The thin veneer that enables the political establishment to pretend that the Democratic and Republican parties represent any fundamental differences gets stripped away whenever someone with socialist leanings breaks through the space formed by the neoliberal Democratic party establishment and the right-wing extremist Republican party, which is where the political establishment lives. Thus the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win on a populist platform in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary has sent shock waves through the political establishment.
Now that right wing alliance is gearing up to defeat Mamdani, using red-baiting, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, with the New York Times joining in the effort. It is at times like these that that newspaper sheds its superficially liberal or neutral mask and reveals itself for the establishment rag that it is. As evidence of this, Margaret Sullivan writes that the paper is trying to blow up a trivial story into something big.
A recent New York Times news story immediately drew fire from readers – and for very good reason.
Headlined “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application,” the article centered on Zohran Mamdani, the candidate for New York City mayor who drew national attention recently with his stunning win in the Democratic primary election.
Its gist was that as a high school senior in New York City, Mamdani – who was born in Uganda and is of Indian descent – checked a couple of different boxes about race when applying for admission to Columbia University.
…Whatever its news value, or lack thereof, the story certainly got the attention of one of Mamdani’s rivals – current New York City mayor Eric Adams, who will run in the general election as an independent candidate.
Adams, who is Black, called it “deeply offensive” that Mamdani would try to “exploit” an African American identity even though he is not Black.
…Mamdani has explained that he was trying to communicate his complicated background. His father is Indian Ugandan and his mother is Indian American; Mamdani himself was born in Uganda and lived briefly in South Africa before moving to New York City as a child.
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” he told the Times.
The Times’s decision to pursue and publish the story was, at the very least, unwise.
For one thing, it came to the Times due to a widespread hack into Columbia’s databases, transmitted to the paper through an intermediary who was given anonymity by the paper. That source turns out to be Jordan Lasker, who – as the Guardian has reported – is a well-known and much criticized “eugenicist”, AKA white supremacist.
…The incident raises a larger issue: the Times’s apparent opposition to Mamdani’s candidacy.
On the opinion side of the paper, there’s little question about that. Even though the Times no longer makes endorsements for mayor, they published an editorial urging voters to avoid ranking Mamdani at all on their ballots because he was so unqualified. (New York City uses ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to list several candidates in order of preference.)
Remarkably, the Times stopped short of giving the same “don’t rank him” advice about disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his office in 2021 and then ran for mayor against Mamdani in the primary.
Greg Godel discusses why the possibility of Mamdani winning the mayoralty gives the one-party state the heebie-jeebies.
Mamdani defeated an establishment candidate showered with money and endorsed by Democratic Party royalty. His chief opponent, Andrew Cuomo, enjoyed the support and the forecasts of all the major media, locally and nationally. Cuomo fell back on every cheap, spineless trick: redbaiting (Mamdani is a member of Democratic Socialist of America), ethnic and religious baiting (Mamdani is a foreign-born Muslim), and “unfriendliness” to business (Mamdani advocates taxing the rich, freezing rents, and fare-less transit). And still Mamdani won.
…But for the left, the important fact was that Cuomo represented the strategy and tactics, the program (such as it is), and the machinery of the Democratic Party leadership. The left needed a victory against the Clintons, Obamas, and Carvilles to demonstrate that another way was possible. And more pointedly, the left needed to see that a program embracing a class-war skirmish against developers, financial titans, and a motley assortment of other capitalists can win in the largest city in the US. Nearly every major policy domestically and internationally that the Democratic Party considers toxic was embraced by Mamdani’s campaign. And still Mamdani won.
…Wall Street quickly panicked, according to the Wall Street Journal:
Corporate leaders held a flurry of private phone calls to plot how to fight back against Mamdani and discussed backing an outside group with the goal of raising around $20 million to oppose him, according to people familiar with the matter.
…
The Washington Post editorial board scolds readers with this ominous headline warning: Zohran Mamdani’s victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party.
…t gets even wackier in the right wing’s outer limits. My favorite libertarian site posted a near hysterical call for the application of the infamous 1954 Communist Control Act to remove him from office, even put Mamdani in prison. The never-disappointing, notorious thug, Erik D Prince, calls for Kristi Noem to initiate deportation proceedings.
