Zohran Mamdani and the Nitwit Revolution

The days of dismissing the Democratic Socialists of America and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as lightweights are over, after Mamdani-endorsed congressional candidates Brad Lander, Claire Valdez, and Darializa Chevalier obliterated traditional Democrats in this week’s New York primary.

Traditional Democrats are finished. Their card is punched. They will be replaced, or more likely absorbed, by a Mamdani-led Democratic Socialist bureaucracy in short order. Though Mayor Zohran is even more overrated as an orator than Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan, he’s now proven that he possesses their same transformational political skill, as his gambit backing three shaky DSA candidates and easily winning all three hands was a masterstroke, one that did mark “a new era for the Democratic Party,” as CNN analyst Van Jones put it.

It’s not Bernie redux. Vermont’s scruffy Senator Sanders will still be trotted out as a totem, a symbol of the insufficiently ruthless old days, tolerated by the DSA’s humorless young leadership in the same way poor old Stepya Verkhovensky was by the young radicals in Dostoyevsky’s Demons. But Tuesday was not about advancing Bernie’s cause.

What happened this week is being described in many places as a big win for populist or “anti-elite” politics, but it’s the opposite. This was simulteneously a wipeout of Clintonian party hacks and Bernie’s staid F.D.R.-style big tent politics, in favor of a slickly marketed revolution with a young ethnic vibe. The Zohran movement is an obvious elite fixation, built atop the exotically batshit boutique ideas that America’s nitwit rich find thrilling, like publicly funded “gender-affirming care,” “humanity has no borders,” and my personal favorite, “the institution of the family acts as part of the carceral system.”