Look, Zohran Mamdani is not the future of the Democratic Party.
I know this is true, because the same was said of Eric Adams. New York City’s outgoing mayor did not live up to his billing. Its incoming mayor (presumably) is almost certainly not going to live up to his. The reason isn’t because Mamdani will become as corrupt as Adams became (though who knows?). The reason is that New York is New York.
Yes, it’s the largest urban center in the country. Yes, its influence cannot be overstated. But what’s good, or bad, for New York isn’t necessarily what’s good, or bad, for America. It may no longer be entirely true that all politics is local, but most of politics still is.
Once you accept the truth of this, all other considerations of Mamdani and the rest of the Democratic Party seem rather dull, as he becomes just another politician in a constellation of politicians who figured out how to appeal to a winning majority in their respective constituencies.
Once you accept that a city isn’t a metaphor for a country, or for a national party, the talk about how he’s dividing Democrats looks kinda stupid. Yes, he calls himself a democratic socialist. So what? Is that going to work in a place like Virginia? Maybe, but probably not. If it did, someone would have tried it. Since no one has, there’s your answer.
Think of it this way. Donald Trump is from New York. His business is based there. He represents the city’s elites. But he’s never won there. Three straight campaigns made no difference. Is anyone going to seriously suggest that, in this context, as New York goes, so goes the country (or so goes the GOP)? No, because that would be stupid.
Yet somehow, seemingly no one thinks how stupid it is to ask if Mamdani is the future of the Democrats, because only the Democrats, never the Republicans, are subjected to that kind of questioning. The reason for this is rooted in the Democratic Party itself, among certain elites who want to prevent it from becoming a fully realized people’s party. And they do this, foremost, by accepting as true the premise of the lies told about the Democrats by Trump and the Republicans.
What lies? First, remember that the number of actual democratic socialists in the Democratic Party (I’m talking about people who choose to call themselves by that name) is vanishingly small. Only two have any kind of national profile. (They are US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders doesn’t really count. He’s technically an independent.)
This stone-cold fact means nothing to Donald Trump. All Democrats, all liberals, all progressives, all leftists, and all socialists, democratic and otherwise, are the name. They are radical Marxist anarchist communists or whatever word salad pops into his soupy brain. There are no enemies to his right. There is nothing but enemies to his left. Does he respect his enemies enough to speak truthfully about them?
No, he lies.
His lies are what certain elites inside the Democratic Party are paying the most attention to. They are not celebrating Mamdani’s success. They are not defending him on the merits. They are not standing on the truth. They are not even standing in solidarity. What they are most focused on is the lies Donald Trump tells, which are magnified by the right-wing media complex, which are echoed by the press corps.
And what they see is either a fight they believe can’t be won or an opportunity to shiv a competing faction within the Democratic Party. Either way requires accepting as true the lies told about their own people, thus making it seem perfectly reasonable to wonder if winning a major election in America’s biggest city is good for the Democrats.
(The answer: don’t be stupid. Of course, it is.)
That these certain elites would rather surrender to lies than fight them tells us their beef with Mamdani isn’t about ideology. (It’s not about whether “democratic socialism,” or any other school of thought, would be appealing to voters outside New York.) It’s about how Mamdani, but specifically lies about him, complicates messaging efforts in a media landscape already heavily coded in favor of Donald Trump, especially of his view of the Democrats, which is that they’re all communists.
Those who are worried about Mamdani’s impact on the Democrats also take for granted the assertion that voters rejected Kamala Harris on ideological grounds – that her policies were out of touch with voters whose main concern was good-paying jobs and lower inflation.
They are ignoring that Harris actually campaigned on so-called working-class issues and that few voters could hear her working-class messaging over the din of Trump’s lies about her. The crisis facing the Democrats is not one of ideology. It’s a crisis of information. Certain elites are pretending otherwise, because it’s better for them if they do.
Mamdani’s victory is a local matter. That is the lesson for certain elites inside the party. It’s also a lesson for their loudest critics.
Certain progressives, let’s call them, believe that Mamdani’s popularity comes from focusing on class (the cost of living in New York). They believe that by doing so, he transcended “identity politics” to amass a following sizable enough to defeat the Democratic establishment.
This overlooks the fact that the establishment, in the form of the DNC and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are backing him. But more important is again the question of ideology. Certain elites think his will turn off voters outside New York. Certain progressive think it will turn them on. They believe a class-based ideology is the unifying force that working people across the country have needed. They just can’t see it, they say, because the establishment gets in the way.
But race and class can’t be easily disentangled, not in America. To many Americans, the idea of government of, by and for the people is a perversion of the “natural order.” It flattens the hierarchies of and within race and class. This belief is bone deep in many of us. It prevents lots of white Americans from being in solidarity with nonwhite Americans, even if they face similar grinding hardships.
Most of all, such thinking overlooks the basics. Many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet. Housing is too high. Healthcare is too expensive. Food is too much. I trust Mamdani when he says he’s a democratic socialist. But I also trust that he’s not fool enough to believe that struggle is the same as class consciousness. He identified the problem. He asked voters to give him the power to try to solve it.
That’s not ideology.
That’s just good politics.