The consequence of ruling like a crazed sociopath is that it makes the radical socialist opposition look sane and inviting.
“Mamdani’s brand of ‘positive politics’ captivates from Mowbray to Manhattan,” reads the headline on News24, about the victory in New York City’s mayoral election of rising Democratic Party star Zohran Mamdani.
He defeated Andrew Cuomo, the former state governor and son of a former state governor, who used to be a moderate Democrat until Mamdani’s primary win forced him to run as an independent.
There was also a Republican on the ticket, Curtis Sliwa, but nobody knows who that was and even Donald Trump backed Cuomo.
Elsewhere, there were gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and a ballot measure to approve redistricting in favour of Democrats in California. In all these elections, Democrats won by a landslide. Not a single county reported a Republican win. All swung strongly in the Democrats’ favour.
These elections are widely seen as an important early indicator of Trump’s popularity, ahead of crucial mid-term elections next year, in which Democrats are now expected to capture both houses of Congress.
Gushing
The News24 story gushed about Mamdani’s youth (millennial), his ethnic origin (South Asian), his birthplace (Uganda), his religion (Muslim), his fight (for working-class folk), his appeal (to many diverse voters), where he spent a couple of years of his childhood (Cape Town), and his father (Professor Mahmood Mamdani, “a leftist radical scholar” who tried and failed to “decolonise” the University of Cape Town around the turn of the century).
Other than a passing reference to Mandani Jr. being a “democratic socialist”, however, you had to read 1,200 words into the 1,500 word piece to learn anything about his actual policy platform. Even then, it consisted of a single sentence: “Mamdani ran his campaign on making New York affordable, promising free childcare, fast buses and a rent freeze.”
The writeup in Daily Maverick was similar: “Former SA schoolboy Zohran Mamdani becomes New York City’s first millennial mayor in ‘historic’ elections,” it blazoned, over a photograph of Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, triumphally clutching hands.
Its first mention of Mamdani’s policy platform came two thirds down the page: “The young millennial’s policies include raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest, hiking the corporation tax, freezing stabilised apartment rental rates and making buses and childcare free for New Yorkers.”
Three cheers for immigrants
It is, of course, great to see that a Muslim immigrant millennial can win an important election in the US. Three cheers for diversity. And immigrants.
None of that matters, however. He could be a white middle-aged pastor, or a green alien from Mars, for all the difference it makes.
What matters – what always matters in elections, though few voters seem to care – is his policy platform. Zohran Mamdani’s policies are boilerplate socialist. Free this, free that, government-owned grocery stores to force prices down, and that old left-wing chestnut, rent control.
He ran against the billionaires, saying, “people feel like large parts of [New York] have been turned into playgrounds for the rich that they can’t afford to be in.”
Well, boo-hoo. If you can’t be productive enough to cut it on the world’s most expensive real estate, perhaps you should be living somewhere less expensive. Like Cape Town, perhaps.
Price controls
If all this price control stuff sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Folks older than Mamdani might recall that emperors once debased the coinage, until the denarius was worth only a fraction of its original value, much like the Federal Reserve today debases the dollar by increasing the money supply in excess of economic growth, and keeping interest rates artificially low.
You may recall that Emperor Diocletian, eager not to be identified as the cause of inflation, railed against the avarice of wealthy merchants.
He issued an edict concerning the sale price of goods: “Men whose aim it always is to profit, to restrain general prosperity, men who individually abounding in great riches which could completely satisfy whole nations, try to capture smaller fortunes and strive after ruinous percentages. Concern for humanity in general persuades us to set a limit to the avarice of such men. Profiteers, covertly attacking the public welfare, are extorting prices from merchandise such that in a single purchase a soldier is deprived of his bonus and salary. Therefore, we have decreed that there be established a maximum so that when the violence of high prices appears anywhere, avarice might be checked by the limits of our statute.”
The consequences of these price caps were predictable: producers cut unprofitable production, shortages arose, and unemployment increased.
Rent control
Likewise, rent control is not a new idea. It is a retread of an idea that has always been popular among the left-leaning elites in major cities, and in New York in particular.
Yet it has never worked. If you cap rents, what happens is that you get an excess of demand over supply of rent-controlled apartments. That means that would-be renters have no negotiating power, because it is trivial to replace them with renters who don’t complain. That, and the lower income potential, mean that landlords have no incentive to maintain or improve their properties, so you get dilapidated tenements, smack in the middle of the world’s most expensive real estate.
Meanwhile, rents for residential units that are not rent-controlled rise, and since rent-controlled units tend to be better located, the ironic situation occurs that well-maintained rent-controlled buildings get occupied by well-connected, well-off people, while low-income people end up either in run-down blocks, or are forced to pay higher rents for unregulated housing far from work opportunities.
A comprehensive review of economic research on the subject of rent control was unequivocal: “…the preponderance of the literature points toward the conclusion that rent control introduces inefficiencies in housing markets. Moreover, the literature on the whole does not sustain any plausible redemption in terms of redistribution. The literature on the whole may be fairly said to show that rent control is bad, yet as of 2001, about 140 jurisdictions persist in some form of the intervention.”
