Or is it the American People?
The U.S. is still reverberating from the stunning success of Zohran Mamdani, a thirty-three-year-old Muslim and a member of the New York State Assembly since 2021, in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City.
He easily toppled the lack-luster and troublesome centrist Andrew Cuomo, and his victory has, predictably, unleashed a torrent of Islamophobic slurs, death threats, and general dismay, with Republicans scrambling to figure out the best way to nullify him, and the old-guard national Democrats fretting like a bunch of woolly mastodons that they might have to join the twenty-first century.
A self-described Democratic Socialist, he ran an energetic, engaged, and media-savvy campaign, promising to make NYC affordable for working-class New Yorkers, after cleverly questioning Trump voters in the city, and discovering that Trump’s promise of bringing down prices was the main metric driving their support.
(That these supporters could ignore the threat of Project 2025, Trump’s criminality in the Stormy Daniels case and his conviction for sexual assault, and his inciting an insurrection, fed by his great, big beautiful lie about the “stolen” 2020 election, seemed to me at first like a breathtaking act of willful ignorance and gleeful, almost sadistic disregard of social norms, but I’ve changed my mind about that, of which more a bit later).
And how will Mamdani deliver on affordability? Free buses running in dedicated bus lanes, city-run non-profit grocery stores, a rent freeze, free childcare, were some very concrete campaign promises, benefits in part to be funded by taxing the wealthy. Mamdani means business, but not business as usual, noting that Trump, once elected, cynically dropped his promises; indeed set about making life more expensive and unpredictable for the masses.
Business leaders, sweating like pigs in a steam room, have gathered together to plan how to squelch his hopes of winning in November, even vowing to back the scandal-ridden Eric Adams as an independent. It’s like the whole capitalist bulwark has been breached and every billionaire on the Upper East Side is manning a pail.
Let’s be clear: Andrew Cuomo is mired in countless sexual assault allegations and ethics violations, and Eric Adams has been federally indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting political donations from a number of foreign nationals connected to the Turkish government.
It need hardly be stated that for Trump, Mamdani is “a 100% Communist lunatic”. And MAGA, in the form of the New York Young Republican Club, has called on Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to deport Mamdani in a post on X which would be laughable for its display of raw panic if it weren’t simply vile:
“The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke @ZohranKMamdani’s citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now—@StephenM and @RealTomHoman, New York is counting on you.”
Given what we’ve seen of Trump’s determination to rid the US of all who disagree with his coronation, who will bet that Miller and Homan won’t attempt this? Is the water boiling yet?
Canadians will notice something odd, however. Free childcare? Got that, pretty much. Free buses? We could talk about it. The TTC is due for a fare restructure. Rent freezes? Who knows what conversations will evolve around affordable housing?
None of these ideas is particularly radical to us. Americans are notoriously unsure of the meaning of socialism and communism; “Marxist” is their hysterical pejorative for, it seems, any kind of truth-telling in education. But Mamdani hasn’t called for the nationalization of anything, or jail sentences for CEO’s. What, might we ask, is the big deal?
In Canada, a democratic socialist country, we take suggestions like rent control and truthful education and free healthcare in our stride (we have our unsung national hero Tommy Douglas to thank for that last one).
That’s progressive, in the sense that we always want greater inclusivity, greater acknowledgement of those we’ve discounted; a widening of the circle of justice. The idea of removing an established right, as SCOTUS did with Roe v. Wade, is unthinkable and cruel.
Americans are unashamedly regressive. They’re jealous, miserly. They agonize over who might get rights that they’re not entitled to; who might get something for nothing. They think of rights as grudging awards for good behaviour, something you grant in bad faith out of your munificence but just as quickly deny as punishment. America doles out its rights like it’s Scrooge and everyone’s demanding a Christmas goose.
