For well over a century, New York has been seen as a citadel of capitalism at its most ruthless and an imposing symbol of US power. That was why a band of Jihadists attacked it on September 11, 2001, killing almost 3,000 people, and why this week’s election as mayor of Zohran Mamdani, a young Muslim who hates Israel and says he is a socialist, has left so many scratching their heads and wondering what is going on.
Most observers agree that Mamdani owed his victory to his popularity among the large number of New Yorkers with recently awarded college degrees who, to their dismay, have found it far harder than they expected to make ends meet in a city in which almost everything is much more expensive than elsewhere. Greatly impressed by his youth, his winning smile and, most of all, by his promise to freeze rents, make public transport free and set up city-run grocery stores that will undercut the money-grubbing mom-and-pop shops, they decided he was their man. Footing the bill for all this will be “the rich” who, he says, can easily afford it.
Donald Trump is licking his lips at the prospects Mamdani has opened up before him. Like many other people, the rambunctious US president takes it for granted that the new mayor will soon turn his home city, New York, into a crime-infested disaster area from which big companies, led by the huge financial concerns that generate so much wealth, will flee in panic to seek refuge in Florida or Texas. To encourage such an outcome, he could starve it of federal funding.
In the view of Trump and those surrounding him, what has just happened in New York will widen the already rapidly growing gap between the Republican-dominated “red states” and those the Democrats have painted “blue,” with the former outperforming the latter by most metrics because they are more friendly towards private enterprise and far less interested in “progressive” social engineering projects that are designed to help favoured identity groups: blacks, transexuals, females and so on. Of late, the difference between the two has become so marked that Trump has taken to sending troops into Democrat-run cities like Washington and Chicago he says are threatened by lawlessness. Now that Mamdani is in charge, much the same could happen to New York.
To the surprise of many, socialism and even Communism are coming into fashion in the United States, a country that – to the disgust of European leftists – for most of its existence seemed strangely immune to its charms. Though aggressively left-wing creeds had long been upheld by tenured university professors who were seen by most of their compatriots as eccentric outliers, in recent decades they have won the adherence of a rapidly increasing number of students whose adult life began when the Soviet Union and its appalling crimes and failures were already ancient history.
Socialism’s appeal has been enhanced by the inability of the US to provide most young college graduates with the standard of living to which they think their educational achievements entitle them. Unless their parents have plenty of money and are willing to let them have some of it, most cannot buy property in places where it is extremely costly and are therefore forced to live in rented flats that cost them a large chunk of their income with little prospect of them ever earning enough to get a proper home. Not surprisingly, many feel that this is terribly unfair.
In the United States and other “developed” nations, this unhappy state of affairs is blamed on the “boomer” generation (people born in the aftermath of World War II when birth rates shot up), that is now departing the scene. Its members stand accused of hogging all the wealth and leaving too little for their offspring, thus condemning them to live in more straitened circumstances than their parents or grandparents. There are many reasons for this. Economies everywhere have become more competitive and more divisive, with the difference between the very rich and the very poor increasing year after year. Young men feel especially aggrieved; they are challenged by young women who are every bit as capable of doing jobs that, a mere 30 or 40 years ago, would have been a masculine preserve. To make their situation worse, technological advances, which look certain to be spurred by Artificial Intelligence, are hollowing out the labour market.
And then there are the problems arising from the well-meaning attempt by boomer politicians to ensure that most people got a university education. Almost overnight, what had once been the privilege of a smallish minority became something all but the least academically gifted could aspire to, often by attending undemanding politicized courses with the word “studies” attached. Naturally enough, the owners of the diplomas they issued think they are of equal value to those that were awarded to their counterparts half a century or more before and that, as a result, they should be regarded as fully credentialled members of the elite. When they discovered that this was not the case and they would not get the well-paying jobs they had been told should be theirs, but instead they would have to scrape a living as, at best, an adjunct professor earning a pittance or by working in a warehouse or restaurant, many felt they had been swindled out of their birthright.
Over the years, much has been said and written about “elite overproduction,” an anomaly that comes about when too many people have been brought up to believe they should be up there near the top when, as has always been the case, there is only room for a reduced minority. In today’s world there are a great many “superfluous men”, and women, as Ivan Turgenev presciently described them back in the mid-19th century. Such individuals made an enormous contribution to the Bolshevik revolution and, as perpetrators or victims, they played a major part in the horrors that it provoked.
Is something similar brewing? Though few people outside New York think Soviet-style Communism is about to stage a comeback, resentment among the many who suspect they are surplus to requirements is clearly intensifying. It is feeding a variety of social and political movements that could have baleful consequences, so the election by New Yorkers of a mayor Trump says is “a Communist lunatic” and clearly has Islamist tendencies could be a relatively inoffensive harbinger of things to come.
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