On an Entirely Predictable Series of Events - Part 1:

The Centerfolds

It is not my intention to provide hope in this article. If you are coming here in search of the bright light at the end of the MAGA tunnel, you’re in the wrong place. I can offer no such comfort. We live in the worst timeline, and tragedy is often indistinguishable from farce. In this article, I will offer you something else — something less cathartic and more libidinal.

You see, the worst people you know are having a terrible time of it lately. And before anyone gets any bright ideas about a new progressive century rising from the ashes of a momentary flirtation with fascism, we should take a moment to enjoy schadenfreude.

Things are happening.

The Democrats Have Their Mamdani Moment

Everyone knew what was coming in the days following Zohran Mamdani’s surprise shellacking of Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Sure, centrist pundits and moderate Democratic officials went scorched-earth against him in the weeks leading up to the election. They called him dangerous. They implied he was an unstable, antisemitic radical. They insisted that his social democratic reforms would destroy America’s greatest city. And even if they didn’t dip into outright Islamophobia, they also didn’t object much when conservatives did.

But that was just a perfectly normal, tough primary, right? Now that Mamdani has secured a comfortable victory and is starting with a decent lead in early polling for the general, all those centrists and moderates will unite behind the Democratic nominee for mayor, right?

……Right?

……Right?

Or will The New York Times publish this bullshit:

A bit of context here — earlier this year, Democratic Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva died while in office, triggering a special election to replace him. His daughter, Adelita, entered the race with a clear advantage in name recognition against Deja Foxx, a Gen Z reproductive rights activist and former staffer for Kamala Harris. Foxx had the backing of Leaders We Deserve and Gen Z for Change — two groups formed to push the Democratic Party forward by challenging older incumbents.

Now, you may be asking yourself what any of this has to do with Mamdani Momentum, and how a race on the other side of the country portends badly for New York’s Democratic candidate for mayor. Well…

Here’s the crux of the article:

• Mamdani won a local Democratic primary as a relatively unknown Gen Z activist against the son of a beloved former elected official, using social media and a progressive message.

• Foxx was also a relatively unknown Gen Z activist running against the daughter of a beloved local elected official, also using social media and a progressive message.

• Therefore, Foxx and Mamdani represent the exact same current of energy within the Democratic voter base.

• Foxx lost badly against Grijalva, thus signaling that Mamdani’s win is actually just an aberration and — Democratic voters still favor the party’s legacy leadership over young progressive upstarts.

There’s just a few problems with this framing, though. For one thing, while Cuomo served as New York Governor for 10 years until he had to resign in disgrace, Grijalva’s political experience prior to her recent victory consisted of a seat on the Pima County Board of Supervisors and, previously, a seat on the school board. Despite her family connections, she’s hardly an entrenched political operative.

I’m burying the lede here. Raúl Grijalva was one of the most progressive members of Congress. He was genuinely a good guy and a fighter for working people. His daughter is just as progressive, and policy-wise, there wasn’t much daylight between her and Foxx. Grijalva didn’t just coast on name recognition — she scored endorsements from AOC and Bernie, along with many of the same groups that backed Mamdani in New York.

Arizona was not a test case for Mamdani Momentum, as Mr. Healy implies. Zohran won as a socialist in a city where the last primary was won by a corrupt cop. The choice for NYC voters wasn’t between a fresh voice and a familiar last name, but between two very different political projects.

The Arizona primary was between two progressives in a progressive congressional district — and voters chose the familiar name over the person who worked for the campaign that just ate shit against a sundowning fascist.

This isn’t simply a clumsy comparison, an awkward attempt to draw eyes to a story about a special election in Arizona by invoking the hottest name in Democratic politics right now. It’s an intentional suggestion that Mamdani’s victory wasn’t about voters supporting his democratic socialist agenda, but rather them just getting swept up in the undeniable appeal and energy of youth.

This article from the paper of record follows their infamous Columbia University application story, where they reported on hacked private records provided by a white nationalist — breaking the seriously important news that Zohran once checked “African-American” on a college application because he was literally born in Africa and lived in America for most of his life.

