But the Democratic establishment should only take so much heart in this. A quirk of history has kept the mayor of New York from seeking the presidency. However, the Democratic establishment is every bit as frail as the GOP establishment was a decade ago, and Mamdani-backed candidates won a string of remarkable victories in New York’s congressional and state primaries in late June. 

Today, the Democratic establishment is finding the bottom the Republican old guard reached in the 2010s, just before a fading reality TV star romped through the primaries and proceeded to remake the party in his own image. Chuck Schumer and his ilk are almost as limp as Jeb Bush was in 2016, when he promised a shock-and-awe campaign but was humiliated on debate stage after debate stage. The odds are better, right now, of Schumer becoming the Senate Majority Leader in 2027 than of him surviving a primary in his own state in 2028. 

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Brad Lander’s ‘No’ to Israel

By Ross Barkan

Trump and Mamdani are chummy because Trump understands, intuitively, that the Democratic Socialist, immigrant Muslim represents the Left version of himself. The two men may agree on nothing politically, but they know what it is like to confront the full wrath of their respective parties’ establishments. They carry battle scars from slaying scions of political dynasties that were once very popular (Bush, Cuomo), and they know the feeling of winning nominations while party elites withhold endorsements. Trump, of course, is the Republican Party elite now, while Mamdani, only six months in office, is a generational star who still can’t get more than a grudging acknowledgment from Schumer, or Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year.

But Jeffries and Schumer, for different reasons, represent a political approach that is fast falling out of vogue. Schumer is 75, and his kitschy, cable TV hucksterism and Israel-cheerleading is alienating to a vast majority of voters under the age of 40. Jeffries is much younger and may well have a future leading the Democrats, yet his own style has failed to resonate with the party’s base. He is not revered like Nancy Pelosi. Very few Democrats beyond the members of his caucus are excited for him to lead the House. His own Israel boosterism has made him the target of young progressives, and rank-and-file voters still feel that he hasn’t aggressively confronted Trump enough. 

It is easy to forget that the base of the Democratic Party was once much more comfortable with its establishment wing. Bernie Sanders could not win the Democratic nomination because, for all the ways party apparatchiks and the DNC might have foiled him, he never won over enough voters to overcome Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Ten years ago, many Democrats liked the former First Lady and Secretary of State. She was not a great political talent, but enough voters in the primaries didn’t want to take a chance on a socialist senator from Vermont.

That era is gone. No true frontrunner exists for the 2028 Democratic nomination. No Clinton or Obama can tip the scales. If Kamala Harris wants to run, she’ll have to get in the muck with everyone else and hope she can survive a grueling primary season. The establishment was desperate to coronate Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama helped engineer Biden’s 2020 victory, convincing the center-Left candidates in the field to drop out and consolidate against Sanders. The establishment won’t have that power, in this election cycle. 

Socialist candidates can win today because there are no more effective Red Scares and fewer and fewer voters remember the Soviet Union. Democratic Socialists are economic populists, and there is a growing share of the Democratic electorate that responds to this messaging. Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America undertakes actual political organizing — the sort Obama abandoned once he became president — and its candidates benefit from an establishment that decided it wasn’t worth the effort to knock on doors or pass out leaflets in the streets. DSA is filling a void. The party elites are only now understanding how threatened they are.

This doesn’t mean DSA is taking over the Democratic Party tomorrow. Members of its ranks still espouse fringe views around defunding the police and abolishing prisons. So far, there is little evidence DSA can win in districts with large numbers of independent or Republican voters. That was Trump’s original magic — to cross over, to create a coalition. But maybe, someday, the socialists can. After Mamdani, who can say what’s not possible? 

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Can social democracy save capitalism — again?

By Joel Kotkin

At the minimum, the far-Left is going to rack up more victories in Democratic primaries. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, proclaimed recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was a laughable statement — not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor truly any “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. The DNC can, on certain national campaigns and the presidential race, assist, but the Democratic Party in America — like the Republican Party — is effectively a shell organization, a ballot line that anyone, with enough effort, can occupy. 

That’s how Mamdani became the Democratic mayor of New York City and Trump became the Republican president of the United States. This is not a parliamentary democracy. Parties do not select candidates, control lists, or charge membership fees. Party lifers like Harrison sometimes like to pretend they do this, or that they have a right to say what a “Democrat” is. At some point, a Trump-like contender will subvert the Democratic Party at mass scale. There isn’t much to head off this possibility; it isn’t like there’s an all-powerful shadow establishment that can rally behind one candidate and squelch the powerful insurgent. Mamdani proved, at the local level, that overcoming this opposition is possible with enough charisma and organization. And his victory shouldn’t be undersold because it was in one city: if New York City were a standalone state, it would be one of the 15 largest, close in size to Virginia. Sanders, were he running in New York City, might have even won were he ten years younger or a bit more palatable. 

