POLITICS: Entitled elites who think they deserve more are secret to Mamdani’s success

There’s a temptation to strike fundamentalist poses when talking about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, an unapologetic member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to the mayor’s office in New York City.

If you hate Mamdani, the explanation comes easily: New Yorkers inhaled too much second-hand cannabis, lost their minds, and elected the communist who will destroy them.

If you love him, you can be just as glib: the revolution has begun, the old order will be overthrown, and nasty old New York will be transformed into an egalitarian utopia.

Of course, when it comes to 21st-century politics — and to New York at all times — things are never that simple.

Voting patterns can be parsed any number of ways. From one perspective, as Renu Mukherjee has observed, “the racial demographics of Mamdani’s winning coalition resembled that of President Trump’s from 2024.”

Like Trump, Mandani also won big with men — and he far exceeded Trump’s inroads among young voters.

One doesn’t have to be a genius to discern the connection.

Both Trump and Mamdani aim to smash the structures that have organized American politics since the end of the Cold War. Their voters are those willing to follow them on that mission; hence the overlap.

Mamdani was fortunate to be running against Andrew Cuomo, a repellent specimen of the old regime. His victory signals the catastrophic collapse of the Democratic Party establishment, an outfit that only yesterday could foist a senile candidate for the presidency on the party’s ambitious young lions without eliciting a murmur of complaint.

Anyone who doubts that those days are over should walk a mile in Chuck Schumer’s shoes. The implications for the 2028 presidential race are, quite literally, incalculable.

Trump, however, is an America-first populist, whereas Mamdani is a DSA-style radical — that is to say, a Marxist who would be a Leninist if he could get himself organized. So mere repudiation of the system can lead to diametrically opposed positions.

Did New York vote for socialism? That case can be made.

A different take on the voting patterns would show that Mamdani was propelled to victory by two groups: the young and the college-educated.

Both are often the same person, lolling in skinny-leg pants and colorful sneakers at a coffee house in Brooklyn — the borough that gave Mamdani his largest margin.

Opinion polls reveal large numbers of the young applauding socialism as a really amazing idea. Conceivably, it could be that youthful New Yorkers hoped to turn the city into some version of Romania circa 1960.

But I doubt it.

For over a century, socialism has failed dismally everywhere it has been tried. Enthusiasm for the ideology, we can safely assume, is proof of a profound ignorance of history.

Zoomers and younger Millennials attended college to learn grievance, not the Battle of Hastings. Their professors were likely still mourning the fall of the Soviet Union.

To decipher the political dreams of the young, I believe we must circle back to our original observation: they are most comfortable in the act of repudiation.

This was a vote against.

In part, they were against a corrupt Democratic establishment so perfectly embodied by the repugnant Cuomo.

But to some considerable extent, they were in revolt against our economic system — against everything implied by that massively connotated term, “capitalism.”

Let’s pause for a moment of reflection.

Capitalism has lifted billions out of primeval poverty to affluence, long lives, and family trips to Harry Potter World — yet nobody has ever written back to say thanks.

Capitalism turned Communist China, once the site of the deadliest famine in history, into a well-fed economic powerhouse.

The same story was repeated in the Korean peninsula. In socialist North Korea, people starve, while in capitalist South Korea — now more than 50 times wealthier than the north — the kimshi joints alternate with KFC outlets.

Yet nobody seems to be paying attention. The very word “capitalism,” in its modern usage, was defined by socialist haters in the 19th century to mean appropriation or abuse of wealth.

The reason for such reflexive disdain isn’t hard to fathom.

Capitalism is based on competition — and for every winner, there must be many losers. And most people — but particularly the hyper-educated — imagine they see a natural-born winner when they look lovingly at the mirror.

The opposite of capitalism, in other words, isn’t socialism but entitlement.

The most relentless enemy of the capitalist system isn’t the proletariat or the revolutionary vanguard but the entitled class.

That brings us back to Mamdani’s young, educated voters.

They belong to a generation that was coddled in childhood and pumped full of artificial self-esteem in school. They benefited from cheap government loans so they could pay college tuition and from grade inflation so they could graduate with straight A’s.

At every step, they were taught to despise their country as unworthy of their own exalted selves.

They had done nothing but expected everything. That’s practically the definition of entitlement.

Then life intervened.

The sociopolitical scramble to the top resembles those great wildebeest migrations to greener pastures across the Zambezi River. The quick and courageous get across first and grow fat on the tall grass. The disdainful and rejectionists in the herd lag behind and eat the leavings, while gazing at the hind-parts of the winners.

Peter Turchin has written about the “overproduction” of elite types. In 1950, when only 6% of Americans had graduated from college, a degree was a ticket to the top of the power pyramid. By 2024, over 40% were college graduates — yet that pyramid remained pointy at the top.

Today, many are called but few are chosen.

Some have argued that the New York vote represents the revenge of the downwardly-mobile — and in specific instances, this could well be true.

If you graduated from an Ivy League school with $200,000 in debt and a worthless degree in critical gender studies to show for it, you are probably looking for someone in a suit you can blame for your troubles.

To make matters worse, artificial intelligence can already run circles around our distracted all-too-human brains. We may be on the cusp of an extinction event for college-level jobs.

But the fact remains that, at the moment, this cohort is doing just fine. Average income for those between ages 25 and 29 has reached $80,000, more than double what it was in 2010.

This is a crisis of shattered expectations. Seduced by their upbringing, the educated young felt destined to play an important part in the world – superior virtue, they believed, entitled them to become movers and shakers, or at least influencers and podcasters, rather than ordinary grunts making a decent living in some insipid corporation.

By the rules of their fragile self-regard, they have been disinherited.

Hence the revolt against a system that has failed to recognize their obvious merit. Hence the fury against capitalism, which tramples on justice and decency to reward those who simply make and sell things.

Mamdani himself is a middling example of the entitled class.

Born into an affluent, artistic family, he has always led a life of comfort and ease. Yet, at 34, the mayor-elect has attempted little and accomplished absolutely nothing.

He was rejected by Columbia University even though his father is a famous professor there. His actions during three years as a state delegate have left no mark on the lives of New Yorkers.

Mamdani is a laggard. That explains the peculiar obsession with those who have crossed the river ahead of him: the billionaire, the “Zionist,” the “1 percent.”

Read, if you have the stomach for it, the full text of his victory speech following the election.

The world described therein is thought to be naturally and spontaneously abundant, due to the efforts of the working people — instead, it’s been pauperized by a clique of oppressors that sucks up wealth like a vacuum cleaner. New York City need only expropriate the expropriators to usher an age of permanent prosperity.

Mamdani no doubt intended this as an economic theory, along the lines laid down decades ago by that brilliant economist, Fidel Castro.

I prefer to think of it as a psychological condition.

If, at one stroke, he could eliminate those whose hind-parts he has been staring at his entire adult life, Mamdani would enter into a glorious personal paradise.

It’s the politics of resentment. The goal is a world without winners to irritate and embarrass mediocre minds.

To the extent that Mamdani can put his principles into practice, he will join the long list of failures engendered by socialism — but failure in this case will be applauded and redefined as the happy place of the entitled crowd.

And in the march to mandatory universal failure, the economy of New York will merely be collateral damage to a gigantic therapeutic experiment.