27 Jun NYC: Same Democrats, New Wrapper
The general consensus among political observers – and right-leaning observers, in particular – is that this week’s “shocking” primary election results in New York’s mayoral race are reminiscent of the 2016 Republican presidential primary results. The establishment has been stunned and rebuked. Rank-and-file voters are tired of the status quo from their party. They’re looking for fresh ideas and fresh faces, and they have settled on those offered by a political outsider whose radicalism is appealing. Or, as The Washington Post’s token conservative/libertarian, Megan McArdle put it, “Looking at the Biden debacle and the Mamdani victory, I’m wondering if we aren’t seeing a Democratic implosion like the GOP one of 2016. Voters unhappy with the establishment, refusing to support the folks who think it’s their turn, turning to charismatic outsiders who make wild promises.”
I hate to keep picking on Ms. McArdle (which I also did a few weeks ago, and whom I generally like and respect), but this just strikes me as wrong.
For starters, Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump are both scions of well-to-do families, but that’s, largely, where their similarities end. Before running for office, Trump was a success in business and in entertainment. Mamdani, by contrast, was a failure in both. He barely even held a real job and was a hopelessly disastrous rapper. Mamdani did win an award once for music production, but it was for the soundtrack of a film his mother directed. Moreover, before running for President, Trump was a true outsider, a political neophyte who’d never held office or been much involved in partisan politics. Indeed, his partisan affiliation had, famously, been rather malleable. This was not the case with Mamdani. He immersed himself in partisan politics almost immediately upon graduation from college. He volunteered to work on a campaign in 2015 and was involved in electoral politics, working in or running others’ campaigns, for the next five years. In 2020, he was elected in his own right to the New York State Assembly, representing the state’s 36th district. Mamdani may be an “outsider,” in that neither he nor his dad was the governor of New York (unlike his primary opponent, Andrew Cuomo), but he is, nevertheless, politically obsessive and has been part of New York City’s electoral politics for most of his adult life.
And speaking of Andrew Cuomo, Trump and Mamdani also differ from one another in the type of opponents they overcame in their respective races. Mamdani beat a tired, old, scandal-plagued, establishment hack. And while it might be tempting to note that Donald Trump did too, that’s not comparatively relevant. Trump beat his tired, old, scandal-plagued, establishment hack in the general election. In the primary, he beat, among others, the wildly successful Republican governors of Florida and Wisconsin; a well-known, well-liked, and highly respected black neurosurgeon; and two young, charismatic Hispanic U.S. Senators from the two most populous Republican states. Trump beat a really, really talented field. Mamdani beat the guy who killed grandma during the pandemic and made unwanted passes at every other woman in the state. That’s not the same.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the question of Mamdani’s “anti-establishment” bona fides. I will concede that the guy is anti-establishment in his temperament and deportment, but in terms of policy, he represents nothing new or original or even interesting. Indeed, he represents the same old, same old remarkably well.
First, there is the question of Zohran Mamdani’s “socialism.” What he believes here, and what he proposes, is hardly new. Everything in his policy arsenal is about as “old-school,” Euro-socialist as it gets. He wants to raise taxes on the rich and provide more “free” services for the poor. (Never heard that before!) He wants to governmental-ize various services in order to cut out the “profiteers” and enable cost reductions. (Obamacare says, “hi!”) He wants to circumvent “capitalism” to make everything better, fairer, and more wonderful, but he doesn’t know exactly how any of that would work in practice. Even when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez promised to do all of this in 2018, it wasn’t new. Nor was it new when Bernie Sanders promised to do all of it while running for president in 2016. And nor, for that matter, was it new when Elizabeth Warren promised to do it all when running for the Senate in 2012. It’s all so old and so tired that it’s hackneyed. Heck, it was hackneyed in 1968, when Bobby Kennedy ran on similar ideas.
As for the ideas that Mamdani embraces on social policy matters, they may be of more recent vintage than his economic ideas, but that’s not to say that they’re especially anti-establishment. Indeed, on LGBTQ matters, his views are nearly identical to those of the last Democratic presidential nominee. (And she was the Vice President of the United States for four years before that.) His rabid antisemitism/pro-Palestinianism is and long has been the standard in American academia, which has also long been a mainstay of the Democratic establishment. Edward Said began writing speeches for Yasser Arafat more than half a century ago and published his paradigm-altering magnum opus just a few years later. When it comes to Israel, the Palestinians, and antisemitic “social justice” more generally, Mamdani’s views are perfectly in line with the Democratic establishment. If anything, Joe Biden was the outsider – and was, even as Vice President.
Again, all of this makes Mamdani’s political rise radically different from Donald Trump’s. As I noted in these pages just two weeks ago, Trump really was anti-establishment in 2016, when he staked his claim to the Republican presidential nomination on his unique and utter repudiation of the party’s longstanding foreign policy position and on his attack on the family that was largely responsible for that position, a family that practically defined the party establishment.
To be sure, Trump has taken advantage of trends in the populace and the conservative establishment more generally (see here, for example), but on the two defining issues of his presidencies – forever wars and immigration – he created the trends. There is not “Never Mamdani” movement like there is a NeverTrump movement, largely because Democratic public officials, in general, don’t find his policies all that problematic. Certainly, they don’t find them as problematic as NeverTrumpers found/find Trump’s.
All of this carries over to the constituencies that voted for Mamdani and Trump. While Mamdani won among college-educated, white middle-class voters, and lost among minorities and blue-collar workers, Trump expanded his party’s appeal to minorities and workers. Trump brought new voters to the party. Mamdani won a highly localized campaign among Democratic stalwarts.
On the surface, Trump and Mamdani may appear to be two sides of the same coin, but that’s an illusion. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is a unique force in American politics. Zohran Mamdani is not. He’s a standard Democrat in a shiny new wrapper.