Either way, men like Harrison, Schumer, and Jeffries will have to adjust to the new order. They will not control the destiny of the Democrats much longer. The clock is ticking.

The California governor is all but openly campaigning for the Democratic nomination, with his aggressive press operation and willingness to engage with Right-wing podcasters. Conventional wisdom suggests his bid will flame out. He presides over a state drowning in social and economic woes. California is expensive, its streets are filled with the homeless, and the state’s population is no longer growing.

The knock on Newsom is that he’s a coastal liberal who has never run in an election where he’s had to take Republicans all that seriously. Vice President JD Vance, who seems poised to be the Republican nominee two and a half years from now, is likely enthused about the possibility of facing down Newsom on the debate stage. 

Newsom is slick, too slick, and he oozes California privilege. He was the guy who imposed Covid lockdowns and then went dining at the tony French Laundry restaurant. He is a creature of San Francisco’s Democratic elite, a relentless ladder-climber who owes his early career success to billionaire heir Gordon Getty, a family friend, and to Willie Brown, the Democratic power broker and former mayor who also elevated Kamala Harris..

There is nothing terribly inspirational about Newsom’s backstory. He played the inside game well, got himself elected mayor, then lieutenant governor, then governor. Now, he thrills the Democratic base as he apes Donald Trump on X. (“SEND IN THE ADULTS!!! GRANDPA IS TIRED” Newsom’s press office replied recently to a Trump video.) In a few years, he’ll be left in the dust by some other Democrat, perhaps a more “serious” standard-bearer like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttgieg, Joe Biden’s former transportation secretary and a 2020 contender. 

All of this isn’t wrong, and could come to pass. But there is a certain kind of pundit who underrates Newsom’s appeal and can’t quite comprehend that this California liberal could be poised to seize the Democratic nomination and become the next president of the United States.

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Can Democrats save free speech?

By Ross Barkan

Isn’t Newsom just Hillary Clinton with hair gel and a smarmy grin? Maybe. What he also is, however, is a budding media star, equally comfortable on television and podcasts, and he relishes a political brawl. He has no trouble with Fox News, and he hosted the late Charlie Kirk on his own podcast, which has become strikingly popular. In 2023, he staged a Fox debate with Ron DeSantis, who looked like, for a brief moment, he could be the next Republican nominee. Pundits derided the Newsom-DeSantis debate as a publicity stunt, but it was, for the California governor, a chance to flex real media muscle. 

What became clear was that DeSantis, for all his braying about the “free state” of Florida and California’s ills, could not dominate Newsom. Republicans, until then, had imagined Newsom to be another liberal patsy. They didn’t think he could hit back. One conservative who did notice Newsom’s potential, Matthew J. Peterson, then editor-in-chief of The Blaze, put it best: “he’s comfortable in his own skin like Trump, and doesn’t just want to be there, but is comfortable and assured and loves being there.”

Indeed, Newsom has more in common with Trump than many Democratic or Republican pundits might believe, and this will be a strength for him in 2028, not a weakness. He is savvy at holding the spotlight, identifying and bludgeoning enemies, and adapting to shifting political moods. 

In the old Fox formulation, bullies versus nerds, alphas versus betas, it was increasingly obvious that Newsom, the oily former jock, was a man fit for the quasi-demented and deeply influential arena of cable TV. Unlike DeSantis, who was also an outstanding amateur baseball player — he participated in the Little League World Series and captained his Yale squad — Newsom retained his ex-jock aura, or at least the sensibility of a guy who was comfortable with athletes and celebrities.

He swaggered and slithered like Jerry Maguire. This, too, would be Vance’s problem if he ended up on a debate stage with Newsom. For all Vance’s tough talk, he still sounds like the doughy, overachieving Yale Law grad who is secretly pleased with himself for rustling up a pair of blue jeans in his bedroom closet. Newsom, meanwhile, is a bit like the guy who cut class all the time and bedded the homecoming queen. 

If his Trump resistance is shtick, it’s effective shtick. He has read the national electorate well. He executed on a successful push to get a gerrymandering referendum passed in California, countering the Texan push to add more GOP House seats. A Democratic-base voter is desperate for a politician who will mock and belittle Trump on Trump’s own terms. And even the happy warriors like Zohran Mamdani, who don’t sound like Trump, understand that you’ve got to be able to mix it up with the president and his supporters. Mamdani’s chummy White House visit didn’t hurt him because he didn’t offer Trump any concessions or even smile for photos. 

