Zohran Mamdani and the Corbynisation of New York

And the winner of the Democratic nomination for the next mayor of New York City is… Zohran Mamdani. Is New York, the city of Seinfeld, Streisand and the 9/11 attacks, really going to be run by a cosplay communist who accuses Israel of “genocide” and refuses to disavow calls to “Globalize the Intifada”?

The city with the world’s largest Jewish population holds its mayoral run-off in November. It’s not impossible that Mamdani, a 33-year-old State Representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), will win.

He won the Democratic primary on 24 June by exploiting the decay of a big-city machine, the slow-moving juggernaut of demographic change, and the generational divide on the Left. If it can happen in London, it can happen in New York.

In one of Mamdani’s canny campaign clips, a faceless interviewer compliments him for fearlessly touching the “third holy grail” of American politics: “You have Islam, you have socialism, and then you have Palestine.” Perhaps he means the third rail.

“When you grow up as someone especially in the Third World, you have a very different understanding of the Palestinian struggle,” replies Mamdani, who is eating rice with his hand in order to show that he remains especially Third World, despite being the son of a Columbia University professor and an Academy-nominated millionaire Bollywood director.

Born in Uganda, Mamdani came to America at the age of seven. He did most of his growing up on the Upper West Side before studying at Bowdoin College ($91,300 a year for four years). As a privately educated young American, he hates everything about America and thinks statues of Christopher Columbus should be torn down because they’re structurally racist.

In another clip, Mamdani eats a burrito on the Q Train subway with a plastic knife and fork. No true American eats a burrito with anything other than their hands. Any sane New Yorker knows that if you eat on the rat-infested subway, you’ll die within hours. Even the crackheads try not to inhale too deeply.

Mamdani’s gustatory stunts show what rich Lefties really think of their “Third World” voters. They also show how politics in the age of digital media is a weird mixture of identitarian signalling, class war and performance art.

The Democratic Socialists of America are America’s biggest theatre troupe. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bronx Congresswoman and DSA doyenne, donned a pair of “Mom jeans” for barnstorming around the Flyover Country with Bernie Sanders. Mamdani dons low-end leisure wear and assays a burrito on the subway.

The “Palestinian struggle” has nothing to offer New York City – unless Mamdani proposes diverting federal funds to dig a new tunnel from Manhattan to the mainland. But “solidarity” with the Palestinians – which means cheering for Hamas, rioting against “Zionists” and smuggling soft Islamism into the addle-brained cant of “social justice” – is now as integral to our new Left as pandering to the Black Panthers was to the old New Left of the 1960s.

The Democrats are adrift after the doddering farce of the Biden presidency and the astroturfed nomination of Kamala Harris. The Clintons are too old, and the Obamas too busy with podcasts and Netflix projects, to steer the party towards the centre ground.

The young anti-Israel agitators on the party’s Left believe that tomorrow belongs to them. The Bernie Sanders-AOC link-up is a passing of the generational torch – and it may mark a watershed in the “Corbynisation” of the party that the majority of Jewish Americans still think of as their political home.

Mamdani calls himself a “proud Muslim”. He also supports full-term abortion, LGBTQ rights and transgenderism. These are not traditional Muslim attitudes. But advocating Islamic identity politics along with lifestyle ultraliberalism is the emerging brand of the Democratic Left. Consider, as we must, the cases of the Democrats’ most eminent Islamo-leftists, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Mamdani’s game is a shotgun marriage of ideological convenience. As Glastonbury’s descent into Nuremberg-with-tents shows, sticking it to the Jews has become integral to the radical performance: a kinds of degenerate Passion Play, the symbolic heart of the Omnicause.

Mamdani is against capitalism, private property and pricey supermarkets. He wants to empty the jails and says, “Violence is an artificial construct.” He says, “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” He can’t quite bring himself to say Israel is the Jewish state, and that “Globalizing the intifada” means terrorism against Jews. So far, he hasn’t needed to.

The political world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is winning the primary by pandering to the fringe before pivoting to the centre for the run-off. Mamdani played the first stage perfectly. He won the Democratic nomination by assembling a coalition of the resentful.

Less than a third of New York City’s registered Democrats voted in the primary. Mamdani won 43.5% of their votes. That’s just 12.9% of New York’s Democrats.

Who were Mamdani’s primary voters? Mr. Minority underperformed among African Americans, Latinos and other aficionados of al fresco burrito consumption. He also failed to charm the over-50s, and white working-class voters who use their hands for more than eating rice.

That, the political analyst Daniel Greenfield argues, leaves “white hipsters and Muslim immigrants” as Mamdani’s core supporters. The changing demography of New York City means that these two groups are thick on the ground. And there are plenty of disenchanted and digitally brainwashed “As-a-Jews” in that hipster demographic.

The corruption of the New York Democratic Party did the rest. After the October 7 massacres, Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor who won in 2021, showed all the moral clarity that Sadiq Khan lacks. But Adams was derailed by federal corruption charges last September. The charges were dropped but Adams’ popularity has not recovered.

Adams is now running as an Independent. So is Andrew Cuomo. The scion of a Democratic dynasty and an ex-governor of New York State, Cuomo resigned in 2021 amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment. His charges were dropped, too. Cuomo is now trying to relaunch as New York City’ next mayor.

A third Democrat, the impeccably liberal Brad Lander – community organiser, Reform Jew, ex-Democratic Socialists of America – won the endorsement of the New York Times’ editorial board. Given the Times’ sense of judgement, you know what happened next. Lander crashed on 11.31% in the primary – splitting the vote just enough to ensure that Cuomo (36.42%) came in second to Mamdani (43.51%).

Cuomo is staying in the race as an Independent. That gives November’s voters a choice between two machine pols of virtue so dubious that they can no longer be Democrats (Adams and Cuomo), a token Republican (the red beret-wearing Curtis Sliwa, founder of the anti-crime vigilantes the Guardian Angels) – and Mamdani.

When we talk of “virtue signaling”, we forget that the virtue of the in-group is only half the signal. The other half of the signal – the half that really excites its audience – is virtue’s opposite, the vice of the out-group.

There has never been an out-group further out than the Jews in the Christian West. There has never been an out-group further in than the Jews of New York City. History shows that Jewish success is no defence. History shows that Jewish success breeds the politics of envy.

The socialist revolution begins by calling the Jews “capitalism”. Islamism spices up the old recipe. Like they teach at Bowdoin, Israel is now the class enemy among the nations.

Cuomo may win in November as the least-worst option. But Mamdani’s breakthrough confirms that this is no longer your grandmother Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party – and no longer the New York we thought we knew.

Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Wall Street Journal and Free Press contributor, a Washington Examiner columnist and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Center for the Study of America and the West.