Zohran and democracy: Three days that shook the world

[marmar]

Zohran and democracy: Three days that shook the world
Is Zohran Mamdani good for the Democrats? It's the wrong question — he's good for the world

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published June 29, 2025 1:00PM (EDT)


(Salon) No doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that many powerful figures in the Democratic Party are more alarmed by Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary than by Donald Trump’s systematic shredding of the Constitution, his paramilitary force of masked deportation goons, or the Supreme Court’s piecemeal construction of a coup-d’état. But it’s a whole lot less of an exaggeration than it should be.

....(snip)....

Mamdani, in other news, has become world news virtually overnight. While his win is highly specific to New York in some ways, it also represents a symbolic challenge to the perceived global centrist renaissance, or what could be called the “neo-neoliberal consensus.” I don’t mean that as scare-quote name-calling: Trump’s return to power this year, as I’ve previously discussed, seemed to inject new life into struggling center-left and center-right parties in various liberal democracies. In Germany, Canada and Australia, for instance, along with a number of smaller countries, mainstream parties have staged comeback victories and fended off the insurgent far right, at least for now.

....(snip)....

That sort of triangulation has, to varying degrees, been the Democratic Party’s standard modus operandi for more than 30 years. Even amid the carnage and destruction of Trump’s second term, that remains the Democrats’ closest approximation to a guiding principle: Kamala Harris lost by veering too far left, in some entirely unexplained fashion. (Maybe it was promising free puppies to violent criminals. Maybe it was being a Black woman. Who can say?) To defeat Trumpism, they needed to be tougher, meaner and indeed Trumpier — while also “playing dead,” in Carville’s immortal phrase, and waiting for MAGA fever to burn itself out.

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Mamdani’s personal immigrant history, as the article observes, was clearly an advantage in a city where about 40 percent of residents are foreign-born. Contrary to what Stephen Miller and his xenophobic online shock troops may claim, that’s a pretty typical proportion for New York in historical terms, not a recent shift or, ahem, a great replacement. What the MAGA trolls actually mean — and occasionally say out loud — is of course that a century ago the foreign-born population of New York was largely “white,” meaning Jewish, Italian and Irish, and today it’s mostly darker-skinned people from the “s**thole countries” of Latin America, South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. We don’t have space to explore the multiple levels of irony, stupidity and viciousness at work here, or to mention that Miller and Trump, like a large proportion of white Americans (like me, for example), are themselves no more than two generations removed from immigrants. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/29/zohran-and-democracy-three-days-that-shook-the-world/

[msongs]

1. saying shook the world makes the magazine look stupid. nt