Newsom has never had much of a fixed ideology — he occupies the Left flank these days, but was a centrist, business-friendly mayor of San Francisco — and he’ll be able to conform himself, come 2028, to whatever mood the voters might feel. This, again, is like Trump — or maybe another famous politician born in 1946, Bill Clinton. Newsom knows conservatives expect little from him. In that way, they are no better than the Democrats, coddled in their bubbles, and they are used to punching at what never punches back. The older Republicans can still remember Sean Hannity’s nightly thrashing of Alan Colmes. In Newsom, they see only the latest woke lib, when they would be better off conceiving of Newsom as a West Coast Clinton: debonair, chameleonic, and cutthroat when needed. Clinton exuded alpha charm. He commanded a press conference room and a TV screen. Newsom isn’t so different.

The other knock against Newsom is electability. If he does beat the field in 2028, including Kamala Harris, how can he possibly triumph in the purple states? Didn’t a Californian just go zero-for-7 in the key 2024 battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia? Newsom could certainly struggle in the rural towns and swing suburbs. It’s not like he has any experience winning these people over.

But don’t be too certain of the electability arguments. Recent history has shown that there’s no way to really tell which kind of candidate can triumph. A black man with a foreign-sounding middle name and less than one term in the Senate wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. A fading reality television star who boasted about his sexual conquests and demonized war heroes wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. And in New York City, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist wasn’t supposed to beat back (twice) a former three-term governor. American politics is getting stranger all the time. And President Gavin Newsom, if still unlikely, is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. One challenge Newsom will have is convincing an electorate weary of political elites and eager for outsiders that he is one of them — or close enough, anyway. In such an anti-establishment country, can the chosen son of Democratic San Francisco actually get himself elected president? Soon enough, we’ll know.

The long and bumpy journey there began one hot summer night in 1992, in the same city that gave us Mamdani. Then, Bill Clinton stood before a packed Madison Square Garden to accept the Democratic nomination for president. “The Cold War is over,” he said. “Soviet communism has collapsed and our values — freedom, democracy, individual rights, free enterprise — they have triumphed all around the world.” Having declared the death of socialism, he then outlined a program to pivot the Democrats towards a new ideology that would “end welfare as we know it” and create a “government that is leaner… that expands opportunity, not bureaucracy… that understands that jobs must come from growth in a vibrant and vital system of free enterprise”.

The previous Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, had begun experimenting with neoliberal policies in the late Seventies — trying deregulation and the use of tight monetary policy to fight inflation — but Clinton went full-hog and made small government the new creed. Its basic premise, that social progress resulted from individuals pursuing their self-interest in an enlightened manner, essentially took Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments and gave it a liberal sheen. Most significantly, by burying the Keynesian consensus that had dominated the Party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clinton joined the Democrats to the Republicans in a new neoliberal consensus. This doctrine, which would dominate American policy-making for the next three decades, would prioritize free trade and globalization, deregulation, a leaner state with less generous welfare, low taxes, balanced budgets, and an independent central bank that used monetary policy as the final arbiter of the government’s fiscal rectitude.

Ever since, it’s been an article of orthodoxy among Democrats that no party which welcomed socialists could ever stand a chance outside of America’s liberal heartlands. Candidates could talk a good line on change, as Barack Obama did in his 2008 election campaign, but once in office quickly reasserted the hold of the neoliberal wing on economic policy. Obama did just that when he handed his economic policy-making over to Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

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Mamdani heralds the radical American city

By Joel Kotkin

Various theories have been put forth to explain the seemingly visceral antipathy Americans have long had to socialism. The frontier thesis posited that European settlement of the West created a culture of rugged individualism; the fragment thesis suggested socialism came to America via German rather than British immigrants, and so was Marxist and counter-cultural rather than Fabian and non-revolutionary. Marxist historian Mike Davis held that organized labour chose not to form a party, as happened in Europe; instead, they hoped to play one party off against the other to secure maximal benefits. Sociologist Barrington Moore believed the outlet of Western settlement acted as a pressure-release valve of urban working classes in 19th-century America’s industrial seaboard. But to this day, polls consistently show that most Americans dislike anything that smacks of communism. Mamdani, for example, polls better in the Big Apple than in the wider country.

That doesn’t mean Americans haven’t been building an appetite for significant change. Over the course of the Obama presidency, the public began turning against the neoliberal consensus, spawning the Occupy movement on the Left and the Tea Party revolt on the Right. But when the 2016 presidential primaries saw insurgent candidates openly challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy, the Republicans succumbed to the anti-free-trade populism of Donald Trump while the Democrats stood firm, delivering the nomination to the uber-establishment Hillary Clinton rather than the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders.

