What are we to think of the win for Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary for NY Mayor? He is, apparently, a product of the Democratic Socialists of America, just like AOC.
For you and I, of course, his proposals to freeze apartment rentals and create government supermarkets, and make city buses free are crazy cakes. Of course, he’s also Muslim and backing the Intifada and everything else that is fashionable and lefty.
He apparently won by getting the votes of the white educated class. And putting 50,000 people in the streets to contact households. His opponent Andrew Cuomo got the votes of Hispanics and blacks.
Of course you can go to “Thomas Sowell Reacts” on youTube and get his reasons, backed by government data, why government interfering in housing and groceries and free transit has never worked and never will work.
In a better world, people like Zohran Mamdani would be anathematized as “deniers” just like those “climate deniers” you’ve heard of. The science — economic, social, whatever — is utterly clear. Government intervention in the economy almost always Makes Things Worse.
So why do the Democratic Socialists of America still believe their fairy tales? Why was Mamdani’s campaign full of activists assisting him in getting the message out? What were all those educated-class folks cheering at his campaign headquarters on election night thinking? Are they serious?
That is why I find Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s ideas abut politics so useful. He simply writes in The Concept of the Political:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
In politics, therefore, actors are either fighting an enemy — price-gouging supermarkets, exploiter landlords, and the like — or gifting their friends with free stuff like free buses.
Fact is, it’s pretty easy to rile up folks and decide to Do Something about it. If you don’t know how that works just watch the movie version of West Side Story. If you’re a Jet, it doesn’t take a philosopher to persuade you that the Sharks need to be curbed, like right now. And the whole point of the welfare state is to hand out free stuff — or what seems like free stuff — to your supporters.
We humans are programmed to respond to the leader that rallies us to fight the enemy that is threatening our community. And we do.
But how can we tell when our leader is riling us up in order to obtain political power for himself rather than save us from a real enemy? The answer is that we would have the benefit of wise commentators — philosophers, historians, social scientists — that would laugh and sneer at the power politician and his war drums. Unfortunately, in our time, we seem to have too many commentators that believe in politics as a beneficial balm to create a just society rather than a necessary evil when the enemy is at the gate.
The question is: how can modern society make an adjustment so that our leaders don’t succumb to the temptation of finding enemies behind every tree? I suppose it would require us all to listen to leaders of every kind except political leaders. How would that work?
Maybe we need a society in which the ordinary middle class has a higher status than right now. The ordinary middle class tends to be more interested in work and family and children than the educated class. The educated class, we have learned over the centuries, has a penchant for building castles in the air — in particular political castles in the air — and then summoning us all to storm the castle and defeat its evil castellan.
How would we do that, and raise the status of the middle class while lowering the status of the educated class?
“So why do the Democratic Socialists of America still believe their fairy tales?” Because they will say “Real socialism” has never been tried. No matter the mountains of bodies our true believers will keep trying till it works.