Zohran Mamdani's ‘radical ingratitude' to the city and nation that gave him everything

New York Post

5 days ago

So many brash and contradictory assertions have been hurled at the Democrat's shiny new mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, that his nickname should be 'Notorious Z.'
Is Mamdani the youthful, charismatic face of the future for the Democratic Party?
Is he a gift to the Republicans?
Is he, as some conservatives insist, a communist?
I am here to answer all questions.
A pretty basic question concerns Mamdani's qualifications for office. He's 33, with a degree from Bowdoin on 'Africana' — which, on the face of it, doesn't bode well for the city.
He was an unsuccessful rapper, so at least there's that. For the last four years, he's been a state assemblyman from Queens with a perfectly virginal record of achievement.
In fairness, New York's recent mayors haven't exactly dazzled the world with their leadership.
Back in the day, Rudy Giuliani could take credit for breaking the mafia. Michael Bloomberg kept the wolves of Wall Street well-fed.
But Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams play-acted the role of mayor and hoped for the best — which, alas, rarely came about.
Voters chose Mamdani despite his lack of qualifications for a good reason. The Democratic Party today resembles a dark crypt out of Edgar Allan Poe, full of rotten and disgusting things.
The front-runner in the race for mayor, according to everybody, was a repulsive creature from the crypt, Andrew Cuomo.
Voters went for Mamdani because at least he's alive and all too human.
But is he really a communist?
He calls himself a Democratic Socialist, which is a contradiction in terms, but some of his proposals seem to leave Bernie Sanders behind and move him closer to Fidel Castro.
Famously, he plans to build a city-owned grocery store in every borough, on the Cuban model. Whether the ration cards on which that model depends will go over well with New Yorkers is an interesting question.
Mamdani has also said that he's intent on 'seizing the means of production,' which sounds alarmingly like he wants to invade China.
I think he's just spouting Marxist boilerplate because, to college-educated Millennials, those words possess an irresistibly transgressive charm.
Mamdani isn't a Lenin-style communist. He's more of a Picasso-style communist.
The renowned modern painter, Pablo Picasso, was a member of the Communist Party, even though he lived in a stately chateau near the Mediterranean, attended by his women, with millions in the bank.
It never entered Picasso's mind that the vanguard of the proletariat would confiscate his property or redistribute his money to the needy.
He was a communist for a singular purpose: to signal to the world his irreconcilable loathing of the system that had rewarded him with fame and bounty.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, Picasso's compatriot, coined a phrase for this mindset: 'radical ingratitude.'
Mamdani comes from a wealthy family. His mother is a prominent film director — an industry not known for its generous sharing instincts.
His father is 'Herbert Lehman Professor of Government' at Columbia — that would be Herbert Lehman, as in the Lehman Brothers banking family.
Mamdani is a child of privilege who's eager to denounce the capitalist society in which he enjoys wealth and status without having lifted a finger to earn either.
It's the best of both worlds. He condemns everything but surrenders nothing.
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And since he's an immigrant of non-Western origins, his condemnations will thrill white progressives desperately seeking to atone for their genetic racism and colonialism — a racket first invented a generation ago by Edward Said, a Palestinian professor whom Mamdani's father befriended at Columbia.
The mayoral candidate's actual communist principles are extremely simple to explain — an 8-year-old could understand them.
The political goal is a kind of universal equality, but when Mamdani turns his leveling gaze on New York, all he sees is disparity.
Some people own apartment blocks while others have to pay rent for apartments. That must be fixed.
Some people are in jail while others wander around at will. That's surely an injustice.
Some students get A's while others get F's. That's just plain racism.
Who decides what amount to pay for goods and services? Why does anyone have to pay at all? Why not tax 'richer and whiter neighborhoods' and make lots of stuff free?
Or even better, why not make the city a billionaire-free zone?
Mamdani is too soft-headed to be a Stalinist. He won't start a gulag at Riker's and fill it with the super-rich.
But a New York that refuses, on principle, to distinguish between property rights and government power, or economic reality and frat house fantasy, or excellence and mediocrity, won't resemble the socialist utopia of Millennial imaginings but rather a lunatic free-for-all devoid of any law but that of the jungle.
There'll be no need for a violent purge of billionaires — they will self-deport to Palm Beach within minutes of Mamdani's inauguration.
New Jersey will boom with relocated supermarkets, gas stations, and investment firms. The New York Stock Exchange will escape under the cover of darkness to Jersey City.
And when crooks and malcontents take to the street, and Mayor Mamdani sends social workers to heal their souls, something fragile will break that can't easily be put back together.
Probably the most troubling questions surrounding Mamdani have to do with the implications for New York's 1.4 million Jews of his obsessive hostility to Israel.
He rejects — or, in Mamdani-speak, is 'not comfortable' with — Israel's identity as a Jewish state.
He has attacked that nation for being 'apartheid' and guilty of genocide in Gaza and elsewhere.
Since his days at Bowdoin, he has actively promoted a boycott of Israeli exports.
While all of this can be dismissed as a stereotypical leftist attitude, with Mamdani it seems to slide into tolerance, and possibly support, of violent 'anti-Zionist' groups.
When asked to repudiate the 'globalize the intifada' movement, which often targets American Jews, he pointedly refused to do so.
Is Mamdani an antisemite?
Not in a 20th-century sense. We shouldn't worry that he'll be unleashing the brownshirts or leading pogroms in Crown Heights.
But the line between political anti-Zionism and cultural antisemitism, American Jews have learned, is faint and shifting.
Whenever Israel acts in a way that is hated by the left, Mamdani, as mayor, is certain to make inflammatory statements.
And if anti-Zionist night riders should decide to punish Hasidic neighborhoods for Israel's sins, I doubt he'll bother to send out the cops, or even social workers, to restrain them.
Our last question, I'm sorry to report, involves the terrifying political monster that for years has fed on leftist brains — I mean, of course, Donald Trump.
Because both men are supposedly charismatic and play well with social media, Mamdani has been put forward by some as the Democrats' younger, cooler answer to Trump. Can this be true?
Well, Trump is a successful building magnate who ran for president three times, won twice and changed the politics of the country and the world.
Mamdani won the nomination to run for mayor. Comparisons strike me as a bit hasty.
Here's another way to look at the matter.
Trump was a celebrity who entered politics as a neophyte. Mamdani is a neophyte who went into politics to become a celebrity.
The two men are in fact mirror images of one another.
The difference boils down to one of scale.
Trump used his status as an amateur politician to build a national movement based on anti-establishment principles. Mamdani's reach, even in New York, will hinge entirely on the answer to the trivia question: 'How many socialist hipsters can be found in the United States of America?'
That answer, I'm reasonably sure, is 'Not enough.'