Moderates of both parties
Until last year, I had never supported a Democratic Party candidate for US president. Last year, I concluded that a soft-left muddler, taking over a perfectly well-performing economy, could hardly do more harm than Donald Trump.
Before that, if I had been an American voter, I would have considered myself part of the libertarian wing of the “big tent” of the Republican party (the Libertarian Party having mostly comprised irrelevant wingnuts).
After Calvin Coolidge, whom everyone seems to have forgotten, I considered myself a fan of the economic policies of Ronald Reagan (though not with his “culture war” ideas).
The white nationalist right was not yet a major force, I could tolerate the conservative wing because it generally supported liberal economic policies, and I could live with the war hawks because I’d rather the US police the world than anyone else.
Meanwhile, my general agreement with the liberal social policies of the Democratic Party was not enough to get me to accept their big-government economics, or the identity politics of the woke left, or the outright socialism of the far left of the party.
In general, then, I’d prefer a moderate Republican in power, and since I’m also not a fan of big government, I quite favour a split government, with Democrats in power in either the House or the Senate, as a check on Republican ambition. The less a government can do, the better, is my thinking.
However, noting that the US economy generally performs better under Democratic administrations, I’m not strongly opposed to moderate Democrats being in power, either, with the split government situation reversed.
Radicalism begets radicalism
What happened here, however, is that the Republicans handed the keys to the kingdom to a sleazy con-artist who displays all the dark triad traits: narcissism, machiavellianism and sociopathy.
This clown walzed into the White House, bulldozed half of it and decorated the other half with marble and ersatz gold trimmings from Ali Express. Then he fired everyone who ever disagreed with him, decreed biological “facts” into existence, sicced the Department of Justice on anyone he’d ever butted heads with, deployed the National Guard to Democrat-run cities under the false claim that they were hotbeds of crime and chaos, sent masked bands of unidentifiable immigration enforcers to round up anyone who looked like an immigrant, raised tariffs against everyone to establish “leverage” for extortion, burnt half the institutions that made America great to the ground, and sold the levers of power to the highest bidders.
The only reason the US economy has held up fairly well is the multi-trillion-dollar artificial intelligence bubble. Once you strip the tech giants out of the averages, corporate earnings are pretty underwhelming.
Other indicators are also starting to wobble: unemployment has risen to the highest level since the pandemic, though the longest government shutdown in history has also caused a data blackout. Reports of consumer inflation are also rising, as one would expect as a consequence of high import tariffs.
Tuesday’s elections were a sharp rebuke of Trump’s MAGA agenda. Turns out voters don’t particularly like a bull in a china shop, and are willing to vote for anyone who opposes it.
Socialism on the horizon
What is striking is that the Democrats are still as rudderless and message-less as they have been for years. They have not come up with a compelling new message to counter the MAGA and Project 2025 ideas that have galvanised Republicans.
While Mamdani is a far-left socialist, the new Democratic governors of New Jersey and Virginia are much more moderate.
The chaos and brutality of the Trump administration has made any ideology appear more palatable than what voters are experiencing right now.
Not so long ago, the fervour of the woke brigade seemed to be cooling as it lost its popularity with the public. Not so long ago, the appeal of socialism to millennials was no more of a threat than the appeal of socialism to young voters had ever been. Not so long ago, the Democrats thought it reckless to bet on far-left candidates like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Now, the far-left wing is in the ascendancy. Socialist millennials are winning major elections. Republicans are starting to distance themselves from Trump’s toxicity. Barring a full-blown fascist power grab (which is not beyond the realm of possibility), the GOP is heading for a thrashing in the next election cycle.
In its place, a revitalised left-wing politics, with old-school socialism at its core and all the superficial varnish of compassion, tolerance, free social services, and concern for all of the great diversity of ordinary Americans, could get an extended day in the sun.
Lesson
The lesson here is simple. If you’re trying to convince the public to ditch “wokism” and “radical left” policies, then you really ought to prove, once you’re in power, that you can deliver a sane, adult, and ultimately successful administration that governs for all Americans.
Instead, Trump has reinforced all of the stereotypes about the American right. He cast even moderate Democrats as crazy extremists or as supporters of domestic terror. Trump, and the MAGA movement, tarnished the entire Republican party as a callous oligarchy, full of anti-immigrant prejudice and racism, jingoistic nationalism, militarist repression of civilians, hostility to LGBTQ+ equality, religious fundamentalism and patriarchy, and the “transactional” politics of corruption and extortion.
Ironically, in his “war against woke”, he is confirming every belief that the woke brigade held about the political right. If the reckless radicalism of Trumpism is the sort of “capitalism” the Republican party is selling, then voters are not going to buy it.
Instead, they’ll buy anything else, including the long-discredited socialism of the far-left wing of the Democrat Party.
Wokism was pretty bad. Trump’s proto-fascism is even worse. But the backlash is going to be worse still. If the US goes on to turn socialist for a generation, the blame will fall squarely on the clown the Republicans elected to defeat it.
[Image: Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, won New York’s mayoral race on Tuesday, in an omen of an electoral backlash to come. Image: Creative Commons]
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