Zohran Mamdani’s Ivy League intifada

We warned you. We told you that one day the foppish blacklisters of the mad modern campus would have real political power. We told you there’d come a time when they would leave their leafy playpen and drag their politics of self-pity that they doll up as socialism into high office. And now it’s happened. Ignore the guff about Zohran Mamdani’s victory being the fruits of a ‘working-class revolt’ – this is an Ivy League intifada, the revenge of Bushwick against Trumpland.

That the new mayor of New York City is a 34-year-old Muslim and democratic socialist who’s never had a real job and struggles to say whether Israel has a right to exist has made waves around the world. The right is in full panic mode, fretting that NYC will shortly declare itself the capital of a new caliphate. The digital left is cock-a-hoop, feverishly dreaming that this perma-grinning son of eye-watering privilege will push the first domino in the destruction of capitalism. Get real. Mamdani’s not going to fight a holy war or a class war, but a culture war.

The good people of New York will have voted for him for a host of reasons. He’s the first NYC mayoral candidate since 1969 to get more than a million votes. Some will have liked his promise to make housing more affordable. Others will have thought New York needed new blood after years of rule by creaking Democrats and Republicans. But in terms of what Mamdani himself represents, and in terms of where the true momentum for his mayorship came from in New York society, there is no question that he is the figurehead of an upper-middle-class cult of grievance that will do sweet FA for New York’s workers.

This is a man who hails from extravagant comfort. His dad’s an African Studies professor at Columbia, his mum’s a globe-trotting filmmaker. He’s a failed rapper (makes a change from being a failed novelist, I guess) and by the New York Post’s reckoning he has spent a measly three years of his life as part of the actual workforce. For the rest of the time he’s done nepo-baby stuff and, of course, politics. Man of the people! He went to the private liberal arts college, Bowdoin, in leafy Brunswick in Maine, where he founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Of course he did.

He holds every correct-think opinion. He thinks transwomen are women and says he will make New York an ‘LGBTQIA+ sanctuary’, whatever that means. He took the knee to BLM and once even parroted that most cherished orthodoxy of TikTok radicals who live in leafy, low-crime boroughs – that the ‘racist, anti-queer’ NYPD should be ‘defunded’. (He softened that stance in recent weeks.) And he hates Israel. Hating Israel is the moral glue of this new, youthful layer of political society. He says he’ll arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever visits New York. He refuses to condemn that chant, ‘Globalise the Intifada’. When asked if he condemns Hamas he fidgets and sweats like Keir Starmer being asked what a woman is.

And it seems his most enthusiastic support came from those parts of New York most likely to share such luxury beliefs. The early indicators are that he did far better among the university-educated than the non-university-educated (ie, the working class). He absolutely cleaned up with younger voters – it looks like three-quarters of voters under 30 gave him their X. And he smashed it in Prospect Heights, Bushwick, Park Slope – districts of Brooklyn that have become a byword for the Cold Brew-supping classes whose idea of work is making a podcast and volunteering in the local co-op three hours a week.

Mamdani was swept into the political limelight on a wave of privileged resentment. The depthless self-pity of downwardly mobile millennials meshed with the hipster intifada triggered by the events of 7 October 2023, creating the perfect conditions for the rise of this anti-Zio, woe-is-me rich kid. Look, I agree there is a housing crisis, and that it is awful that so many twenty- and thirtysomethings look destined to rent forever. I just find it hard to sympathise with the section of that generation that has promoted climate alarmism and sneered at working-class Americans, thus making it less likely that mass house-building will take place while pissing off the men who would be called upon to do it.

The most galling thing about the Mamdani phenomenon is its claim to be a working-class uprising. Mamdani himself says he’ll fight for the working classes, though surely he’ll have to meet some of them first. The global left is gushing over his win as if it were New York’s equivalent of the Paris Commune. What we have here is the staggeringly dishonest co-option of class politics by an over-credentialled emergent elite who will in truth be pursuing their own Bushwick bullshit, not the improvement of the lot of New York’s workers. They cosplay as class warriors because that’s sexier than the reality – that they’re privileged members of an activist class that will cancel you if you say lesbians don’t have penises but love you if you say ‘Destroy Israel’.

Mamdani’s campaign has exposed how the faux-socialists of the burgeoning young elite really view the working classes – as the saps of history; as agency-lacking victims who require smart cookies from Brooklyn with two degrees in political studies to rescue them from the moral doldrums. Hence, Mamdani’s ‘working-class uprising’ involves talk of free bus travel and city-run grocery stores. It’s charity masquerading as revolution. To the Uber-taking arts crowd of the downtown Mamdani set, ‘working class’ means tragic little people who can’t afford the bus and who crave an apple from the government. Please stop calling paternalism ‘socialism’.

Across the Anglo-American world, a new class of overeducated, high-status influencers is cribbing from the language of socialism to push a politics that is anything but. Here in the UK you’ll see Oxbridge girls in ‘I’m Literally A Communist’ earrings who say ‘Up the working classes!’ and then faint when the oiks vote Reform. We have Your Party, the Jeremy Corbyn / Zarah Sultana outfit that poses as a class revolt when everyone knows their membership is 99 per cent angry graphic designers who can’t believe their Dalston rent went up again. And now we have Mamdani, mayor of a city with such a great history of working-class rebellion, who dons the mask of class to disguise his crusade of culture. I trust New York’s frank, free-speaking workers will soon see through this charade.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.