In New York City’s mayoral race, Democratic primary voters have eleven options, but realistically, they’re facing a choice between the top two candidates: a phenomenally corrupt man of the establishment in disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, and a phenomenally terrifying socialist outsider in Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez just endorsed Mamdani, joining anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour.
On economics, Mamdani makes former left-wing mayor Bill de Blasio look like Milton Friedman. Mamdani’s agenda includes a $9 billion tax hike, freezing rent prices, free child care for all, free buses for all, and a $30-per-hour minimum wage. Mamdani opposes hiring more NYPD officers, wants to get rid of the Strategic Response Group that deals with keeping order at protests, and wants to eliminate the police overtime budget. (No joke, wasn’t Wilson Fisk’s opposition to police overtime and hiring more cops supposed to signal to the audience that he was a bad guy in the recent Daredevil series?)
Momdani’s idea of fighting crime is promising to arrest Bibi Netanyahu. Mamdani did not sponsor the annual resolution for Holocaust Remembrance Day any of the last four years.
(If you’re looking for a silver lining, Mamdani wants to end Columbia University and New York University’s exemption from property taxes. Hey, why isn’t anybody running around saying Mamdani is trying to destroy higher education?)
What we’re seeing is a part of a long-delayed Democratic Party battle about what their party wants to do and what it is supposed to stand for, a battle that was largely on hiatus for the duration of the Biden presidency. And it’s an intense conflict between two vitally important core components of the modern Democratic Party: establishment corruption versus far-left socialism.
In the presidential primary of 2020, Democrats had a buffet table of 24 candidates. Joe Biden had the highest name recognition, but through 2019 he hovered around 30 percent support nationally and had even dropped to 18 percent in the RealClearPolitics average as late as February 26. Very few Democrats were all that enthusiastic about nominating Biden, who looked like he had aged a decade since he had been vice president, was already starting to have odd interactions with voters – “look, fat” — and his promises were increasingly unrealistic. (June 11, 2019: “I promise you, if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: We’re going to cure cancer.” October 23, 2019: “Putin knows that when I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny, and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over.”)
One of the younger, more energetic options was supposed to emerge from the crowded field, unite the party, and set the course for the next four to eight years. Instead, a lot of candidates who thought they were hot stuff proved to be utterly forgettable on a debate stage.
To the horror of many Democrats, the candidate who did emerge as the frontrunner from the early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada was Bernie Sanders, who made clear he intended to go into the general election defending the record of Castro’s Cuba. Far-left socialism was on the verge of winning against Establishment Corruption.
The Democrats — perhaps in a preview of the ruthless pragmatism they would bring to bear against Biden last summer — concluded that nominating Sanders was too risky, and that Biden, being the last man standing who wasn’t openly socialist, was the safest option. In stunningly rapid succession, Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden. Establishment Corruption triumphed over Far-left socialism, although once the new Biden administration hired a bunch of Elizabeth Warren staffers, Biden administration policies were considerably further to the left than the Biden campaign had suggested.
When a party controls the White House, every faction within it feels at least some pressure to keep their criticism somewhat muffled and to pull their oars in the same direction. In the absence of a party leader, every side jostles for power and prominence.
We’re going to see a lot of this conflict in the 2026 midterms and the run-up to the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. A lot of Democrats deeply believe in the importance of using powerful elected offices as a way to divert taxpayer money to allied groups, to sign exorbitant book deals, and to grope armed state troopers, as Cuomo did. And a lot of other Democrats deeply believe in the government’s ability to solve all problems by throwing gobs and gobs of more money at those problems, and raising taxes through the roof to pay for it all.
The person who can bring these competing values into true synergy – “we can be both corrupt elites and far-left socialists” is the one who is most likely to be the 2028 nominee.