Applying Sun Tzu to Mamdani

Yesterday I applied Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt to the Mamdani phenomenon. But this morning Sun Tzu called. “Don’t forget,” he said,

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

It’s easy to sneer at New York City’s Islamo-Stalinists that voted for socialism in their city, but we still need to understand them, six ways from Sunday. Here’s Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute noting the “elite overproduction” proposed by Peter Turchin.

If you want to find someone in a revolutionary mood, look to the recent college grad with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and no solid job prospects, the 35-year-old creative professional who is spending a third of her low six-figure income on rent, or the 40-year-old Ivy-educated adjunct professor living with roommates who never, ever do the dishes.

Yes, of course, all this elite overproduction is because of the stupid politics of our liberal and Democratic friends that give student loans to young fools, and teach kids that the only thing in life is a creative life, and that being a university professor is the highest form of life. Unless. Unless they created all this on purpose! No, I don’t think they are that smart. But I still understand the frustration of the young educated class. They are the best and brightest! It wasn’t supposed to be like that!

Then there’s Sasha Stone. She used to be one of them, she writes.

I knew nothing of Communism growing up. I was that dumb girl who dated the guy with a Che Guevara poster on the wall. Growing up on the Left and in California, the only thing I knew about Communism was that it led to the Red Scare and McCarthyism, which I knew was bad.

Yeah! That’s an interested effect of the liberals whining about the days of the Red Scare when there were real Communist spies like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss floating around in high places in Washington DC. But experts agree that it was McCarthy and anti-Communism that were the problems! Because reasons.

Writes Sasha Stone:

It wasn’t until I traveled overseas to France and Italy that my sad little brain started to crack open. I realized that the business I built was something I never could have done anywhere else. I was free in America. FREE.

Think about the fashion-conscious women that voted for Mamdani:

What do these women stand for? Designer glasses, fashion, influencer culture? They worship at the altar of Capitalism every time they use Door Dash, every time they post a TikTok, every time they use their phones. They walk around with a computer in their pockets and have no idea how it even got there.

It’s amazing, isn’t it! These “educated” people don’t even know that rent control degrades the housing stock and screws over the folks left owning the apartment building after the big guys have bailed out. Hey, why do you think that Donald Trump got out of his dad’s NYC apartment business and into the upscale hotel business? They don’t even know that supermarkets are a crazy business of really low margins where you are out of business by Wednesday if you don’t keep your eye on the ball. Unlike government employees in state liquor stores.

The thing about capitalism is that it works for you even if you don’t have a clue how it works.

Correction. Nobody knows how capitalism works. We have a few theories, and a few people actually understand bits of the theories. But the truth is that capitalism is like everything else on this Earth. We don’t haved a clue how things work. We know that sex leads to children. But we don’t understand sex, and how the process works that leads to children. We just do it, and hope for the best. That’s how the whole universe works, by the way.

But we do know that socialism doesn’t work. We do know that “planning” doesn’t work. We do know that administrative government doesn’t work. We do know that government regulation doesn’t work, because “regulatory capture.”

That’s the key thing to understand about “life, the universe, everything.” We know how to do it: walk, skip, drive, work, buy, sell, sex. But we really don’t understand what we are doing, and why.

It’s still true what H.L Mencken wrote a century ago.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

He forgot to add: “educated people.”