Chapo Trap House

Zohran Mamdani’s victory came as little surprise. On both the left and right comparisons to the 2008 presidential election abound; Mamdani is said to mean nothing less than the rebirth of American liberalism. Like Obama, he was initially a foe of the Democratic establishment, but then embraced. And like Obama, he gets his intellectual and cultural ballast from politically active, urban, college-educated men. Mamdani’s victory can, in a narrow sense, be explained by the demographics of New York City. But what differentiates him from Cuomo and other establishment Democrats is his ability to speak to the popular, online leftism that millennial, professional New Yorkers traffic in. This particular subculture has seen little electoral representation until now.

Forgive the analogy that follows. Is Bernie Sanders the Barry Goldwater of the left? Has Sanders, to echo the words of George Will on Goldwater, lost two primary campaigns but won the future? What reminds us of Goldwater is the clarity of Sanders’s proposals and the force with which he expressed them. Medicare-for-All, canceling student debt, free college tuition; paid for by soaking the wealthy with new taxes. Sanders made all of this thinkable, because most of his ideas are popular. The Sanders moment arrived at a time of political reorientation that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War years. Polling showed that half of millennials have unfavorable views of capitalism. Seventy percent say they are likely to vote for a socialist candidate.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.