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Zohran Mamdani offers a terrifying glimpse into the future of Left-wing politics
If it can happen in New York, it can happen anywhere. Last night, Democrats in the second most Jewish place on Earth, home to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Woody Allen and pastrami on rye, elected a Corbynite mayoral candidate who has defended the slogan 'globalise the intifada'.
Zohran Mamdani, the proud 33-year-old socialist who was born in Uganda and worked as a rap music producer before turning to politics, pulled off a traumatic political upset when he beat the former state governor and moderate frontrunner Andrew Cuomo to win the nomination.
Until recently, Mamdani, who only became an American citizen in 2018, was all but unknown to most New Yorkers. After all, this was the city of mayor Eric Adams, the pugnacious supporter of Israel whose popularity only collapsed after he was indicted on federal charges including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations last year, all of which he denies. In hard-Left circles, however, the Mamdani was fast becoming a poster boy.
The photogenic son of a professor of post-colonial studies at Columbia University ran on a platform of free universal childcare, free buses, a rent freeze and – you guessed it – condemning the Middle East's only democracy, which he has lavishly accused of 'genocide'.
Predictably enough, the emetic Mamdani campaign has been fuelled by umpteen vacuous TikTok videos, together with endorsements from the usual coalition of socialist dinosaurs like Bernie Sanders and airhead celebrities like model and activist Emily Ratajkowski and comedian Bowen Yang (who once put his name to a 'queers for Palestine' letter). 'This is not just about New York, this is about the Democratic Party,' Ratajkowski said in a video with Mamdani. 'It's about the hope that we have that there is a belief that people can win elections, and not just money.' Pass the sick bag.
Here was yet another expression of the unifying power of Palestine on the Left, which has somehow become the meeting-point of narcissistic progressive posturing, eyepopping sexual experimentation, race radicalism, petulant teenage rebellion, climate fanaticism, Cold-War era anti-capitalism, and amongst some the venomous cause of global jihad and the sheer hatred of Jews.
With the murder of two Israeli diplomats in Washington DC in May, the adolescent rage turned deadly. With the invasion of RAF Brize Norton this month, it crept in the direction of terror. And on both sides of the Atlantic, from Leicester South to Manhattan, it is becoming increasingly political.
There is no shortage of irony here. As one Jewish-American writer put it: 'I hope this puts to rest the notion that Jews control politics. We couldn't even elect a non-antisemite in the most Jewish city in America.'
Clearly, if you thought the Democrats had begun to learn the lessons of their drubbing by Donald Trump last year, you were wrong. There could have been no louder howl of American rage at the ultra-progressive agenda than the 2024 presidential election.
New York, that most liberal of cities, has turned itself into a battleground for the soul of the Democrats. Partly, of course, this is generational: many of Mamdani's voters were young zealots who took on the old guard and crucified them. But in the bigger picture, it is a battle between the ideologues and the pragmatists. And the ideologues are winning.
Wherever you look in the West, the same pattern is playing out. A small number of hardened Islamists and their fellow travellers are reaching for the levers of power over the heads of the bovine silent majority. With the moderates on their own side unable to muster anything other than appeasement, the tide is turning by increments.
History is not always written by the masses. It can be written by the fanatics. With our democratic traditions unable to compensate for the rampant radicalism and apathy muting our immune systems, we are watching our societies slip away.
