Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary for mayor in New York City has national Democrats all in a tizzy. Democrat George Latimer told CNN, “It’s going to be tough for front-liners because they’re in districts that have a lot of Republicans in it that would look at a Democrat and want to hear the narrative, ‘Oh, this guy’s radical.’”
The remnants of the old Bill Clinton coalition, Third Way Democrats, claim that Mamdani has “ideas so extreme… that they sound like they were cooked up in the offices of a Trump-aligned ad maker.” They particularly hated the "defund the police" plank of Mamdani's platform.
But many of the candidates' most radical ideas were just fine with Democrats last year. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden dropped out, espoused "defunding the police,” state-funded gender-affirmation treatment, and "re-examining” ICE to one degree or another.
The fact is, Mamdani represents the young, hip, modern Democratic Party. Political sage Michael Barone calls Mamdani supporters the "Barista proletariat."
According to Barone, writing in the New York Sun, the Barista Proletariat is "made up of people with temporary jobs in service industries, nonprofit organizations or media, perpetual grad students or adjunct lecturers who supplement their incomes often by gaming welfare systems and working off the books."
"You could see them as economic parasites on Manhattan’s rich finance and media wealth," Barone adds.
Indeed, Mamdani's promises of government goodies galore have these Gen Xers and Gen Zers swooning.
Matt Taibbi writes, "it's comical watching [Washington Post writer] Philip Bump and others wringing hands about 'liberal excesses' when for years they wrapped arms all the way around far nuttier ideas than state grocery stores."
It’s comedy is of the Claude-Rains-Shocked, shocked variety. Through the Trump era national Democrats worked hard to shoot themselves in the face (or balls, in the case of Tim Walz) with “potential red-state voters.” The pattern is consistent. When a wedge issue seizes media attention, Democrats flock to whatever side Trump is not occupying and do the righteous-shriek from scripts prepared by the most glue-addled activists available. “It’s time to abolish ICE” appeared when Trump imposed a “zero-tolerance” border policy in 2018, while “Defund the police” was everywhere after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and so on. Time passes after each case, and the party is slow first to realize, then admit these positions cause political damage — after which it sends spokesgoons on media tours to renounce them. Here’s Biden campaign flack Cedric Richmond repudiating “defund”:
The tragedy (from the Democrats' point of view) is that they keep doing the same thing over and over, getting on their soapbox, railing against Donald Trump as if they had no idea what he stood for, and trying to convince the American people their government is in mortal danger.
Meanwhile, 60% of the people are scratching their heads in a perplexed manner, wondering what the Democrats are getting so excited about.
As the American voter moves farther toward the center-right, Democrats keep thinking their salvation lies in moving farther and farther left. Should we tell them when they're about ready to fall off the cliff?
The Democrats are in a state of denial so profound that they've lost all sense of what is radical and what isn't.
I bring this up because although Mamdani’s free-ride economics likely will be damaging to the party nationally, especially if they flop, Democrats already screwed themselves a thousandfold harder by spending the Trump years on-boarding the much weirder and more disturbing social mantras of the academic left, which include those constant efforts to “center” race and gender that annoy just about everyone. Often (as in the case of Hillary’s mid-campaign broadsides against Sanders) these decisions have appeared more reactive than strategic, with Democratic pols rushing to embrace notions about everything from trans sports to destigmatizing shoplifting to wearing kente cloth scarves, almost always in the midst of a media mania. This has led the public to associate Democrats with everything from Indigenous Land Acknowlegements to Emotional Support Peacocks to Woke Snow White, and the party certainly suffered (and will continue to suffer) far more from those hegemonic social irritants than Mamdani’s proposals for subsidized eggs or free bus rides.
The Democrats are in a state beyond "disarray." They've been hit with a disintegration beam from a ray gun, and their atoms are losing cohesion, blowing away in the wind.
They have no clue how to escape from their own "riot of conceits," as R. Emmett Tyrrell referred to the Democrats' beliefs. They're trapped in their own contradictions without a way out.
It's a wilderness of their own making and they can't find a way back.
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