Maybe there was a time in the past when a candidate to become New York City’s mayor prompted as much fervor in some quarters and as much fear and loathing in others as Zohran Mamdani, but I do not recall it.
In the 100–odd days until the city votes Nov. 4, we — New Yorkers and the rest of us— are in for political warfare that could turn out to be epochal. This will be a riveting campaign season; in my read it is unlikely to be a pretty one.
Mamdani, who has served in the state legislature since 2020, wowed New York City and the rest of the country when, on July 1, he trounced the Democratic field to win the party’s nomination to run for mayor this autumn.
The Democratic establishment, which had put its money on Andrew Cuomo (literally and figuratively), was stunned. Cuomo, a machine pol who resigned as governor of New York four years ago amid accusations of sexual harassment, was considered a shoo-in and, reflecting this, ran a campaign we can kindly describe as complacent.
Then came the blow: Mamdani, with more than 50,000 volunteers campaigning for him, took 56 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, to Cuomo’s 44 percent.
Figures don’t always lie and liars don’t always figure.
Mamdani is a true phenom, an energetic 33–year-old full of policy proposals that address the real problems of real people. A free bus system, a freeze on rents in half the city’s apartments, supermarkets run by the city, a properly redistributive tax regime to address the near to obscene inequality New Yorkers endure: These are good ideas, ideas with obvious appeal to Democratic voters, ideas expressive of his commitment to dynamic change.
Mamdani, I have to add right off, also takes a principled position against the Israelis’ shocking barbarities in Gaza and then America’s support of them.
But one’s strengths are at times also one’s vulnerabilities, as Mamdani is about to discover. On Monday, July 14, Cuomo announced in a brief video that, rather than step aside after his punishing defeat, he will stay in the race as an independent with the all-but-stated intent of preventing New York from falling “in the hands of the far left,” as The New York Times idiotically put it in a piece reviewing Cuomo’s renewed campaign.
Cuomo, whose term as governor reeked of opportunism and corruptibility if not proven corruption, is now the unseemly front end of an attack on Mamdani that is unlikely to relent until this race is decided.
Wall Street and the banks, hedge-fund billionaires, major corporations, New York real estate developers, the Israel lobby, corporate media, the Democratic mainstream: These are all lining up to make sure Zohran Mamdani does not win come Nov. 4. He’s a Marxist, a socialist, a Communist, a lunatic, of course an anti–Semite.
Zionist extremists and their sympathizers charge that Mamdani, a Muslim, will impose Shariah law on New York City. President Donald Trump has wondered aloud whether he should have Mamdani arrested, or whether he, Mamdani, should be stripped of his citizenship.
Financial and corporate interests spent $22 million on Cuomo’s failed primary campaign. There is every indication they will spend more this time.
Let us, then, view this in the large: The battle has been joined between Democratic Party elites and the voters they are increasingly committed to suppressing, between money and democratic process, between power and the forces for change that gather as we speak not only in New York but across the country.
We have been here before, of course. But the risk that the Democrats will destroy themselves as they attempt to destroy Zohran Mamdani is in my estimation greater than ever.
Here is Mamdani on “Meet the Press” Sunday, July 1, just after his victory:
“We can beat anyone that’s in this race because what we’ve shown is that this is a campaign that has the support of more than 400,000 New Yorkers. For too long, politicians have pretended to simply be bystanders to a cost-of-living crisis. They’ve actually exacerbated it. And our vision is one that will respond to it and make this a city affordable for every New Yorker.”
And Mamdani when asked about the Gaza crisis in an interview with Politico during his campaign in April:
“I think what is incumbent to do is to stop subsidizing a genocide. And that’s what we’ve seen over more than a year. And it’s what we’ve seen intensify right now with Donald Trump.
And it is hard for me to explain to my constituents, who live in the largest public housing development in North America, in Queensbridge, why they have to live in substandard conditions because the government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians over more than a year now.
And the sheer number of children that have been killed does not even capture the level of trauma for those that have survived. And that is a responsibility for us to speak up against, as the people who are financing it.”
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … it’s a political candidate who says what he means and what he means reflects the realities facing Americans in this, the third decade of our troubled new century.
