How capital wields race against Mandami's socialism
Beset on all sides by the woke and anti-woke, Mandami's campaign maintains its lead
The Hamptons bourgeoisie is voicing some familiar lines about NYC mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, according to the New York Times:
Patricia Duff, a Democratic donor, had thrown her lot behind Mr. Cuomo. “Mamdani has a great smile and is wonderfully articulate,” she said. “His social media is entertaining, and his promises sound fine until you look at the fine print and they’re not realistic. It’s fantasy land.”
The most familiar thing, of course, is the barely-phoned-in cliche about socialist promises being unrealistic. “Rich American liberal thinks that socialists live in fantasyland” is such a dog-bites-man story at this point in history that it’s hard to understand why the NYT would bother reporting it; in 2025 the truly interesting story would be to find people in the Hamptons who actually support Mamdani, or who at least have objections to him that aren’t just autocomplete text in the phone of every Ben Shapiro fan on the planet.
What really caught my attention, however, was the praise of Mamdani. It hasn’t been that long, after all, since another candidate with foreign roots was described by his political opponents as “articulate”; but when Joe Biden said this about then-candidate Barack Obama, it made national news as an obvious example of backhanded racism. It wasn’t just that Biden talked about a well-spoken black man like this was an unusual aberration; it was that Obama’s opponents consistently refused to engage with his candidacy seriously. Instead of grappling with his ideas, they preferred to treat him like a superficial spectacle, all hype and branding.
So it has been striking to see the exact same dynamic play out with Mamdani — but without any commentary about subtextual racism. Evidently, when a socialist candidate wants the public to take his ideas seriously, it’s fine to wholly attribute popular support for him to superficialities about his smile or his TikTok posts. Here’s how Isabella Redjai writes about him, for example:
As with Obama, the secret to Mamdani’s success is not policy but what many call “the vibe.”…Mamdani didn’t just run a campaign; he curated an experience. With his signature three silver rings, photogenic smile, and what many online are calling a “humanizing tone,” he blended culture and politics into a lifestyle brand.
Why exactly would Mamdani need to “humanize” himself? Again, the contrast with Obama is illuminating, because it’s impossible to imagine someone using that kind of phrasing about him without a massive backlash of commentary about implicit racism. But here, Redjai talks about Mamdani’s “humanizing tone” in the course of arguing that his success “is not policy” — how could it be? — so liberal discourse gives her a pass.
Ironically, the only time racism seems to come up in popular commentary about Mamdani is when pundits are obscuring the role that class plays in opposing his campaign. Case in point: a curious editorial by Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Elite Panic at the Heart of Liberal Attacks on Mamdani. Cottom:
The recent political attacks against him are coming from all directions — Republicans, Democrats and the real estate lobby. Some of these attacks are about political interests — of course, landlords wouldn’t like affordable housing and tenant-friendly Mamdani... But a lot of these attacks are thinly veiled racism.
The “but” here is crucial. Cottom is talking about racism as opposed to class, not as some additional element in the opposition to Mamdani. The entire editorial is an exercise in reframing liberal opposition to Mamdani’s campaign as a symptom of racism:
Mamdani’s economic policies prioritize poor and working-class people. He has, in a way, betrayed the white liberal investment in the institutions that made him possible.
It’s hard to miss the analytical asymmetry here. Cottom acknowledges the poor and working class, but when it is time to identify their oppressors, the upper class is nowhere to be found, and instead liberals are characterized by their whiteness. This is not the both/and analysis that characterizes left intersectionality; it is a genre of identitarian reductionism that redefines capitalism as a mere expression of white supremacy.
This is only one of the more explicit erasures of class struggle. In a Vox article on “The alarming racism in NYC’s mayoral race,” for example, author Abdallah Fayyad gives “3 reasons that explain it”; somehow, the word “socialism” does not appear once in the entire article. (Fayyad for example quotes Rep. Andy Ogles referring to Mamdani as “little Muhammad,” but pointedly omits the rest of the quote — where Ogles warns that Mamdani is “an antisemitic, socialist, communist who will destroy the great City of New York.”
More typical is an extended piece by Don Moynihan, who puzzles over why the New York Times has been so critical about Mandami. His conclusion:
Mamdani is being othered and threatened for his identity…Mamdani is an immigrant. He is seeking to lead a city where more than three million immigrants make up more than one-third of the city’s population. Rather than seeking a gotcha on how he represents his identity, it would be more compelling to understand why New Yorkers are responding to that identity…
Somehow, it does not occur to Moynihan that a corporate behemoth and establishment fixture like the New York Times might actually oppose a political candidate because of his policies and his platform. The possibility of an institutionalized anti-socialist bias at what remains the vanguard of liberal journalism simply isn’t acknowledged; Moynihan doesn’t even feel the need to shoot it down.
Race is certainly playing a role in Mamdani’s campaign, but it is far from the simple story liberals tell about a battle between the woke and the anti-woke. On one hand, all of the talk about racist condescension we saw with Obama has evaporated now that liberals are calling Mamdani “articulate” and “charming”. On the other hand, when it’s time to explain why real estate moguls, grocery magnates and corporate media oppose a socialist, suddenly identity is the only explanation. Capital has no need to commit itself to racist or anti-racist rhetoric; it opportunistically adopts and drops both as the situation warrants.
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