Yet not so shockingly, many fellow Democrats nearly matched the scorn and contempt heaped on Mamdani by Wealth, Power, and Trumpers. Senate and House minority leaders– Schumer and Jeffries– refused to endorse the primary winner. New York Representative Laura Gillen declared that Mamdani is the “absolute wrong choice for New York.” Her colleague, Tom Suozzi, had “serious concerns,” as reported by Axios under the banner: Democratic establishment melts down over Mamdani’s win in New York. Other Democrats ran away from discussing the victory and, of course, the overworked, overwrought, and abused charge of “antisemitism” was tossed about promiscuously.
It should be realized that all that the Democratic party establishment cares about is getting back into power, not to radically change the course of the country. They think that as long as they stay dormant, people will get tired of Trump and Republicans and vote them back in. Hence they sabotage any real left-wing alternative within the party, the way they did with the Bernie Sanders campaign and which they will now do with Mamdani. But they may be seriously misreading the mood of the electorate.
Though the Party’s leadership will not acknowledge it, the Democrat brand is widely discredited. As Jarod Abbott and Les Leopold conclude: “Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.”
…This squares with recent polls that show strong disapproval of elected Democrats and the Democratic Party. The recent late-May Financial Times/YouGov poll shows that 57 percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of Democrats in Congress. And a similar 57 percent have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. Only 11 percent have a very favorable view of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic party establishment seems to think that all they have to do is sit tight and not rock the boat and that the Trump presidency will eventually run aground, dragging the Republicans down with him and that the voters will then vote the same old Democrats back in. These polls suggest that they should not be so sanguine and take the voters for granted.
Of course the establishment of both parties is anti-socialist, but I profoundly disagree that the difference between fascist and non-fascist anti-socialists is not fundamental. Under a fascist regime, not only is it impossible to get rid of the current government by voting it out, but dissenters, and indeed anyone, can routinely be seized, tortured, killed, disappeared without trace. The USA is quite obviously moving in that direction as fast as its fascist party and leader can manage, and opposing that movement is vital not only to Americans but to the entire world. And before anyone objects that the USA has long behaved in exactly that way abroad, yes, I’m well aware of that -- indeed, fascism has been described as applying the methods of imperialism at home. It still makes a fundamental difference.
I understand why the term “African American” was introduced (relatively recently), but this exposes the cultural specificity of all racial/ethnic terminology. Even if we exclude those with recent ancestry from outside the continent (such as Ugandan Asians), by no means all those born in Africa would identify themselves, or be identified on sight by most Americans, as “Black”. Many native North Africans have skin no darker than many Italian or Spanish people, and some have blond hair and blue eyes. Most of those born in Madagascar (which is a member of the African Union) appear similar to Malays, while the populations of Mauritius and Seychelles have complex mixtures of ancestry. In American parlance, “African-American” is an alternative way of saying “Black” -- indeed, I’ve seen Americans thoughtlessly refer to Black British people as “African-American”! But there seems no good reason to be offended at Mamdani using the term more literally -- unless of course you’re looking for an excuse to diss Mamdani.
One of the reasons the Democratic Party does not poll well is because people (including a whole lot of registered Democrats) feel they have been betrayed by the party (which they have been, IMHO). This is not the party of FDR or Kennedy. This is now a party of the capital-corporate class. Granted, they support more liberal social concerns (gay marriage, abortion rights, et al), but they are not fighting against wealth inequality and the like. People see them as being too friendly to corporate concerns, and not fighting for the average worker. I see this going back to Bill Clinton, the DLC, and all of the “Third Way” Dems.
@jimf:
It’s really more the party of Eisenhower in some ways. I’d say you could make a good argument that the modern Democratic party bears some resemblance to the pre-Nixon Republican party. They’ve become the party of billionaires who want to drain the country dry but keep the cultural issues to a dull roar so there’s no massive revolution and ‘the system’ keeps running stably while they’re doing so. As opposed to the modern Republicans, who have become the party of billionaires who don’t care what anybody else thinks anymore and feel they can get away with open looting and taking permanent control, and actively encouraging everybody else to fight each other and cause chaos while they’re doing so.
So basically both parties are owned by moneyed interests that want to drain the country dry, but the Democrats at least want to keep a fig leaf of actual democracy so nobody complains too much.
This site https://mamdanitimes.com/ has a lot of fake NYT headlines riffing on the fact that what Mandami did on that application form was try to do the right thing, some of them are funny.
Jazzlet @#5,
Thanks for the laugh!
And, just as a reminder of how horrible the Republicans are…
“But what if there is a huge storm coming?”
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16VVpC4a3T/