the link), but this could not be the case in New York City. NYC is around 25 percent “black,” an amorphous category (unlike the more homogeneous African Americans of, say, South Carolina), which includes native African Americans, “mixed” Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Haitians, people from several African nations, etc. Likewise, Adams, though himself native African American, does not run what Adolph Reed termed a “black urban regime,” like some mayors of majority black cities (though his fealty to developers was just as ironclad). In other words, the Democratic Party didn’t have the same kind of structural leverage in this more diverse, deep-blue city that it employs through the BPC at a national level to slap down challenges from its left.
Again, Mamdani in NYC is not an anomaly in New York City; but NYC can’t be crudely replicated anywhere else. Mamdani found a fissure, and that’s about a far as his electoral success can be generalized. Elsewhere, the fissures do exist . . . but they’re different fissures.
You can’t reasonably separate the tactical, the practical, the material, and the symbolic in politics, which is what many post-fight commentators will do with regard to the Democratic Party, in part because Trump is such a bull in the china shop that many can’t take their eyes off of him long enough to see the background anymore.
To understand the Democratic Party in each and all of these facets calls on us to find the material stage upon which the other features dance. There are material reasons the Democratic Party can’t get its shit together, the same reasons that have cost the party its former standing among the working class. Commentators, many of them, seem uninterested in history; but as Faulkner once quipped, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The DP is caught in the neoliberal live-trap.
It’s become unfashionable to use the term neoliberalism, in part because it’s been abused by people who never understood it, and in part because the ruling class still doesn’t want us to talk about it, so they’ve marshaled their cultural mavens to declare it passé. I’ll boil it down for you, because it’s neither irrelevant nor, per Faulkner, passed. In semi-laymen terms, it’s the combination of financialization and austerity. Click this link for a long-form treatment of this. What sunk Eric Adams, apart from his venal corruption, was “austerity.” Neoliberals aim to take the tax burdens off the rich and transfer the the social costs onto everyone else. In this sense, at least, Trump is also a neoliberal (where he differs from them is in foreign trade policy, about which the neoliberals are evil, and Trump is just stupid as fuck).
Financializaition translates into a “too big to fail” financial pole of capital (“Wall Street”) that calls the political shots on its own behalf at everyone else’s expense; a trend that has enriched the rentier class to the point where they can finance and counter-finance elections. Wall Street is the material core of the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton—raised in my family’s home town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, a hustler town developed as a gambling mecca by the Irish mob—broke the code with his triangulation strategy in 1992. Wall Street is a the structural antagonist of the working class, which is why Wall Street had gravitated to the Republican Party prior to Clinton . . . nothing to do with conservative cultural preoccupations. In fact, Wall Street can finance the commodificaton of cultural trends of any kind.
Clinton gleefully through the working class under the bus in exchange for Wall Street funding, and the Democratic Party has been doing it ever since. In fact, they’ve become utterly dependent on Wall Street, because Wall Street can put its big fat fucking thumb on either end of the political scales at will. All Wall Street asks in return is that its politicians (like Elissa Slotkin) remain vigilant about preventing any popular erosion of Wall Street’s status as master of the political universe. We can risk a Donald Trump, but we can’t risk a Bernie Sanders . . . or a Zohran Mamdani.
(Trump is an anomaly, inasmuch as he doesn’t understand even neoliberal economics—his own financial success being predicated basically on a network of criminal enterprises—and his ideas about how the world runs are on par with C-level freshman who’s watched too much TV. Nonetheless, when Wall Street pushes back, he gives in. He’s a bully, and like most bullies, he’s a loudmouthed fucking coward who readily recognizes those more powerful than he is.)
When a politician like Ellissa Slotkin says, “people are really focused on costs and the economy,” and they’re “looking for a new generation of leadership,” this is her rhetorical tightrope, with one side being the obvious and disconcerting shift in the tactical terrain and the other side the personal-political necessity of not saying things that spook the Wall Street herd. Far easier to suggest that the people’s focus is on the economy (no admission that the economy itself is the problem) and that the party’s problem is not its fealty to Wall Street, but not enough young neoliberals in leadership. (Bullies aren’t the only cowards; the ambitious are often cowards, too. I know . . . there’s redundancy there. What sunk her party in the Michigan presidential contest was inflation and genocide [yet another example of abject political cowardice].)
One reason it’s been so easy for Trump to push around the Democrats is that they’re even more yellow-bellied than he is. More to the point, though, they’re the captives of their own institutional arrangements.
It’s not just Republicans who can exploit the gaping cracks in the Democratic edifice, which is why Mamdani has inflamed a general panic.
As to “What now?” in NYC, I can’t even venture a guess. Reality tames every ambition by and by, and the ruling class has a vested interest in seeing every successful challenge fail (they may not Walton-ratfuck Mamdani’s election, but I fully expect them to ratfuck his administration). Details"? WTFK? I’ll let all the precognitive political swamis set their own selves up for future embarrassments. My crystal ball’s busted.
(All the ratfucking blather from both parties about Mamdani being elected by “the laptop class” is complete horseshit, by the way, as shown in this article.)
