The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor is widely hailed as a political setback for President Donald Trump across the global commentariat. European pundits describe it as a sign that populism, triumphant for the past few years, may be peaking out.
At first glance pundits may seem to have hit the bull’s eye.
Mamdani represents anti-Trumpism in many ways.
He is a Muslim while one of Trump’s first moves in his first term as president was to ban citizens of seven Muslim majority countries from travelling to the US. Mamdani describes himself as a duodecimal Shi’ite, which brackets him with what Trump regards as an especially challenging brand of religion. The fact that in Tehran official media has hailed Mamdani’s “victory” reinforces that impression.
The new mayor is also unabashedly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian to the point of threatening to have Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he arrives in the Big Apple. (Needless to say, he can’t because that is above his paygrade.)
At a time that Trump is waging a campaign against “too much immigration”, legal or illegal, Mamdani, who became a US citizen recently, would have difficulty claiming that he is “one of us” as MAGA supporters define.
Mamdani has been congratulated by almost all of Trump’s betes-noires notably former President Barak Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders.
But how serious is the “beginning of the end for Trump” theme played by his political foes?
The short answer is: not very!
The real test of Trump’s durability will come in next year’s mid-term election.
This time round the Republicans managed to keep their majority in the House of Representatives by holding the two seats contested in Florida. Democrats won the governors’ position in Virginia and New Jersey states that have been often theirs for decades. In California, a proposition to add five seats to the state’s representation in the Congress passed - no surprise as this increases the Golden State’s influence in Washington.
However, in contrast with Mamdani’s fire and brimstone rhetoric Democrats projected a centrist profile in all three states. They tried to portray Trump as an extremist in terms of the current phase of the American cultural war.
Because he was not born in the US, Mamdani of course cannot reach for the presidency.
In fact, his mayoral victory may be due to conjectures that few foresaw.
New Yorkers who won’t vote for a Republican even by holding their nose were left with no choice but to listen to a newcomer promising all sorts of goodies.
Then Mamdani made an error that might not only doom his mayorship but could also reduce the Democrats’ chances of winning back the Senate and the House next year. The error was to brag about himself as a “socialist”, one of those clichés that American politicians and pundits equated with Communism and a weapon in the hands of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Last Tuesday Trump branded Mamdani and beyond him the Democrats as crypto communists.
However, if socialism is seen in its Wester European meaning the United States tacitly adopted a Social democratic agenda from the mid-1960s with President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”.
Socialism might have been invented by the character in one of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist when the cheeky street urchin along with other urchins being served the orphanage’s soup shouts: More!
He doesn’t care that if he gets more, someone must get less.
For the past six decades, successive US administrations have done socialism while using it as a “reds under the bed” trope against adversaries.
Today almost half of all Americans receive benefits and entitlements of various kinds costing over $1 trillion in 2024, something unheard of in the US until the 1960s in days that self-reliance and the pioneer spirit was seen as the nation’s code of ethics.
Senator George Mitchel, an eminent figure in Democrat Party’s recent history told me in a conversation in London years ago that his party always won by “offering a social agenda but appearing to be at the center.”
He described Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, an icon in the left of the party, as “offering a tactical win but ensuring strategic loss.”
I was reminded of that conversation when AOC jumped the queue to congratulate Mamdani on his “historic victory.”
Whenever the Democrat party has lost a presidential election and veered left to remedy that loss it has lost even bigger in subsequent contests. This is what happened when the party chose Senator George McGovern as presidential candidate in 1972. Democrats made the same mistake a decade later by fielding another left-leaning candidate in the person of Governor Mike Dukakis.
To a good part of American electorate socialism is like sin, you are tempted to enjoy it but loath to admit it. Obama understood that. He “socialized” large chunks of the health sector, almost 12 per cent of GDP, while swearing he wasn’t doing socialism.
If Democrats get high on Mamdani displaying an Ali Baba’s cave of more entitlements in the name of democratic socialism Trump may have to thank the young man from Kampala for giving him new ammunition in the cultural war he says he is waging.
George Orwell warned that “disparate desiderata of sections of society” could lead to a “feeling of cultural insecurity by a nation.” Trump has built his electoral successes on precisely that feeling.
The last time socialism got big public exposure in the US was when Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won nearly 1 million votes in both the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections. In the 1930s, Socialists won more than 1,000 state and local elected offices nationwide but evaporated as snowflakes in June.
