Zohran Mamdani's Win Is the Beginning of the End of the Old Democratic Party

Mamdani’s NYC primary victory shows that the old tricks of the political establishment are dying out—and something new is being born.

Mostly, in politics, good things don’t happen. Let’s be honest. Most of the time, the candidates are dishonest, and the issues are distractions, and the person with the most money wins. Sometimes, though, there is a reason for inspiration. And — even more rarely — there is a reason to believe that things are changing. You can feel the gears of history moving. You can feel the tectonic plates of normalcy begin to quaver and slip. The previous, unsustainable arrangement of the world is beginning to slip. The future holds something different.

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist, just won the New York City Democratic primary for mayor. When the results came in last night, I was inside a DSA watch party in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, a sprawling space with the look of a crumbling high school auditorium, and the sweat-drenched young crowd of Zohran volunteers was approaching ecstasy. These people, used to living on the margins of the political mainstream, have been catapulted into its center. This, I think, is not going to be a fluke. The stuck wheel of the Democratic Party is beginning to turn.

First, though, will come the panicked thrashing of a dying beast. Eric Adams, the disgraced current Democratic mayor of New York, is running for reelection as an independent. So, too, may Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former Democratic governor of New York, who was just humbled by Mamdani in the primary despite $25 million in super PAC spending on his behalf. The Establishment — not just the city’s Democratic establishment, and not just the national Democratic establishment, but also Donald Trump, and the national Republican Party, and Wall Street, and New York City’s rich people, of whom there are many — will throw money at whichever of those wounded old wildebeests seems most plausible. Zohran, like AOC before him, will be elevated to the status of Socialist Boogeyman, smeared as a vile communist, subjected to veiled and unveiled racism, and opposed by organized capital. All of those forces will make his final hurdle, the general election in November, as high as it can possibly be.