I’ll just say this: neoliberalism is hitting two walls of exhaustion at once right now: exhaustion of the system itself and exhaustion of people’s patience. Trump, as well as Mamdani, tapped into the latter, whereas Trump seems to be doing all he can to accelerate the former (just look at his clown cabinet!).
Money runs politics, and it still does; but Mamdani jui-jitsued the money issue. He set up a situation where the more they spent, the more the money-muppets exposed themselves. Every grotesque spending number only served as another confirmatory point on Mamdani’s scoreboard. (Who will do the in-depth analysis of this? Please.)
This obviously requires a sharp publicity apparatus, about which I know not enough at this point. One piece said his media strategy did three things: decentralized control over the content creators, lots of personal narratives, appeals that generated emotional responses, and showcasing regular people. The same article said that his culturally-literate publicity people were highly agile—rapidly folding their messages in to hot topics (in multiple neighborhoods and languages). Once a message went viral in a community, Mamdani’s people—if not Mamdani himself— showed up to consolidate their gains through personal contact. Canvassers, who knocked on around 800,000 doors, had written material in more than a dozen languages. While identity is a “progressive thing,” and while he did throw sops to certain identity-groups, like trans-ideologues, his main message went to values and issues, not identity. This allowed that message to bleed across the boundaries set up by identity politics. The main thing was, from what I understand, the message was a short list of those boundary-transcending issues, and his campaign stuck to the core message like Marshmallow Fluff (Bernie’s most effective tactic, too).
This can be replicated.
Little else can, at least in the American hinterlands, including many American cities.
In New York City, two percent of the population are white evangelicals. In America generally, that number is 17.3 percent. In the United States, the Jewish population, even where the majority are Zionist in their sympathies, is a blip. White evangelicals are America’s Zionist bulwark. Likewise, evangelicals are the single largest homogeneous element in the Trump coalition. They hold the sincere belief that Trump is God’s tool to bring about a prophecy they’ve incorrectly gleaned from the last book of the Christian Bible, the fulfillment of which also includes Israel’s conquest of the Levant. This belief is why evangelicals are impervious to the arguments against Trump—something Democrats don’t fully appreciate. They already know that Trump is a philandering bully. The see him as the crooked stick with which God is drawing a straight line through The Tribulation to the thousand-year reign of Christ where white evangelicals will serve as the King’s retainers and enforcers. (My own grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventists suffered serial crises after wrongly and confidently predicting the dates for all this.)
Upon this evangelical base of support, Trump retains the loyalty of Never-Democraters, confused cult followers, lesser-evilists, garden variety bigots, militia loons, and a substantial population of degenerates who celebrate his macho shtick and his cruelty. Democrats have no such solid coalition. Whereas the Palestinian genocide calved off voters from the Democrats, whose leadership is totally in the Zionist pocket, it super-charged Republicans (the day before yesterday, the IDF murdered more than 400 Palestinians standing in relief lines, with snipers shooting children for sport). There is wholesale agreement among Republicans that men shouldn’t be in women’s prisons or women’s sports, and that physically healthy children shouldn’t be administered sterilizing hormones. Most of the country agrees with this, even the majority of Democrats, and yet the DP remains the captive of this gender insanity. Together, factors like these have combined into a perfect storm for the Democrats.
In a recent NPR poll, approval of Congressional Republicans was at an all-time high of 33 percent, while Democrats scored an anemic 27. Trump’s approval rating remains stubbornly strong at 45.2 percent, and rising among some younger Democrats! Fifty-six percent of US voters now disapprove of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, DP apparatchiks run around like headless chickens, trying to stem the tide without changing a single practice or policy, apparently unaware that everyone, including their ever more reluctant defensive line, knows their vacuous and evasive rhetoric was, is, and will continue to be an insult to people’s intelligence.
This was how Mamdani came into his own; but New York City is not the US. It’s not even most other cities.
The only real option for the Democratic Party is the very one that will lose the party a major financier, Wall Street, which will mobilize its considerable resources against Democrats who dare to betray it. That option is to embrace an aggressive, offensive (in the tactical sense), and tangible social democratic program to run for, and quit running defense against Trump per se. This is obviously not on the table, because party leadership has withdrawn into its mental Führerbunker.
As to whether anyone can challenge the system in a given place, given the high cost of “the wealth primary,” is a question that can only be answered locally. Can independents run successfully? Can people continue (a la Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Mamdani, et al) to focus their challenges first within the DP? (I still see this as the only generally viable option, though I’d be open to independent challenges where feasible.)
All open questions. Honestly, I have little reason for optimism, so I’ll fall back on “fool’s hope.”
I’ll close by saying, as I did in an earlier piece, that a social democratic program has to restrain itself, sharing only a dozen or fewer majoritarian planks, and leaving the cultural stuff (guns, abortion, gender shit) to individual candidates without adverse outside consequences so they can tailor their campaigns to their own people.
Oh yes, and run campaigns with red fucking meat. Say the shit everyone knows, and “political pros” are afraid to say. Serve it up with a ferocity that matches the mood of the voters.
Peace