YOU SONS AND YOUR DAUGHTERS ARE BEYOND YOUR COMMAND.

Regular readers know I lived most of my life in New York and love it in the bittersweet way of exile. So the mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani delights me. One reason is that he has been opposed by the worst people alive – not just rich fucks in the city, but also reactionaries across the country and even around the world, as seen in Rod Dreher’s dispatch from whatever European foodie tour he’s presently on. 

Dreher claims that “the parts of the city that voted Mamdani are the whitest, [and] those that voted Cuomo are, for the most part, the most non-white,” not because it portrays reality (Mamdani took Harlem, Lefferts Gardens, Fort Greene, Crown Heights, Cypress Hills for fuck’s sake – Cuomo took the Upper East Side by double digits!) but because “Liberals Are The Real Racists” is part of his shtick. Speaking of racism, as one always must when considering Dreher, the thing is titled “Mamdani's Big Apple Intifada,” and contains this:

New York City is home to about one million Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jews on the planet. And the city has now, in effect, elected a mayor who embraces the slogan “globalize the intifada.” 

Bullllllshit.

Jonathan Chait explains why this is a problem:

Ah ha ha ha ha. Not only Dreher but the whole Prestige Press tried to make Mamdani’s support for the tormented Palestinians into a synonym for antisemitism, notwithstanding his considerable Jewish support, not least meaningfully from his fellow candidate Brad Lander (which of course Dreher does not acknowledge). So one of the beauties of this victory is that the ancient trick of conflating less-than-total support of Israeli foreign policy with the Holocaust looks less surefire than before. (Tubby’s and Netanyahu’s recent bombing spree may have helped there.)  The boys at Commentary must be chewing the carpet. 

So must be the Prestige Press, who were running headlines like “Cuomo leads Mamdani by 14 points in survey ahead of NYC primary voting” on election day.  They wanted to take him down bad. 

They won’t learn. Will the Democrats? Mamdani’s program, as he eloquently lays it out, is hardly collectivist, and mostly common-sense reform for a city that’s been mugging the shit out of its poor and middle-class people and turning their money over to billionaires for decades. Like the man says, “there are far too many New Yorkers who do not know if they will be able to call themselves that next year, who do not know if they will be able to afford their rent, or their child care, their groceries, or even their MetroCard.” If you’re panicking over a rent freeze and free buses, you’re not on his side – nor on the side of the people who gave him victory, which used to be considered the core Democratic constituency, back before neoliberal trimmers turned politics into a game to see who can deliver the least for their constituents.

Much has been made of the sex pest angle — that voters (as opposed to pundits) were disinclined to forgive and forget the scandals that drove Cuomo from the statehouse. It makes some sense — Bill Clinton’s endorsement seems not to have helped Cuomo, and Anthony Weiner lost his comeback race too. It makes still more sense in context: these guys’ antique attitudes toward women are part and parcel of their whole moldy worldview. People are catching on and I’m beginning to think that all the stupid Democratic rearguard sabotage, with elderly timeservers driving out or squelching their best young talent, is not in fact the insurmountable obstacle it sometime appears, but one that’s now starting to crumble. 

I particularly liked Tish James, who brought Tubby to justice, reading Mamdani's opposition for filth in the video above. Lap it up, comrades!