Zohran Mamdani Exposes Nullity of Democrats and Republicans

Surely you’ve heard by now of Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the 33-year-old soon-to-be mayor of New York City. Since we live in the Florida Reich, most of what you’ve heard is slanderous or ridiculous. His name evokes reactions to Barack Hussein Obama’s name before Obama and all his Husseins became more American than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton.)

Except that Mamdani really is Muslim, and really was born in Africa, to Indian parents. So Mamdani can’t be president. But he can be everything else. An impressive plurality of New Yorkers thinks he can be, while Republicans are calling him a Marxis-Lenninist-Islamist terrorist and standard-issue Democrats aren’t doing much better. They fear he will radicalize the party and sink its chances to retake the White House, such as those chances are.  So what does Mamdani stand for besides the October Revolution and Sharia?

FDR might yawn: He wants to impose a 2 percent tax on those earning $1 million or more. He wants to raise the city’s corporate tax to match New Jersey’s (the federal rate was 52 percent in 1969. It is now 21 percent.) He wants to make bus-riding free and offer free child care for children up to 5 years old, as do most civilized nations that value children beyond bumper-sticker morality. He supports congestion pricing (already in place, and successful.)

He would freeze rents for a million New Yorkers for only a year and build 200,000 affordable housing units, much like the city did after World War II.¹  In a city that would not function without migrants, he would bar ICE agents from city facilities and add to legal aid for migrants under ICE’s boots. He believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and is enforcing an apartheid regime on Palestinians, two demonstrable facts for which he’s been called anti-Semitic by Israel’s American Inquisition. 

There are minor proposals like opening five–just five–city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, on the wholesale, tax-free model. Nothing revolutionary about that. You see them in deep-red Kansas and reddish Wisconsin (albeit in Madison). But because a Muslim liberal in New York City is proposing it, his approach is being compared to Das Kapital. 

He’s also proposing to set up a Department of Community Safety so trained mental health professionals rather than cops respond to mental health crises that fill police blotters, a proposal Sheriff Rick Staly should welcome here if we ever have leadership wise enough to propose it, because his troops are unnecessarily made to act like social workers and psychiatrists for lack of appropriate services. 

For all that, U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee Republican, called on Mamdani to be deported. The lunatic in the White House seconded him, also calling Mamdani “100 percent lunatic communist.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, leader of the modern-day Know-Nothing party, socialshat an image of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa–this about a candidate who’s more LGBTQ-friendly than Ed Koch was, and Koch was gay. 

In Free Florida our own congressman, Randy Fine, who’s torn between letting Palestinians “starve away” and nuking them, thinks Mamdani will impose a “caliphate” on the city. Our cadaverous Sen. Rick Scott flew a banner over New York’s beaches, inviting those who “hate socialism” to “Move 2 FL.” Please, senator. We’re surrounded by enough haters as it is in our little corner of blood-red FL. 

You expect all this from Republicans, who have fetishized the Southern Strategy–“an old American standard of exploiting working class grievances for elitist political gain,” as Howard Zinn put it–to fabulous successes since Nixon.²

Here was a chance for Democrats to follow Saul Bellow’s advice, accept their burden and seize the day. 

Instead, New York Congresswoman Laura Gillen called Mamdani “a threat to my constituents.” She was referring to his economic proposals, but the word “threat” associated with a dark-skinned Muslim in New York–Willie Horton on the Hudson–was not lost on anyone. For additional racist measure she said he “is not the right face for the Democratic Party.” The desperate Andrew Cuomo campaign darkened Mamdani’s skin and Muslemified his beard, the way sleazy Time Magazine made OJ Simpson look blacker (30 years ago). Corey Booker, whose 25-hour speech on the Senate floor last spring echoed much of Mamdani’s platform, has refused to endorse him, as have many prominent Democrats (Obama has been more openly supportive), rallying instead to back Cuomo, who was disgraced out of office on a Niagara of scandals and predatory smut. Yes, HimToo. 

That’s who Democrats are embracing while playing into the GOP’s culture-war trap by fighting Waterloos over DEI, trans and even migrant rights as a dogma when they could be proposing pragmatic alternatives. (In fairness to Biden, he tried with migrants, but Trump’s Republicans killed the bill for fear that it would block their most potent race-baiting way back to the White House.) As they cling to old orthopdoxies and fight on Republicans’ terms, Democrats further debase themselves into irrelevance and repel what remaining liberals they could depend on. 

The Mamdani phenomenon will pass: he’s about to be elected mayor of New York, not more. But the reaction he’s elicited has been like an MRI of both our parties’ cancerous hopelessness. 

Democrats in their wilderness should be championing energetic countercurrents who could slow the slide and focus the party on everyday challenges: unaffordable housing. Unaffordable health care, even–and especially–for companies and governments. The resegregation of schools along class and sectarian lines. The transformation of the tax code into permanent welfare dividends for the rich as our infrastructure crumbles and the research institutions that powered the former American Century are kneecapped

Instead of capitalizing on a new voice that champions the disaffected, Democrats are competing with Republicans in a race to the muckiest and showing why their party is a moribund mob of know-it-all elitists who’ve lost touch with every house next door. They’re either mute to the quashing of personal, academic and political freedoms or they feed it with doctrinaire wokism. 

Democrats have embraced the asphyxiating worship of abstract, blanket orthodoxies–“founding fathers,” “patriotism,” “diversity,” “free market”–that equate doubters with treason. They salute the militarized police state for fear of being branded soft on crime. They’re complicit in the suicidal economics of governance by tax cuts, debt and tulips that have made us the most unequal Western society in the world. We are on an unavoidable big, beautiful rendezvous with British Empire-like has-been status by the time China–one of our biggest creditors–becomes the world’s biggest economy in a few years. 

But city-owned grocery stores, free child care and a 2 percent increase in the corporate tax rate is the end of American civilization. 

To call today’s Democrats “liberal” is as much of a misnomer as to call Republicans “conservative.” The most dominant force in the two parties is reactionary illiberalism. I’d say they deserve each other. But we deserve neither. And that’s why Mamdani is winning. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

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