New York City Lab-Tests Identitarian Intersectional Car Crash Dummy

Zohran Mamdani's candidacy is a joke to everyone but his supporters

Old New York is gone. Every classic metropolitan has left the city center, taking their taxable wealth with them. The new Manhattanite is younger, alienated by high rents, victims of elite overproduction. Progressive left politics has always built its promises on the young and diverse, and for once, the primary victory of “South Asian” Zohran Mamdani realized this supposed demographic destiny. He won his party primary on a promise to levy greater taxes on the rich, white people who have already fled New York.

Only after securing the nomination did we learn that Mamdani claimed to be both “Asian” and “Black or African American” on his application to Columbia University. His excuses notwithstanding, Mamdani’s supporters beclown themselves by defending the indefensible. Mamdani posts video clips of himself eating with his fingers, Third world-style, to the derision of Third world immigrants who can spot a fake. Mamdani comes from privileged, cultural elite parents: an Ivy League academic father who hates America, a mother who makes Disney movies. He has never had a real job, but all the education he wants. Mamdani is an avatar of his most fanatical supporters, right down to the identitarian fraud. Saturday Night Live could not possibly satirize Mamdani — he is self-satire.

Mayor Eric Adams may yet overcome Mamdani. If that does happen, New Yorkers will have come to their senses about communist grocery redistribution schemes. Adams complained about the Biden administration’s immigration policy and got indicted for it. If Adams does win, the ‘silent majority’ principle will have overcome the activist mysticism of the hip urban left. I am not holding my breath, however.

Mamdani’s “energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently — and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way,” Ruy Teixeira writes at the Liberal Patriot. “But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and ‘the Squad’ were in the aftermath of the 2018 election — and we saw how well that worked out.” Inevitable policy disasters in Manhattan, such as the predictable results of police defunding in favor of therapeutic ‘solutions’ to crime, will galvanize national opposition to progressive policy solutions in general. Welcome back to the 1970s.

Teixeira points to the perennial Democratic Party faith in the inevitability of a progressive youth generation. This almost-millennarian expectationalism goes back to the passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971, ostensibly so that the young people could correct the mistakes of their elders. Instead, they voted very much like their elders with disappointing consistency.

During the 21st century, young voters have trended left. But this situation reversed itself in November 2024, splitting the youth vote in the middle and portending a long-term trend away from the Democratic Party as well as the cultural progressivism that is its wellspring of support among the young. Mamdani is renewing faith in the “chimera” of a rising generation, to use Teixeira’s word, prolonging the delusion that Democrats can count on a future progressive majority.

The texts that progressive political activists were using decades ago provide a window on these expectations. For example, here is a book that was given to me at Netroots Nation, the largest conference of online progressive activists and organizers in the world, in 2009, one year after publication. Retailing for $20 on Amazon, Generation We was provided for free in my souvenir tote bag. The authors had completed a detailed survey of the “Millennial generation” and concluded that a “green new deal” style agenda would forever attach this new cohort of youth to the political party and movement which championed said agenda (HINT: THEY MEANT DEMOCRATS).

The most interesting thing about Generation We is that ‘gender’ barely even gets mentioned, and ‘dender identity’ not even once. At the time, that word, gender, still referred to sex difference, meaning women, who are always an afterthought in Democratic politics.

Referring to a study of the 2004 national elections, Eric Greenberg and Karl Weber note that “Millennials” reject mandatory traditional sex roles and stereotypes, preferring that government actively ensure equal treatment for “women” on the job. Women already outperformed men in academia and outnumbered them in critical fields, such as law and medicine and education, the authors announced. “But it is their views on sexual preference issues that are perhaps the most strikingly liberal.” Yet this generational goal was realized in 2015 with the Obergefell decision, just six years after I received my copy of the book.

Notably, there is no mention of transgender people or puberty blockers in Generation We. Instead, the authors write that “Millennials are ready to consider themselves a part of a planetary humankind not divided by race, religion, or national boundaries, but ready to accept differences in beliefs and values in exchange for progress, peace, and a better life for all.” They are the future Utopia, in this Climatist gospel, which reads like theosophy because that’s what it is.

The ‘progressive generation’ is in fact an ad hoc issue coalition that has changed over time in hopes of attracting the youngest voters in such a mass that the conservative olds won’t matter anymore. It is not a demographic destination for America, nor a natural home for minorities. Its values are expressed in the checklist of the progressive omnicause and they reflect the high level of education among what is actually a very white demographic. This is reflected in Mamdani’s overperformance in white boroughs and underperformance in black boroughs.

At The New York Times, Michael Lange identifies a “commie corridor,” the habitat of a “young and hungry leftist base reshaping politics in New York City, stretching from Astoria south to Sunset Park.” Mamdaniland does not reflect the larger country in which it lives. David Hogg also personifies the same values, but he has no identity characteristics to protect him from intraparty rivalries. Mamadani’s identity characteristics, now exposed as a poor basis for awarding political office, let alone patronage, are his sole claim to deserve either.

Andrew Cuomo was the establishment candidate, and worse yet, he was hated by the rising generation of Democrats that wants to take over the party and achieve their grand designs for Maoist cultural reorganization. As Teixeira says, the only lesson that Democrats nationwide should learn from Mamdani is that it pays to run against the party elites. He certainly does not represent the interests of the ‘working class.’ As Teixeira explained in separate essay recently, Mamdani’s fusion of economic populism with “cultural radicalism” repeats the mistake that Democrats made in 2024. The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party is trying to direct the broader culture instead of following the culture.

“To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are,” Teixeira writes. AoC and Mamdani cannot fight the elites while they are seen as the elites. Their base “is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professionals-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power.”

The people Zohran Mamdani blames for inequality, that he wants to tax harder than other people, are not really in charge of us, anymore. The people who actually do rule us are simply claiming what they consider already theirs. The identitarian car-crash of Mamdani’s CV may not derail him from the path to the mayor’s office, but it will serve very well to remind Americans outside New York City just why they loathe their Manhattanite elites so much.

“Last election, it was all the gender stuff, the insistence that men can have babies and such, and now I fear that ‘we like the terrorists’ is the new this,” Bill Maher complained of Democrats following the youth vote in May. “Liberals need to push back on the dumb ideas that come from their children.” See, for example, Mamdani’s proposal to “remove enforcement of traffic violations from the NYPD and place it under the purview of DOT” in order to “end racially biased traffic stops.”

This will require automated enforcement, of course, so Mamdani will crack down on false license plates by having DOT send the fines to whatever fake address goes with the fake tag. It all makes perfect sense to anyone who still thinks defunding the police is a great idea.

Likewise, Palestine preoccupies the young Democrats, but no one else. It is a marginal issue that has become orthodoxy in a party desperate to keep its putative lock on the youth vote. “The Democrats’ problem is that the energy of the party is with the young, and the young are with the terrorists. That’s not good,” Maher worried. Zohran Mamdani contains everything that makes the actual rising generation of Democrats so dangerous for the party’s future.