Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Part I

NYC Voters Had Better Look More Closely at Zohran Mamdani: The Critical Theorist, Muslim, and Democratic Socialist of America Member Wants to Be the New Face for the Democratic Party

November 4th is going to be election day in the United States, and it’s not real high on the radar of many people because it’s an off-year election, but there still are some very significant votes that are going to be cast. And I think at this point the most interesting of those elections is the race for the Office of Mayor of New York City.

The nation’s largest city is looking for a mayor, and this is a political powerhouse of a race. And of course the front-runner is Zohran Mamdani. He’s Muslim, and that’s perhaps, if anything, the less colorful part of his background because the more ideologically charged part of his background is that the fact that he’s a Muslim is tied to the fact that he’s also running as the Democratic candidate in a city which has never before elected someone like him, that is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And even as he’s the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party, and even as he knocked out very powerful Democratic candidates, the fact is that in New York, there is a massive worldview clash that is happening.

Now, the worldview clash in one sense was first of all within the Democratic Party. Now it wasn’t just a battle over worldviews, it was something of a, well Gotham-sized political soap opera. And that’s because at least one of the candidates knocked out by Zohran Mamdani in this race, one of the candidates was a former governor of the state of New York. Now you would think it’s something of a step-down to run for the mayor’s seat in New York City after you served multiple terms as the governor of New York. But Andrew Cuomo had to resign that office in a massive scandal, actually a series of scandals.

Now, here it tells you something, he’s considered the only hope to avoid Zohran Mamdani, that is the Muslim candidate who’s a Democratic Socialist of America card-carrying member, you might say. And thus it would be a very interesting showdown if not for the soap opera, but it is a soap opera. And you’re looking at a massive worldview issue that we need to confront. And that comes down to multiple issues related to Zohran Mamdani. And I want us to take a closer look because as the election comes, the likelihood is that some of this is simply going to fall to the wayside.

Now, when we talk about someone being radical in politics, we really do need to define what we’re talking about. In the case of Zohran Mamdani, we’re talking about someone running from the political left. But there is left and then there is left. Capital L Left. Zoran Mamdani is there. And this is something that he’s been trying to fudge just a bit on the campaign trail, but I say just a bit because his actual proposals on which he is running are quite liberal indeed. But nonetheless, he is saying that he is not running on the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, but rather on his own platform. His own platform is scary enough.

But I also want us to look at the fact that there is an ideology, a worldview behind the Democratic Socialists of America, and in truth, Zohran Mamdani can’t run far from that party and its ideological persuasion. Very much committed to a form of Marxism, very much committed to socialism. That’s one of the words in the title of the party. And when they say socialism, they mean it. The use of the term democratic socialism is supposed to insinuate that it’s socialism, which comes not by some kind of totalitarian revolution, but rather that it comes about by the democratic process. And the idea of democratic socialism is something that animated many people on the Left in particular in the second half of the 20th century.

But it has now come back, and it’s interesting to note that it has come back on the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is the loud and increasingly, it’s very clear it is the most energetic part of the Democratic Party. And this came up for one thing in the repeated presidential candidacies of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. You got to follow this kind of carefully, but he’s not officially a member of the Democratic Socialists of America as a party, but Zohran Mamdani is. And that shows a shift from one thing from say a rather older, that’s an understatement, member of the United States Senate to a very young candidate for the Mayor’s Office in New York City who is young, Muslim, and at least to some degree, Marxist.

Now doing media analysis, I often point out that the New York Times is the most influential newspaper in the United States. It’s also a very liberal newspaper. But again, there is liberal and then there is liberal. There’s left and there is left. I want to credit the New York Times for doing a lot of media coverage of Zohran Mamdani, his background, his ideas, his candidacy. The electorate there in New York is not going to be able to say they didn’t know who Zohran Mamdani was when they elected him, or we should say who he is, and who he’s likely to be as New York’s next mayor. So let’s just consider, this is a man who grew up in Africa, who grew up in the United States, this is someone who is the son of very privileged parents. His mother is in the movie business. His father is a professor at Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia University, Mahmood Mamdani was in Uganda and he was a close observer of the anti-colonialist movements there. Not just an observer, but a participant as well.

And when you look at the household in which Zohran Mamdani was raised, it included people very familiar to the household such as Edward Said, that is one of the main characters in so-called post-colonial studies in the academies, particularly at Columbia, but also beyond. But you also have people like Rashid Khalidi also at Columbia at times, also very much one of the most influential people in the ideology of post-colonialism, and in particular the ideological support for a Palestinian state. But it’s not just a Palestinian state.

