SerpApi.Org
Even the Gray Lady is raising her eyebrows at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political two-step.
The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro went so far as to accuse Mamdani of deflecting as she pressed him for a definition of the “working class” he professes to champion during a recent sit-down.
At first pass, Mamdani’s working class included all who “work to pay” their bills.
When Garcia-Navarro asked if that included “someone making $250,000 a year,” the mayor affirmed that it did, before ultimately drawing his line “at about a million dollars a year.”
These are the prevarications of a man who knows where his bread is buttered.
Mamdani is a self-described socialist whose political success depends on his ability to present as a champion of the working man — the kind who clocks in early, stays late and coarsens his callouses in the interim.
After the triumph three far-left candidates he backed in high-profile Big Apple congressional primaries last month, he heralded a supposed “shift in the balance of power between working people and their special interests.”
“Finally,” he declared, “working people are going to have more of a voice in the halls of power.”
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Except they don’t.
Because Mamdani and his disciples’ potent political base is composed not of overlooked everymen, but an at-once privileged and aggrieved white-collar class.
The proof is in the pudding.
According to the Times’ post-primary analysis of Mamdani’s decisive defeat of Andrew Cuomo last summer, the former beat the latter in higher income (42%-30%), whiter (39%-34%) and more college-educated (45%-28%) precincts.
But the more moderate ex-governor came out ahead in lower income (49%-38%) and black (51%-34%) neighborhoods.
The Bronx backed Cuomo; Mamdani ran up the numbers in wealthy Manhattan and crunchy Brooklyn.
A nearly identical story played out this summer in the congressional races Mamdani successfully upended.
Police, prison and border abolitionist Darializa Avila Chevalier dispatched incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, yet handily lost the lower income areas that the mayor said she was being sent to Washington to represent.
Rep. Dan Goldman won his district’s less affluent precincts by 14 points, yet Mamdani ally Brad Lander will nevertheless replace him on the ballot this November.
Mamdani doesn’t actually believe $999,999-a-year earners are average joes living paycheck to paycheck.
But he’d be damned before he declared war on the exceedingly comfortable upper middle-class voters who backed him en masse last year.
Affordability, affordability, affordability: that’s the message many have credited with catapulting a little-known assemblyman into Gracie Mansion.
But Mamdani’s appeal has always been less in what he’s promised to do for down-on-their-luck New Yorkers’ pocketbooks than in how he makes the more fortunate feel.
That is: righteous, important underdogs fighting the good fight in their personal and political capacities.
Self-righteous and self-important, maybe.
His working class savior complex is just one product in a larger suite on offer.
Consider also his explicit anti-Americanism, which sells like hotcakes in the era of collapsing Democratic patriotism.
On the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday, Mamdani delivered an address in which he explained that what’s great about the place that’s given him everything is . . . nothing, really.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” he lamented.
“We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”
Never mind the concerns of the working class who overwhelmingly bear the burdens associated with mass illegal migration, or their apparently jingoistic love of country.
Mamdani serves the interests of the Hampton house crowd convinced that the enforcement of immigration law renders America a fascist hellscape.
His unshakeable obsession with Israel, too, is part of a carefully calibrated strategy to indulge the overeducated progressive activist class.
How many bus drivers, firefighters and construction workers are clamoring for an NYPD officer to put Benjamin Netanyahu in cuffs?
Mamdani is a shrewd operator dancing with the champagne-sipping social justice warriors who brought him.
But he finds himself in the tenuous position of having to do so while paying lip service to the working-class voters whose interests he works against and whose worldview he scorns.
It’s a tightrope that, even in deep blue New York, is beginning to fray.