Americans are reconsidering some of their rash generosity. They insist rights are primarily for the white, the heterosexual, the male, so that those who’ve won those jackpots can feel justifiably deserving. Anyone else with the sheer gall to demand equal rights is, in their calculation, a con artist who diminishes the value of theirs. They’ve already taken out a woman’s right to bodily autonomy; soon marriage equality, scornfully misnamed “gay marriage” in the homophobic locution of the right, will be on the chopping block. I don’t need my bespoke Nostradamus robe to predict that one.
In the meantime they’ve disappeared trans persons just as effectively as if they’d bundled them into a van with bags over their heads. Trans people don’t fit the narrative. Trans children have to be protected against their own misguided feelings and wrongthink.
But Americans’ revulsion at the idea of someone—and not even a Christian, to add insult to injury—wanting to provide free childcare shows how hollow their solicitude for the children really is; how it very much masks the right’s agenda.
Children are just the hostages, shoved forward like human shields to distract us from the determined assault on human rights and render any objection impossible; trans persons, the most publicly abused and vulnerable members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, are the terrified proxies for all queer folx.
Americans have always been kingmakers, bestowing not rights but privileges which rely on the whims and mood of the powerful, privileges which can be withdrawn if the marginalized aren’t suitably grateful, or for no reason at all: if the current kingmakers didn’t get their cup of coffee with an After Eight mint.
Their aspiration to a republican democracy is fake. They’re fine with kings, as long as they get to choose them.
I guess it’s the economy
It’s become axiomatic that Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom. He’s voracious for power, but the floodgate of power first had to be opened for him. Why would anyone do this?
This is the question that no one is dwelling on, because it cuts to the core of an economic system that doesn’t produce inequality as an unfortunate byproduct: it is built on the necessity of inequality.
The question concerns how a majority of Americans—oh, not the young Queens-dwellers, not the progressives in New York City, the A O-C’s and their ilk, but a majority of Americans, could have ignored the fall-out from Trump’s first term and his subsequent judging by more than one jury of his peers and, not even holding their noses, thought all of that inconsequential.
The majority of Americans ignored due process, the rule of law, loathsome character, sexual depravity, and said, it’s the economy, stupid.
And I’m fairly certain that most Americans aren’t dumb, despite the dumbing down of everything (the glib rewrite of American history, the new invisibility of the queer and gender-diverse); Americans aren’t all hateful, though their federal leaders currently are (witness the town halls with Americans in flyover country demanding that wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia be returned: there is human decency there and an understanding, however muddled, of something being amiss. Unfortunately, they don’t get that due process isn’t something only photogenic “innocent victims” are entitled to; those accused of crimes, which, it seems could be anyone now that even contrary opinions have been criminalized, need it, too).
This is where I changed my mind. It seems a kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of economic desperation is at play, here, whereby the working class, debt-ridden, underpaid, buying groceries on credit, unable to think beyond the end of the month, gasping for air as they barely maintain their grim status quo, get bumper sticker politics quoted at them so they can fool themselves that they’re engaged.
Due process? Constitutional crises? Politicizing the DOJ? Mind-games for the elite. If your kids are hungry, if you’re hungry, you’re not thinking of anything but dragging yourself to Walmart for another shift, driving your Uber for another twelve hours, then putting something like dinner on the table. You collapse into bed for a few hours’ sleep, you rise, exhausted, to start another day. That’s your life, baby, but don’t worry, soon you’ll be a billionaire. Just work harder!
Economically desperate people will turn to anyone, no matter how ludicrous, criminal or false, if they’ll just be promised a bit of respite, some ease from the grind of never getting ahead, the grind of two or three shit jobs; the grind of paying a mortgage because everyone believes the American dream means you have to, at least, own a house.
You’ll believe Trump because he promises lower prices; all Kamala promised was democracy.
Will Zohran Mamdani be the catalyst for change? The final crack in the capitalist façade? It’s too good to be believed. He represents a temporary thorn in the side of the powerful. He’s innocent, guileless. He has the idealism of the pure at heart, the courage of the holy fool.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid, terribly afraid, that he will have to be stopped.
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