One of the things that has come up again and again and again is the fact that Zohran Mamdani has been long-term, long time a champion for Palestinian statehood. It’s hard to know how radical his ideas are there. But again, to give credit to the New York Times, they ran a front-page article just a few days ago entitled Mamdani’s Path Towards Backing Palestine Cause. Nicholas Fandos is the reporter in that piece. And I don’t think it pulls punches. It actually goes back to when Zoran Mamdani was a little boy growing up in a household in which this kind of post-colonialist studies, and again, that is a form of critical theory. So when you talk about things that are called critical theory, sometimes that’s misapplied. In this case, that’s exactly the category. And Zohran Mamdani was literally raised in that context.

He was also read to by his father stories, and he was taught by his father the ideology of post-colonialism. And that basically holds that European empires, in particular, European empires, mostly in the 18th and 19th and into the 20th centuries, oppressed peoples in order to extract things in the age of empire, treated people there as subhuman, and thus liberation movements take on a very radical hue. And that’s exactly what took place. And by the way, Mahmood Mamdani has recently published a book, which is a revisionist history of what has gone on in the last several decades in the nation of Uganda.

Now, just a little footnote here. Remember Idi Amin, the totalitarian dictator who is guilty of so many things, even down to very credible accusations of cannibalism, just all kinds of things. And of course, Idi Amin was one of those names that went down just absolutely symbolic of the kind of tyranny that kind of totalitarianism produces. But in this new book, Mahmood Mamdani just published in the last several weeks, he comes out and calls for a revision and basically a far more positive view even of someone like Idi Amin. You wouldn’t think that anyone raised in that kind of household holding to those kinds of ideas could get close to a major elected office in the United States. In worldview terms, this tells us how far the society has shifted.

Now, I want to be careful. Zoran Mamdani is not running to be governor of New York State. That would be a very different election. He is not running to be President of the United States. That certainly would be a very different election. But this is not an insignificant development, particularly because it is being heralded as the arrival of a new model for the Democratic Party, and it’s going to be very difficult if he does win the election, and that seems almost a certainty at this point. He’s going to be held up along with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others as a model for the resurgent Left in the Democratic Party.

Of course, let’s just put a footnote in here. Why would I put it that way? It is because there were times in the 1960s when the left and the Democratic Party, and that means the ideological left, and that includes socialists and many others. They thought they were in the driver’s seat, they thought they were in control, and so they ran candidates, they actually thought, by the way, were going to win. And so the Democratic Party began to win only by distancing themselves from that kind of candidate.

After the massive electoral loss of George McGovern as the 1972 Democratic candidate, by the way, he himself was a liberal, but the point is his young supporters were far too his left. Once he went down to one of the most massive electoral defeats in American history, the Democrats began to move into a new mode and that produced someone eventually like Bill Clinton and of course also Jimmy Carter in one sense. But nonetheless, the reality is that the far left, the ideological left of the Democratic Party has just been waiting its time, and they think they’ve met their time when it comes to Zohran Mamdani.

Now, it’s interesting to note that he still is associated with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Democratic Socialists of America is not an idea. It is a political party. It has ideological positions, it has policy positions. And without going into detail for the sake of time, they are quite radical. When he has been confronted about this, Mamdani has said, look, he runs on his own platform, not on the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. But he’s a member of the party and he rose to political prominence as a member of the party, which is to say that doesn’t wash. I gave credit to the New York Times for some very insightful coverage. I mentioned the article about how he had come to be such a very powerful, ideologically driven backer of the Palestinian cause, and he’s not backing off of that whatsoever.

The New York Times coverage is really interesting showing, again, as I said, even the people in his home, and he was raised by, in particular his father, a post-colonial theorist. And so he came to it in one sense, not only ideologically but genetically. He was raised in that home. And the fact is that when it comes to Israel and when it comes to even, let’s just say the current proposals even about something like a two-state solution supposedly to the situation there, it is really interesting that when it comes to talking about Israel, and he has been facing this, and Mamdani has been facing this electoral challenge. He’s been meeting with Jewish leaders and he has at least for now stopped saying some things that could only point to the extinction of Israel, and that is for instance, “From the River to the Sea.”

But nonetheless, when you look at the kind of reporting that’s going on here and you trace his intellectual pilgrimage, it’s clear he showed up in college very much with this agenda. He was known in college for this agenda. He has been associated with this agenda all of his adult life. Nothing here is new.

