According to polls, the increased amount of support for New York Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is coming from people under the age of 35. 

Mamdani has never held a real job in his entire life. If you were looking for the definition of a career useless person, this would be the guy. 

You might say to yourself: How does a person with effectively no résumé, who worked for his mommy and was a rapper, wind up as the Democratic nominee in New York City?

But to misunderstand that is to misunderstand everything about Gen Z.

I’m not a politician, so I don’t have to pretend that the concerns of Gen Z are legitimate. I understand that if you’re a politician, then you have to placate people when they emotionally explain to you why their life is so difficult. Sometimes people do have difficult lives with real challenges in the world.

But when I hear from Gen Z that the American dream is dead to them, all I can think of is this: You have got to be kidding me.

I’ve read many pieces over the last couple of years now that Gen Z has it tougher than any generation in modern history. I thought to myself, “I’m going to vomit.”

How many serious wars have they had to live through? Zero. Zero serious terrorist attacks. They have lived in the most prosperous time in human history and the healthiest time in human history.

But because their rent is too high in New York City, while they concomitantly hold some sort of nonprofit jobs, they whine.

I don’t mean everyone in Gen Z complains without reason — there are many people who are suffering, who have a disease, who have health problems, who have been dealt a rough hand by life.

Those are not the people I’m talking about.

The generational complaint that somehow Gen Z has it worse than the millennials or Gen X or the boomers, or the Greatest Generation, ignores literally all of American history, all of it.

But if you’re a politician, you can make bank by pretending that these people have legitimate concerns and they’re not just being ungrateful and bratty. For these folks, Mamdani is an avatar.

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He has no resume. He grew up absolutely loaded with wealth, and currently is taking advantage of a rent-controlled apartment in New York City. He is currently living in a rent-stabilized apartment where the rent is $2,500 a month. The market rate would be $8,000 per month. He earns $147,000 a year and is campaigning on housing affordability in New York City.

You might think to yourself, “That’s crazy. How are all of these socialists in New York City supporting somebody who’s so clearly a hypocrite?”

But that misses the point: So many folks in America look to their politicians as aspirational figures. I think a lot of people who love President Trump view him as an aspirational figure, somebody who’s very wealthy and very powerful, somebody who’s made more of himself than otherwise he might have had at the beginning. Yes, he grew up rich, but he made himself into a brand name available all across the world for literally decades, and then became President of the United States twice.

It’s an aspirational thing.

But what if the Gen Z aspiration is to be a career loser who lives off of their parents’ income until they get some sort of cush government job living in a rent-stabilized apartment? What if that is the actual aspiration? What if people look up to Zohran Mamdani not in spite of the fact that he is a loser, but because he is a loser?

A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mamdani’s.

And this is the central point. 

Armin Rosen noted in Tablet Magazine:

New York is thought of as the sink-or-swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that’s not true anymore. The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in government. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce, compared to 10 percent nationally. Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.

Wage growth in New York City is healthy because it’s all done off of government grants.

All of those nonprofits are not independently raising their money. They’re getting money from the government. Thus, they’re effectively second-order government employees.

When you look at the stats in New York, you understand just why Mamdani is so successful. You have well over 50% of the population that is working for some sort of government-orchestrated, government-organized, or government-funded segment of the economy.

In other words, the people who are getting money from the government are not the people who are paying for the government. They’re all Zohran Mamdani types. They’re living off the largesse of government.

Meanwhile, all of the rent across New York City has been rent-stabilized. 50% of all of the units across New York City have been rent-stabilized. One million units have been rent-stabilized, which means that there’s an artificially low supply of new construction in New York City. That means the prices go up. 

Mamdani is complaining about “affordability.” It should be pointed out that it’s all left-wing policies that made things unaffordable. Additionally, of the people who are in New York City trying to afford those rent-controlled, rent-stabilized apartments, a huge number of them are on the government dole, so they are earning from both ends. The government is stabilizing their rent, and at the same time, the government is likely subsidizing their salary.

This is why I’m irritated when I hear from Gen Z about how tough things are in places like New York.

We should point out that there has been this mindset that has settled in among the American population that you are supposed to die where you were born. 

This is not a typically American idea. There are people on the Right who believe this. There are people on the Left who believe this. But it is not a traditional American idea. The traditional American idea, if you go back to the very beginning, was to cross an ocean with nothing to guarantee what was going to happen. People went into the wilderness, built a crappy house, and tried to start a business. And if that didn’t work, they would abandon that place and move further to the west, across mountain ranges, across rivers.

That was the original American idea.

Traditionally, when it was too expensive to live in a place, Americans went somewhere else.

But Americans are not doing that anymore. Instead, the reason so many New Yorkers seem warm on socialism is that many New Yorkers are already living a form of socialism. They are living the Zohran Mamdani lifestyle, where they are being supported by the government in a wide variety of ways, ranging from the regulatory to the actual subsidy.

So when they say things are so hard in New York City, and the answer is more redistribution from the people who are earning all of the income and paying all the taxes, the answer should be NO.

At some point, there’s going to have to be a call for some level of responsibility on the part of young people.

I grew up in a 1,100 square-foot house with one bathroom and shared a bedroom with my three sisters until I was eleven. I did have the ultimate privilege: a solid two-parent household.

And you know what? It was a fine life. I’m grateful for that life.

I’m telling this story because there is this dumb assumption that if you talk about mobility in America and the capacity of people to make smart decisions and to make the kinds of moves that will be necessary to achieve success, the immediate accusation is that it was only true for you, it’s not true for anybody else.

But it’s not only true for me. It is true for a huge majority of Americans. If you make smart decisions in America, and if you stop whining for five seconds, and if you go out and make better decisions for yourself, you can make a better life for yourself.

So many politicians make bank off this idea that America is dying, that the American dream is dying. Who does better because of that?

Politicians.

This is how they gain power, because every time they fail, they turn around and they say, “The system has failed. Give me more power.”

This is how you end up with Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders.

It’s not going to work out for anyone who believes this garbage. It’s not going to work out for the city of New York. It’s not going to work out for the country.

The only person who can make your life better in the end is you. You are the person who makes your life better, not Mamdani, not Bernie Sanders.

Most Americans are not dreaming of a government job, making a decent salary, and living in a rent-stabilized apartment.

That is not the American dream.

It never was.