I could not help noticing a couple of things in the news as Mamdani’s victory sank in.
One, there has been a spate of worry recently as various studies have come out indicating a radical shift in public opinion about Israel, Palestinians and the former’s campaign of terror against the latter in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Gallup and the Pew Research Center each weighed in this past spring to show roughly similar results — this shift most marked among Democrats.
Peter Beinart, who, among much else, opinionates at The New York Times, put it succinctly in a July 6 commentary. A dozen years ago Democrats polled by the Gallup Organization favored Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points.
“This February,” he writes, “Gallup found that Democrats sympathized with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 36 percentage points.”
How’s that for symmetry?
The headline atop Beinart’s column was, “Democrats Need to Understand That Opinions on Israel Are Changing Fast.” I thought Beinart’s commentary was O.K. so far as it went, but his headline writer seemed to me far off the mark. Of course mainstream Democrats understand that opinions on Israel are changing fast.
It is impossible to imagine otherwise. At issue here — and I detect what concerns Beinart subliminally — is that Democrats understand very well that opinions on Israel are changing fast and are utterly indifferent to this marked change in sentiment.
Two, just as I was putting these events side-by-side in my mind — the opinion polls on Israel, Mamdani’s brilliant rise to political prominence and the instantly frenetic response among various elites, The Grayzone published a six-minute segment concerning the annual retreat of the great and good that Allen & Co., a long-influential merchant bank that keeps well out of the public eye, has run for many years.
Here is Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone’s editor, on the occasion. The segment was published Tuesday, July 15:
“Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader [in the Senate] is heading for Sun Valley, Idaho, this week to meet with Hollywood elites and Big Tech elites in a semi-secret, off-the-record retreat .… and they’re basically all conspiring to determine who will be the next Democratic … I wouldn’t say ‘conspiring,’ but they’re discussing, one of the agenda items, is who the Democrats will put forward as their next candidate…. This is how it works.”
I don’t see anything wrong with “conspiring,” myself. And in this brief clip Blumenthal has certainly captured “how it works.” They are demonstrating how it works in New York as we speak.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, promises hundreds of millions of dollars to support Eric Adams, New York’s current mayor, as the man to take down Mamdani. Adams, of course, faced federal corruption charges until President Trump ordered the case thrown out.
My question is how long this kind of anti-democratic ugliness can remain how it works.
Voters in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of six to one, have just told their party they favor a candidate who promises imaginative change.
They have announced, to step back a short distance, that they want America to be something new, another kind of America. But there is no reply from the party’s upper reaches. You would think these elites would listen and learn at this point, but they show no inclination to do either.
They continue to cast Mamdani as some kind of anti–Israel radical — lots of Islamophobia going around since he won the primary — but his position on the genocide in Gaza is in line with those polling numbers and appears to have contributed to his support even among New York Jews.
What we are looking at, to stay in the context Mamdani affords us, is Sun Valley vs. Queensbridge, the working– and middle-class district Mamdani represents. This is the unholy symmetry of American politics in this, the third decade of our new century.
I do not suggest this is any kind of new opposition. Neither is the mainstream Democrats’ effort to sink Mamdani’s ship anything we haven’t seen before. They did it to Bernie Sanders — twice, indeed, in 2016 and again in 2020 — and, with the assistance of the Israeli lobbies, they did it to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, legislators from New York and Missouri respectively, when monied interests and the lobbies destroyed them in primary contests last year.
But Mamdani is a case of another order, in my interpretation. He is too exciting to too many voters, in a word. His ideas resonate too well beyond New York’s five boroughs. He stands — in his early thirties as against his early eighties — too effectively for another idea of America. The gang-up against him is too easily legible.
This puts the party’s elites and all the interests behind them in a bind. They cannot afford to allow Mamdani to take City Hall in New York, and I conclude with the greatest reluctance they won’t. A win for Mamdani in November would change the complexion of American politics too drastically.
At the same time, given the national attention his campaign has attracted, Mamdani has more or less instantly acquired a totemic significance in American political culture. Stopping him this autumn would almost certainly be an undemocratic mess.
To the extent the Democrats succeed in destroying this man, they will also destroy themselves.
Source: Consortium News.