Furthermore, when he talks about Israel, he says he’s opposed to Israel because it is a Jewish state. He says he doesn’t believe there should be any kind of state which is mandated by what he says is a hierarchy or a religion or anything like that. But if you’re really going to hold to that, let’s be honest. If you think that Israel is not to exist as a Jewish state, we need to remember that Israel from the beginning has only existed as a Jewish state. There is no Israel without a Jewish state. The moment you define Israel as something other than a Jewish state, eventually the Jewish people will not be in Israel. Israel will disappear and so will the Jewish people who are living there. And make no mistake, that is the agenda. And when you look at the Palestinian liberation movements, it is clear that is the agenda, and I’m using the term they use of themselves.

Part II

Mamdani Has Not Left His ‘Political Home’: Zohran Mandani Hasn’t Really Moved from the Democratic Socialists of America

But now I want to point to something else, and that gets back again to the Democratic Socialists of America. Many in the media, and many of course who are political supporters of Zohran Mamdani are trying to say, “Yeah, that was kind of a youthful indiscretion, but he doesn’t hold to those same positions now.” And this is where another media outlet, very influential, has done a good job, and that’s the Wall Street Journal. In this case, the writer is James Kirchick. He has written a piece and it comes under the headline, “Has Mamdani Really Left His ‘Political Home’?” The two words political home are put in quotation marks because Mamdani has made that reference to himself.

One of the points made in this article, and it’s basically a half page in the print edition, one of the points made by James Kirchick is that there is no evidence whatsoever for the fact that he has supposedly distanced himself from the positions and the ideology of the Democratic Socialists of America. He writes this: “In 2023 at the National Political Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, Zohran Mamdani said, ‘We are special because of our organization. What makes the organization and its members special is their sincerity.'” Well, in other words, he was saying that he sincerely stands with the Democratic Socialists of America and their sincerely held ideology and policies. You’ll recall that that party was formed by Michael Harrington, also known very much as a man of the Left. He argued for a democratic socialism that is using the democratic system, using the constitutional system of the United States to move towards democratic socialism in power. And Michael Harrington, by the way, described the left he was hoping for as “The left wing of the possible.” So in other words, push left as far as you possibly can.

The Democratic Socialists of America, however we need to npte, are now considerably to the left ideologically and in policies of where Michael Harrington was in the second half of the 20th century. We’re talking about a truly radical organization, and I think most Americans would recognize that. When you use the word socialist, it actually means something. James Kirchick in this article uses the statements that were made by Zohran Mamdani as recently, as I said, as 2023, so that’s 2 years ago. When people want to talk about Mamdani’s political evolution or how he has distanced himself from the party, we’re not talking about something that happened when he was in college and now he’s 50. We’re talking about something as recent as two years ago.

And furthermore, when you look at many of the statements he’s made and the proposals he has offered in the assembly there in New York, it’s clear he really has meant what he said. This is not an aberration. We have not misunderstood him. Speaking by the way, the Democratic Socialists of America, I think James Kirchick is exactly right when he says that the party has moved far to the left. “It is as socialist as ever, but unworthy of the label democratic.” He then goes on to ask, “What does today’s DSA stand for? In 2021, it issued a detailed national platform supporting extension of voting rights to non-citizens, nationalization of railroads, utilities, critical manufacturing, technology companies, institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate and finance.” That’s all. Also it called for the abolition of police, and Mamdani has himself openly called for the abolition of police. He says that if elected, he will apologize to the police. All that’s coming a bit too late and none of it is believable.

Mamdani and his current campaign staff want to say that he has distanced himself from the DSA. Kirchick then writes this. “Watch Mr. Mamdani’s 2023 address though, and you’ll get a decidedly different vibe. He sounds like an apparatchik addressing a party Congress on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, repeatedly declaring fealty to of the committee, using Marxist buzzwords like praxis and casually deploying Zionists as a slur.”

Now, I just want to remind ourselves of the timestamp here. That’s 2023. This is 2025. Two years later. This is the same man. There are people in New York who want to point to the fact that he will hold to lower housing costs. By the way, given the finite amount of housing in New York, that is virtually inconceivable and he holds to other policies that are likely to be blocked by the governor of New York, given the constitutional system there, that doesn’t give New York City absolute carte blanche over its own affairs. And then he has also promised things like free bus rides. Well, again, who doesn’t like free? And the answer has to come back. Well, it isn’t free, and by the way, it’s not working all that well when you have to charge for it. You make it free? Well, I think anyone understands the catastrophe that that would be likely to bring but it is something that voters evidently like to hear.

And this is another reality that we just need to understand in worldview terms. I mentioned that he’s not running, at least at this point, to be governor of New York. Then he’d have to deal with farmers and others outside New York City, Upstate New York, much more conservative, at least in general terms, even when you have a labor vote, far more conservative than what you find in Manhattan. He’s not running for President of the United States, but let’s remind ourselves, Bernie Sanders running on at least some similar ideas has run, and he has been a credible candidate, or at least he has run a credible race more than once in the Democratic Party’s nomination process.

