“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/ for trying to change the system from within/ I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them/ First we conquered Manhattan, then we conquered Berlin.” Composer Leonard Cohen wrote the verse in 1987, for a song he defined as a tribute to “our terrorists, Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein”. Zohran Mamdani would be born just four years later, but his triumph seems to many to be confirmation: only radicalism saves.
Trump suffered series of defeats last Tuesday, a reflection of the free fall in his approval rating since his inauguration (from +18% to -1% among whites, from -8% to -37% among Hispanics and from -37% to -76% among blacks).. Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey are part of the poll equation. New York, however, has revealed the strategic option that divides Democrats: Cuomo, centrist pragmatism, or Mamdani, the turn to the left. The result is feverishly interpreted as a lesson.
A year ago, Trump received the highest vote in the city for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, reaching 30% of the vote. On the eve of the municipal election, the president abandoned his party’s candidate to endorse Cuomo, against the “leftist lunatic” Mamdani.
On a superficial reading, it was intended to help choose the “lesser evil”. A second reading suggests a more sophisticated maneuver: as his support is seen as kryptonite by the majority of Democratic voters, the intention would be to incinerate the centrist in order to display Mamdani’s face as the face of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Mamdani describes himself as a “democratic socialist”. In 2020, in the wake of street protests against the murder of George Floyd, he described the New York police as “racist, anti-queer and a threat to public safety”, calling for the “defunding” of the municipal police department. Since then, he has apologized and assured that he repudiates those opinions. Democrats, centrists or leftists, correctly concluded that their identity policies have failed, paving the way for Trump’s return to the White House. But the consensus ends there.
Trump’s nationalist and reactionary populism has reclaimed a working class despised by the post-Marxist “new left.” Bernie Sanders, the Democratic candidate defeated by Hillary Clinton, never tires of proposing the restoration of the “old left”: the fight for social and economic rights. Mamdani’s campaign, packed with the color of Bollywood films and driven by flocks of young people engaged on social media, offered a contemporary packaging for an old concept: economic populism.
Freezing rents for one million apartments, free transport and municipal daycare centers, subsidized public markets – the promises constitute a program that is as bold as it is risky. Its costs, Mamdani did not hide, will be covered by a sharp increase in taxes. The image of Jeremy Corbyn, the British socialist who enchanted the Labor Party until leading it, in 2019, to the most humiliating electoral defeat since 1935 will have emerged in the memory of more than a few democrats.
Mamdani cannot run for president, but he challenged Trump: “turn up the volume.” Manhattan, first, then the USA. The Democratic left doubles its bet.
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