New York’s new mayor and the perils of progressive politics: Simon Lincoln Reader
Key topics:
Zohran Mamdani’s rise and comparison to Sadiq Khan’s leadership
Critique of progressive-left and Islamic political alliances
Generational and cultural divides shaping modern urban politics
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By Simon Lincoln Reader*
Friends of mine in New York, delightful, wildly successful fellows who have about ten jobs each despite none of them boasting an education past the age of 13, are annoyed at Tuesday’s mayoral vote.
In a group call last night, one of them claimed that the new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani – sorry, Zohran Kwame Mamdani – is going to steal Donald Trump’s private jet and fly it into his building on 5th Avenue (these are my kinds of people). I explained that whilst I wasn’t certain that was going to happen…it couldn’t be worse than London.
I’ve lived for nearly a decade beneath a similar kind of blended political philosophy – call it an Islamo-left alliance. Socially and culturally Islam is incongruent with today’s wayward progressives but politically…it’s a useful flirt, even if its limits mean that the furthest it gets is fooling around on the sofa, before the Muslim man discovers that the progressive lady is in fact, not a lady, and subsequently tosses him off the roof.
Nonetheless, it’s not good: when this happens to cities, as has happened to London under Sadiq Khan, your friends gap it to Milan or Geneva, life becomes more expensive and more dangerous, and your high streets become littered with barbers’ shops washing drug money, or vape shops, or chicken shops. One wing of such is probably worth a year of Ozempic. So, er, not good.
But Mamdani’s posturing must be given a full body-cavity inspection. He has a degree in African studies, for which: well-done Zohran – sorry, Zohran KWAME – but it isn’t exactly a degree in law, and mayors with degrees in law who were human rights lawyers previously are wily operators.
Sadiq Khan is a very bad mayor, whose only contribution to thinking has been whipped platitudes, but he has survived precisely because of this foundation. He knows how to – as Jacob Zuma would say – “meandoz” (meander).
Mamdani isn’t exactly original either. Most of his statements have been lifted from Barack Obama’s father, or even his own father, Mahmood. Imagine plagiarizing your own dad? And then the example of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) refers.
Sassy Latino bartender
In 2018, pulses were set racing by a sassy Latino bartender emerging from nowhere to “smash the patriarchy” and make all stuff free. Underestimated by her opponent, she trounced the complacent old fool with an intelligent campaign, then packed a bag and a ginger boyfriend for Washington.
Then in 2021, with her party now firmly in control of Congress, she was instructed by the very people who voted for her to hold Nancy Pelosi to ransom by forcing a vote on the floor on Medicare for all. “Nah,” she said, “…don’t think I’ll do that.” When those who had voted for her expressed their disappointment, she dismissed them as “misogynists”.
But had those who voted for her looked a little closer, they may have tempered their enthusiasm. AOC grew up in leafy suburban New York, where she was known as “Sandy”. “Sandy” isn’t exactly exotic-left-wing-hood: more luxury Caribbean cruise (in hindsight, her campaigners should have considered adjusting this era to a “LaSandy”).
Similarly, Mamdani’s mother is exotic glamour. Having made Hollywood films of an acquired taste (his father is just standard wholesale UCT extravagant fallist), Mamdani has also got himself a neat little pad in gated Kampala, from which he reportedly runs an Airbnb.
But cautioning a sense of doom doesn’t answer an important question: why do these political specimens keep appearing? There are two groups that we should examine here: one worthy of sympathy, the other the Tower of London.
The first group consists of white, mostly single women aged between 18 and 24, who were not credited by Mamdani in his victory speech (Yemeni bodega owners and Senegalese taxi drivers were, so, not very generous). These are lockdown’s girls, poisoned by Teen Vogue (which has only this week – tragically – shuttered its politics desk), loaded with student debt, and persistently aggravated by the likes of AOC to resist the “tradwife” profile, so encouraged to hate all men.
Ripple effects
With their prospects diminished by the ripple effects of the greatest transfer of wealth in history (2020), where just about everything today for them is prohibitively expensive, they voted for the guy who said he had a few ideas about that.
The second group is the same group that has destroyed pretty much everything it’s touched. These were the largest generational beneficiaries of the aforementioned windfall and are, through twists, responsible for the financial conditions imposed upon the girls.
The men who were young soldiers the day the Second World War broke out would later create the conditions from which an astonishing type of leader would emerge: Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Their children, however, despite benefiting from the wisdom of these leaders and the even better conditions they created, manufactured a fake conscience along the way, under the pressure of which they’d ultimately buckle.
Whereas our girls vote for people like Mamdani out of desperation, this group votes out of guilt, or cynicism, or even sadism. It should come as no surprise that the more prominent of the 44 signatories on that stupid local open letter last week have all voiced their support for Mamdani, despite having very little to say about the revelations emerging from the Madlanga Commission.
Primal place
New York is a primal place, and feelings exist closer to the surface than they do in layered, gentrified London. In a city that’s felt the humiliation of the markets refusing to lend to it (1975), the real power centres have always been the unions, the construction mafias and at the very top, the most competitive real estate arena in the world, in which the majority of successful participants are Jewish. If anyone in the world knows how to deal with fallists, it’s probably this crowd.
But there is a very simple way to prevent this from happening in future. Just torture the boomers, and everything will be okay.
*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014.
*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.