{"id":219695,"date":"2025-06-27T22:11:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-27T22:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/219695\/"},"modified":"2025-06-27T22:11:15","modified_gmt":"2025-06-27T22:11:15","slug":"zohran-mamdani-has-struck-a-blow-to-the-democratic-partys-passivity-moira-donegan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/219695\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani has struck a blow to the Democratic party\u2019s passivity | Moira Donegan"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re told that the Democratic party is at a crossroads, that leaders have lost their identity and their way. We\u2019re told that they must spend millions discovering their own \u201cJoe Rogan\u201d, or espouse deregulation, or surrender the fight for the rights of targeted minorities. The Democrats<\/a>, we\u2019re told, are in a moment of soul searching, of trying to find out how they lost young men and the white working class. They\u2019re still thinking, half a decade on, of how to undo the supposed damage of the 2020 summer, when protesters opposed to the extrajudicial killings of Black civilians shouted: \u201cDefund the police.\u201d The subtext of this handwringing, which has been incessant in the media and among party insiders since the November election, is that the party must move, yet again, to the right. It is presumed that they can\u2019t attract voters otherwise.<\/p>\n

The apparent victory (still unofficial because the counting won\u2019t technically be complete until July) of a 33-year-old socialist in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary this week suggests otherwise. Zohran Mamdani<\/a>, a state assemblymember from Queens, was a little-known leftwing activist whose campaign against the former governor and New York household name Andrew Cuomo was polling in the single digits. But with immense personal charisma and a talent for retail politicking, airtight message discipline centered on making life affordable, and a small army of motivated young volunteers, Mamdani defeated a political dynasty, defied conventional wisdom, and is expected to win the American left its biggest electoral victory since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez\u2019s primary coup in 2018.<\/p>\n

In the process, his campaign presented a new vision of the party: one that has energized voters with its authenticity and moral vision even as major donors and the party establishment have balked. The leaders of the Democratic establishment have long believed that the party\u2019s left flank was its greatest liability. Mamdani has proven that it can be an asset.<\/p>\n

Any responsible commentator will tell you that Mamdani\u2019s success in the New York<\/a> mayoral primary will be difficult for other progressive candidates to replicate. The city\u2019s public campaign-funds matching program allowed the candidate to spend his time in highly visible public engagement with the people of New York \u2013 rather than on fundraising efforts among the rich. The ranked-choice voting system \u2013 still relatively new \u2013 incentivized him and the crowded other field of candidates to form a united front against Cuomo, and allowed Mamdani to capture the crucial endorsement of his fellow candidate Brad Lander, the beloved New York City comptroller.<\/p>\n

Mamdani, too, seems to have the kind of personal talent that is rare in any politician: a relaxed and personable demeanor, an uncommon gift for oratory, and a rhetoric of morality and dignity that appears not just plausibly authentic but genuinely inspiring, and is already drawing comparisons to liberal political giants like AOC and the young Barack Obama. Crucially, too, Mamdani is uncommonly disciplined: he avoided attacking the progressive liberals, like Lander and state senator Zellnor Myrie, who were slightly to his right, preferring to unite with them and recruit them into his movement, a gesture of pragmatic generosity that kept the field from turning into a circular firing squad. And he has a gravitas that most of us could not rise to, enduring cynical and often racist smears from Cuomo supporters, who called him antisemitic<\/a> for his support of human rights for Palestinians with a calm dignity that emphasized his loyalty to all New Yorkers, Jewish or otherwise. All of this \u2013 his incentives, his talents \u2013 contributed to his victory. None will be easy to recreate in another race.<\/p>\n

And yet Mamdani\u2019s victory is a signal of a subterranean shift happening in the base of the Democratic party \u2013 the younger, more motivated, more active voters who the party leadership relies on but does not quite trust. The Democratic party\u2019s leaders \u2013 like Nancy Pelosi of California, but prominently including Mamdani\u2019s fellow New Yorkers Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries \u2013 have largely rolled over<\/a> in the second Trump administration, failing to use either their procedural power or their public platforms to create leverage against the Maga agenda or advance an alternative vision for the country.<\/p>\n

Their passivity and risk aversion has stood in contrast to the mounting energy of their voters, whose anger at Trump\u2019s authoritarian ambitions, racist immigration policies and broader rollback of rights has sparked a growing protest movement. Energized liberal voters find that the Democratic politicians they elected to represent them are passive and complacent, even in the face of what they themselves correctly described, in 2024, as the ascent of a fascist movement. The party\u2019s rhetoric is not being matched by its actions, and its actions are not matching its voters\u2019 passions. Indeed, the party appears most energetic when it is crushing the ambitions of its charismatic younger members, as when it denied powerful committee positions to AOC<\/a> and Texas\u2019s Jasmine Crockett<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Establishment Democrats seem, if anything, as if they want to disappear, to be absolved of their responsibility to advance a political agenda of their own. This might be why they have fled, repeatedly, rightward, away from their own professed principles. This might be why they lined up, during the mayoral primary, behind Cuomo<\/a>, the disgraced former governor whom many of them had called on to resign just four years ago his candidacy was a promise that their own structures of power and patronage would remain intact, that nothing much would change. Mamdani represented a threat to their own vision of a do-nothing political party. For that, they tried to crush him<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You can only antagonize your own base for so long before they begin to notice. In a new poll conducted just days before Mamdani\u2019s upset victory, fully 62% of Democratic voters said that their party needs new leadership. Mamdani \u2013 youthful, energetic, and actually interested in governance \u2013 offers both a rebuke to the Democratic establishment and a vision of the party\u2019s renewal. It may be coming whether the Democratic National Committee likes it or not. Fed up with their useless, antagonist leadership and unwilling to give up on the prospect of progressive change, many members of the Democrats\u2019 hated base are certain to follow Mamdani\u2019s example, taking risks to challenge unpopular or ineffectual incumbents and entrenched local party machines. Since Bill Clinton\u2019s victory in 1992, the Democrats have been trying to reinvent themselves as a more conservative party, assuming that their future lay rightward. They were looking in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We\u2019re told that the Democratic party is at a crossroads, that leaders have lost their identity and their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3090],"tags":[51,1700,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-219695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114757624529580646","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}