It’s not surprising that the moderate neoliberal consensus that informs most mainstream media political coverage has it out for Mamdani. These are the same people who compared Bernie’s 2020 Nevada primary victory to the Nazis marching down the streets of Paris.

A Tough Sell

It’s not just the media — Democratic Party leadership (such as it is) is also quite transparent in their contempt for Mamdani. When asked if he would endorse the Democratic nominee for mayor of the city he represents in Congress, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries claimed he didn’t know enough about Mamdani and that he “didn’t get involved in that primary.” Kristen Gillibrand made up stories about global jihad, and Eric Swalwell made it known he doesn’t associate with the things Mamdani has said about Jewish people.

What Swalwell — nor anyone else intent on smearing Mamdani as an antisemite — has not made known are any specific examples of objectionable things that he has said.

This, of course, is due to Mamdani’s unabashed pro-Palestinian stance on the Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza — a stance he did not back down from while running a successful primary campaign, earning a significant number of Jewish votes in the process.

When asked to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” he politely refused — noting that while it wasn’t something he personally says, he also understood that, for many people, it simply means resistance and fighting for equal rights. He helpfully pointed out that when the Holocaust Museum translated its materials on the Warsaw uprisings into Arabic, they too used the word intifada.

The Holocaust Museum did not like being reminded of what words mean.

It’s worth noting what the alternative to Mamdani would be if The New York Times and Democratic leadership had their way. Andrew Cuomo recently announced that he will not respect the results of the primary and will instead run for mayor in the general election as an independent. As mentioned earlier, Cuomo was the governor of New York State for 10 years before he had to leave office amid a series of controversies. In 2020, an investigation by the Manhattan DA found that Cuomo had credibly sexually harassed at least 11 women in his orbit while governor. Accounts from victims and witnesses paint a picture of your standard dirty old man — delusionally believing his unwanted physical contact and juvenile sexual propositions were actually charming, if not somewhat appealing, to the women around him.

If being a serial sex pest wasn’t enough, Cuomo might also be partly responsible for thousands of additional nursing home deaths during the height of the pandemic. After receiving millions in campaign funds from the health care industry — including companies owning nursing homes — he signed an executive order forcing nursing homes to accept medically stable COVID patients without testing. This was ostensibly an effort to free up hospital beds. He then quietly inserted a provision into a state budget bill that shielded nursing home administrators from liability for death or injury resulting from negligence.

Both Cuomo and the health care lobbyists who sincerely believe in his vision for a better New York insisted that such legal immunity was necessary to protect the brave medical workers and support staff during an unprecedented public health emergency. Critics said it was a license to increase profits by cutting corners and allowing unsafe working conditions. And sure, a report found that residents of nursing homes were 7.5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 in states with similar corporate immunity laws — but I’m sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Although Cuomo did try to hide the truth — undercounting reported nursing home deaths by around 50%.

It’s hard to maintain the moral high ground over Trump voters when you’d rather have a serial sex pest who killed grandparents for campaign cash as mayor than an affable socialist who believes genocide is bad. If you think Cuomo’s “leadership” is worth a few dead family members and a trail of traumatized women, then why are we mad at MAGA-world again?

Of course, there’s the current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. Adams didn’t even run in the primary. Knowing his defeat in that contest would be complete and brutal, he skipped straight to the general, running under a proposed “EndAntiSemitism” ballot line. When he won a crowded primary back in 2021 as a tough-on-crime, moderate former cop, he was lauded by the media (and himself) as the future of the party — the antidote to the far-left “lunacy” seen as an albatross around the Democrats’ neck.

Adams quickly proved he was very tough on certain crimes — like being homeless on the subway. Other crimes, like those committed by his pastor friend convicted of defrauding churchgoers, or his own receipt of improper gifts from the Turkish government… not so much.