In hindsight, though, that was the beginning of the end for the Democratic neoliberals. Clinton’s subsequent humiliating defeat at the hands of Trump rankled with the Democratic Left, which pointed to polls that said a hypothetical Sanders-Trump contest would have been won by the Brooklyn-born firebrand (though hypotheticals rarely tell us much). Since then, Left-wing populists have repeatedly surfaced, and the establishment has kept beating them back. Most recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was working as a bartender in the Bronx when she won a shock victory in the 2018 House of Representatives election, found her wings clipped last year when she tried to win the top Democratic position on a powerful House committee, only to be beaten by a septuagenarian. AOC, as she is popularly known, then set off on a nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with her mentor Sanders, drawing large and enthusiastic crowds in unlikely places such as Oklahoma, Utah and Montana. The tour culminated in September in her native New York City, where the star attraction was none other than Mamdani.

On Tuesday night, more than 30 years after Clinton pronounced socialism dead, the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani stood before a raucous crowd as proof that it had risen once more. Like AOC, Mamdani came out of nowhere to rocket to victory. Like AOC, he is a charismatic and articulate master of new media. Like AOC, he deeply unsettles the Party establishment — the Clintons refused to back him, as did Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

But by defeating the establishment and its deep-pocketed backers in a hugely lopsided contest, Mamdani may have given the Left both inspiration and a significant base from which to launch a run for the 2028 presidential election, with AOC frequently topping lists of the papabile. While that possibility still seems a long shot, she and Sanders may well emerge as kingmakers in the Democratic primaries, one way or the other.

And while the Party leadership still invokes the need to cleave to the center, the Left-wing Democrats seem to have two things going in their favor. First, sentiment is shifting. Ever since the bank bailouts that followed the 2008 crash, Americans have grown less enthusiastic about capitalism, with Democratic voters now expressing strong and growing support for socialism. Most notably young voters, who broke strongly for Trump last year, have soured quickly, apparently disappointed that his anti-establishment rhetoric gave way to a warm embrace of tech oligarchs. Meanwhile, Sanders remains one of the most popular politicians in America and even AOC, who is more divisive, enjoys substantially better approval ratings than Trump.

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The fall of the crypto-oligarchs

By John Rapley

The second thing going for the radicals is that Americans don’t always do what they say they’ll do. The received wisdom in 2016 was that Clinton was a shoo-in because Americans would not vote for a candidate as far outside the mainstream as Trump. But they did, twice. The secret to Trump’s success seems to be that even though he seldom enjoys majority approval, his supporters are so devoted to him that the Party has opened an enthusiasm gap with the Democrats. It may be that the secret to Democratic success lies in a similar strategy: don’t worry if a majority don’t like your candidate, provided a highly-motivated plurality turns out on election day. Mamdani may show how to do it.

While a socialist is still unlikely to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2028, the resurgence of radical populism within the party makes it probable that the next candidate will have to repudiate neoliberalism. In other words, the odds have improved that the 2028 election will pit a MAGA Republican against a Left-wing Democrat. The resulting pyrotechnics might obscure the true significance of that development: a definitive end to the neoliberal era.

A new consensus might not immediately emerge to replace the fallen neoliberal one, given that both parties are engaged in internecine warfare between rival wings. Among the Democrats, the establishment won’t give way without a fight, and they can point to the fact that centrist Democrats did well in other elections on Tuesday night. Among the Republicans, while loyalty to Trump binds the Party together, splits are emerging between different factions as the fight for the 2028 nomination heats up. Policy volatility could result, as one administration after another repeatedly undoes its predecessor’s work, as Trump has done with the Biden administration’s.

Nevertheless, on several points, MAGA Republicans and the Democratic Left seem to be converging — not least because some of Trump’s neoliberal reversions, such as tax cuts, deregulation and a rollback of public health care, have landed uneasily with many of his supporters (witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent meltdowns). But the deeper trends seem increasingly clear. Globalization will likely diminish as trade deals and immigration policy pay more attention to worker rights and supply-chain resilience. Central bank independence may no longer be sacrosanct, and the Federal Reserve may be expected to underwrite looser government spending. Inflation may consequently settle at the higher level it’s at now. There is likely to be some restoration of regulation, and the tech oligarchs especially may come back into the crosshairs of populists on both sides of the political aisle. Tax policy may be revised to be less favorable to the rich, and more to the middle class. A cross-party consensus on health care reform may yet emerge. In other words, American capitalism may be entering a new and uncertain age. The future could look quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.