Zohran Mamdani is the incarnation of something we have not seen in New York politics in quite a while. If Tom Wolfe were alive, he would have recognized Zohran’s type instantly. Afterall, it was Wolfe who coined the phrase “radical chic” to describe it. In a now famous 1970 article in the New York magazine titled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Wolfe was the first to describe the fashionable adoption of radical political causes by the New York upper-class intelligentsia as radical chic.

The same class that was entranced with the bravado of Che Guevara and the Black Panthers in the 1960s is now infatuated with this exotic called Zohran Mamdani. Trim and tailored in his J.Crew suit and manicured beard, he espouses both Marxism and Jihadism. It is no wonder that the cultural elites are going gaga over him, and let us not forget about all those Bryn Mawr graduates, bored with their jobs in NGOs, fantasizing over this cuddly reincarnation of Che Guevara.

Zohran learned from the best about being radical chic. His parents were both exotic mascots dedicating their careers to creating performative art for the guilty delight of our cultural elites. His mother is a filmmaker quoted as saying, “I will go to Israel when the walls come down” — though I don’t know if she followed through on that promise after the walls were breached on Oct. 7th. His father is a professor in the study of African colonialism at Columbia University where he is busy disparaging Western civilization for its original sins of racism and imperialism.

Zohran’s views are a synthesis of all the views that the Left currently holds. He espouses the perspective of that old Marxist blow-hard, Bernie Sanders, lecturing us on the means of production and the emerging proletarian class. He champions the Palestinian cause of pushing the Jews into the sea, a fate that I would reserve exclusively for Chuck Schumer. He is all for gay rights except when he is flirting with his Jihadist friends in Gaza and the West Bank. What more can I say about Zohran and his brand of radical chic other than he is charming and affable and an adherent to the most repugnant ideologies that have ever inflicted mankind?

Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.