In 2024, Adams was indicted on federal charges of bribery, conspiracy, and other related crimes stemming from his acceptance of free airfare to Istanbul and illegal campaign contributions from individuals with ties to Turkey. When Trump won his second presidential election later that year, Adams appeared to strike a deal for those charges to be dropped — in return for giving ICE free rein to terrorize NYC’s immigrant population. Not that blackmail was necessary for Adams to adopt an anti-immigrant stance; he had already been blaming cuts to city services on the financial burden caused by migrant asylum seekers.

Oh — and he has his own sexual assault allegations, because of course he does.

In a sane world, Cuomo and Adams would be relegated to the John Edwards Memorial Dustbin of former Democratic Party stars that we never want to talk about again. And yet, in the weeks leading up to the primary, party big guns like Bill Clinton and James Clyburn (notably not a New Yorker) threw endorsements toward Cuomo in hopes of shutting down Mamdani’s rapid rise in the polls.

Not only did this not work — Mamdani went on to earn the most votes in New York mayoral primary history. He ran an excellent campaign: from his ads to how he sold his platform, to how he handled himself in interviews and debates. He captured a real “from here” New York City vibe — more so than either of his two main opponents.

No matter how desperately the party and the media wanted voters to believe otherwise, for anyone with eyes and ears it was nigh impossible to imagine that Mamdani could be a worse choice than the millionaire nepo-baby sex pest or Trump’s favorite Democratic mayor.

This is a development.

A Matter of Credibility

At the end of the day, the simple truth is that Mamdani ran a great campaign — and Cuomo barely ran a campaign at all. The former governor was content to rest on name recognition and big-money donors until polls showed Mamdani closing the gap. At that point, the Democratic establishment tried to put their finger on the scale.

That finger used to mean something.

It wasn’t that long ago that James Clyburn’s endorsement in South Carolina stopped Bernie Sanders’ momentum in the 2020 Democratic primary dead in its tracks. Clyburn’s ability to swing the Black vote toward certain candidates may be overstated at times, but it’s not nothing. And indeed, Mamdani lost significantly with poor and working-class Black voters.

But as The Intercept points out, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Mamdani actually did quite well with younger Black voters — the ones who tend to be more favorable to leftist economic narratives and are less tied into the traditional Black political networks that have historically moved the Black vote in unison.

The rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment comes from the fact that they simply don’t care what they do with power — only that they be given power. They will not meaningfully address poverty, police brutality, reproductive rights, economic justice, climate change, taxpayer-funded genocide, or anything else that can’t be identified as the desires of their big-money donors and mythical median voters. All they can offer is technocratic competency and the increasingly hollow argument that whatever your problems with their leadership, Republicans would be worse.

This has proven to be a flimsy foundation on which to build a successful political formation. It worked well enough in the ’90s and early 2000s, when deregulation from the previous decade produced a series of financial bubbles for the economy to coast on. But those bubbles eventually burst — and people started noticing how miserable things were under late-stage capitalism. People wanted change.

The Democratic Party wanted small, structural corrections to the status quo — tweaks that alleviated just enough of the burden carried by average people to preserve the fundamental systems that granted them the power they believed they deserved.

And then Trump happened — and the one thing Democrats could honestly claim as a deliverable, keeping the regressive far right from power, suddenly became no longer a credible promise.

Even when Biden narrowly beat Trump in 2020, it was clearly more backlash to Trump’s mishandling of COVID than any real belief in Democratic leadership. While Biden’s single term seemed to genuinely aim at reasserting the Democrats’ traditional position as the pro-worker party, meager efforts in reshoring manufacturing and strengthening the NLRB were overshadowed by Biden’s advanced age — which made it nearly impossible for him to sell the American people on an ideologically coherent vision.

And of course, the only reason the party insisted on having the oldest person ever to run for president as their standard bearer was because Biden was the only person who could have beaten Bernie Sanders in the primary.

To make matters worse, Democrats took the astroturfed opposition to “wokeness,” protests, trans rights, and ending the genocide in Gaza as permission to do the only thing they still know how to do effectively: attack their own base for disloyalty and naïve ideological stubbornness.