So it is really interesting that we watch this, when it comes to issues like gay rights, you can imagine, LGBTQ, all of it. And by the way, all of it not only pushed to the ideological extreme, but all of it financed in terms of what amounts to a form of socialized medicine. Abortion, you just go down the list. We’re talking about someone far, far, far on the left. And one of the most puzzling parts of all of this is how you have all these reports, surveys, and pollsters coming to say, a sizable number or at least percentage of Jewish voters in New York are likely to vote for Mamdani. I just can’t imagine how that could be said. I can’t imagine that that could be true. On the other hand, I guess since we’re talking about New York City, maybe it can.

But I want to go back to that statement from Mamdani, in which he has taken back, or at least said he’s sorry or no longer going to use the term From the River to the Sea. But at the same time, he has not backed off of his criticism of Israel, he’s not backed off of the fact that he says he would issue an arrest warrant on the basis of the international criminal court for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister. He hasn’t backed off of many of these things. He hasn’t backed off of the fact that he’s opposed to Israel as a Jewish state. How in the world Jewish voters can turn around and vote for him is beyond me. It’s almost as if they don’t believe that ideas matter, and this is where we just have to look at the ideas and recognize, oh, they matter. As a matter of fact, we can’t imagine a world in which they don’t matter.

Part III

The Red-Blue Binary is Not an Accident: Recent Events Have Solidified the Political Binary in the U.S.

All right, now I want to end today by talking about the obvious. We are talking about a very large city. We’re talking about the largest city, the largest metropolitan area in the United States, and I made the statement, you’ve heard it over and over again that the further you get into an urban territory, the further you get from rural America, by and large, the more liberal, and that means not only in terms of say, economic policy, but even the ideology, the more liberal it becomes. You have very blue coastlines, very red interior. In farming states, you might have a couple of blue places, maybe a county or a city, a town where there’s a major university and thus you have the campus playing a part in the more liberal culture. But by and large, America is resolutely now red and blue. This is not something that was a fluke of an election in the 1980s. This appears to be a permanent reality.

And I just want to leave you today with the thought that maybe that’s not at all an accident. And by that I mean the coasts have always been more cosmopolitan, cities have always been more cosmopolitan, less judgmental, far more tolerant, far more secular, far more liberal. But I want to go back to the fact that when you’re talking about Israel and you’re talking about these positions of our consideration today, a lot of this really comes from one place, and that is the modern leftist academy. It’s coming from modern leftist universities. It’s coming from a network, an entire body of thought. When it comes to post-colonial theory or anti-colonialism, all the isms of critical theory and all the rest, this has been ensconced in the academy for a very, very long time, and we as Christians understand that ideas come with consequences.

Political policies come out of these ideologies, and now you see a very charismatic political candidate has come out representing these ideologies. And the ideologies may come with a very youthful expression, they may come with a lot of energy, they may come with a very attractive candidate just in terms of his ability to hold attention and a very infectious telegenic smile. But the fact is that ideas matter, ideologies matter, and you know that when you use a word like socialism. One of the great mysteries of this moment is how Americans who have tended to be able to kind of see through much of this, well, I can’t say Americans at this point, let’s just say New Yorkers. Even New Yorkers have been able to see through much of this, and they have basically, over the course of the last several decades, they’ve been more prone to elect people to solve problems.

But when you come to Zohran Mamdani, the ideology is so front and center, it is so radical, and it’s so absolutely graphically displayed, so unapologetically displayed, even as it’s in a winsome appearance, the ideology is still there. Democratic Socialists of America, “Abolish the police,” you just go down it. He may back off a bit, but this is where he has been his adult life, and we know you can also understand how he was incubated in much of this in his own family with radical ideology. But it still is difficult to imagine how a city on the coast filled with campuses, all the things that would add up to cultural liberalism is still hard to imagine that in New York City, the mix has come to precisely this, and yet it appears that it has. He won the Democratic primary without breaking a sweat. And of course, he said he worked hard for it, and apparently he did.

But let’s face it, he’s a charismatic candidate to some people, and there have to be people who actually like his ideas, and that’s what should really concern us. If he came out of the blue and this election were held so fast that no one could know who he was or what he believed, then poll numbers like this might not vex us so much. But we do know who he is, we know where he came from, and we know what he believes. Voters in New York know all of those things. Thus, we’re going to be waiting to see what happens in New York because I can promise you if Zohran Mamdani is the new Mayor of New York, what happens in New York won’t stay in New York. Ideas have consequences regardless of where they start.