On Zohran Mamdani

The socialist candidate won the New York City mayoral primary. What does it mean?

The thing about Zohran Mamdani is that he is not an Islamist, but a regime leftist who understands that the symbols of the exotic Other are an extremely valuable currency within the world of the radical Left. He was able to very skillfully combine the outward appearance of the Third World oppressed with the inward politics of the average white DSA leftist. This is a very powerful formula and Mamdani, like AOC, has the charisma to make it stick. Both shrewdly selected political districts in which this kind of politics is possible, then used those as a mechanism for building the appearance, and eventually the reality, of a national movement. His ideas are utterly destructive, but his presentation is compelling. He was even able to make "city-owned grocery stores"—an idea plucked straight from the histories of Third World communism—into a meme. If he wins the general election, America might be able to witness a real-time experiment in socialist economics.