Pundits and party spokespeople couldn’t wait to blame “the groups” for pushing unpopular identity-based issues over bread-and-butter economic concerns. But when Parkland school shooting survivor–turned–activist David Hogg won the vice chair seat at the DNC and pushed for younger candidates to challenge old, entrenched Democrats who had been at the wheel when Trump took power, he was pushed out of his job — with party hatchet men cynically using “woke,” identity-based rules to dispute his election to leadership.

Flash forward to the recent NYC mayoral race, and suddenly all that talk of party unity in the face of Republican fascism — and respecting the will of Democratic primary voters — gets tossed out the window.

Because New York Democrats picked the wrong guy.

This is a party without clothes. Whatever credibility they had is long gone. Their currency is only good with the most extremely online reply guys. Their only marketable path forward — the Abundance Agenda — is just a superficial repackaging of failed neoliberal dogma, financed by economically conservative billionaires and sold by some journalists who curse in interviews.

A New Hope

I told you this mini-series wasn’t about hope — and I meant it. But how about some very cautious optimism?

Mamdani’s victory was more than just another leftist blip on the map of the Democratic electoral terrain. New York’s ranked choice voting gave liberals in the city a chance to do something the party had long insisted was impossible: form a coalition with the left — on the left’s terms.

One of Zohran’s most influential supporters was one of his primary opponents, Brad Lander — a progressive more in the mold of Elizabeth Warren than any kind of unabashed democratic socialist. Instead of attacking Mamdani from the center or dismissing his socialist background as unrealistic, Lander embraced the opponent to his left once it became clear that’s where the momentum against Cuomo was.

Clearly, voters liked this. They liked being given permission to support something more than the usual third-way, corporate-friendly centrism administered by quasi-conservative sex pests. They liked voting against a Democratic establishment that has treated them more like a pesky annoyance than a coalition partner — and doing so without handing Republicans a win.

There’s a roadmap here: one in which liberals across the country realize that the Democratic Party, as currently constructed, fundamentally cannot deliver on its promise to defend Americans from the threat of creeping conservative authoritarianism.

They might realize that the leadership of the party — the same leadership that lost two elections to a predatory game show host with more bankruptcies than substantive legislative achievements — is in no position to lecture anybody about electoral strategy.

AOC and Bernie may not be the most popular figures on the left right now. Their obsequious defense of Biden before he dropped out of the 2024 race — and their lack of moral clarity on Gaza — have cast serious doubt on their ability to strategize in favor of a leftist political project.

But the numbers they’re drawing in conservative and rural areas on their Oligarchy Tour are meaningful — especially to normie liberals who just want to beat the Republicans and end the MAGA moment.

Mamdani may not be the perfect savior. His politics are good. His political instincts are even better. But mayors of large cities like New York have to contend with far more powerful forces than just bitter New York Times reporters and useless party leaders like Hakeem Jeffries.

Circumventing real estate interests and the NYPD to deliver on a left economic populist agenda is going to require a level of political finesse and dealmaking we just haven’t seen from many progressive mayors.

But you gotta start somewhere — and it’s clear that voters are ready for it.

Democratic leadership may not like it, but as a party, their favorability is at an all-time low. Early polling suggests they may not even be able to fully capitalize on a truly disastrous start to Trump 2.0 in the coming midterms.

It’s hard to see how they dig themselves out of this hole while maintaining the neoliberal centrist consensus that got them here. There is currently a non-zero chance that the Democratic Party — as we’ve known it for the past 30 years — is dead.

And while that might not be enough to justify hope, it’s definitely something to take notice of.

Of course, the centrist Democratic establishment aren’t the only ones having a terrible 2025. Trumpworld and the MAGA coalition are also going through it right now and “at levels we haven’t seen before” to quote the current president. So in part two we’ll talk about the disintegration of Trump 2.0.

Solidarity Forever.