Over on Substack, Elle Griffin takes an “abundance” debate detour en route to praising NYC Democratic Mayoral winner Zohran Mamdani.
An excerpt from The Elysian:
But though policy is important in an election, it’s not enough. I can look through every politician, whether Democrat or Republican, and like half of their policies and hate half their policies. I do! But to vote on a politician based on building policy alone, or on a rent freeze that only affects a minority of residents, is to completely miss the big picture of everything else going on in our country!
People voted for Zohran because they want a social democracy (“vibes”), regardless of whether Mamdani’s policies are the best possible social policies we could implement. We have to make that kind of decision with every politician we vote for.
And we need to pay attention to those big picture vibes! We need the stump speech and the rallying cry and the bold plan to fix our country. “Populism,” of the Bernie or Trump variety, was always going to happen. People are very unhappy with the American government right now on both sides of the aisle, and everyone is looking for a drastic change. To replace Bernie with Joe Biden was to block that drastic change. To replace Zohran with Cuomo or an abundance Democrat would have been to block that change.
That’s why we have Trump, and I don’t think a trad Democrat or abundance Democrat will be able to beat Trump with a list of good policies but no plan to drastically alter our government.
The “Tax the Rich” dress here is required. People are mad.
Especially when we see who Mamdani is going up against in the fall. Eric Adams, the former NYC mayor, is still in the running despite committing bribery and fraud. He agreed to allow ICE into a sanctuary city in exchange for Trump’s pardon, then switched parties to run in the race as an Independent. Cuomo, who resigned in disgrace during his last term and just lost to Mamdani in the primary, has now switched parties to run against Mamdani again in the fall as an independent. We now have two politicians who didn’t win a primary but still somehow get to run in the fall against the one who did.
How does that make sense?
We need a more ambitious counter to this kind of politics.
Trump is promising to end all wars, build the biggest economy the world has ever seen, and burn the old government to the ground so he can build a better one in its place. If Democrats counter with “we’re going to build more houses and fix permitting,” they won’t just lose the election—they’ll lose the plot entirely. We need a Mamdani-type candidate who can rally a movement. Who can name what’s broken in America and dare to reimagine what could take its place. If that leader also embraces abundance—with bold, practical policies that materially improve people’s lives and pull the country out of its spiral—all the better.
But abundance alone isn’t enough.
If we’ve learned anything from the theater that is American politics, it’s that we’re heading into the climax. The audience is restless, the stakes are sky-high, and the country isn’t waiting for a policy wonk with a white paper—it’s waiting for a protagonist with a vision.
Okay, I agree that what Mamdani is trying to do _looks vaguely_ like populism, but it actually isn’t. People keep being confused about that. Populism isn’t just ‘promising popular things’.
For it to be populism, he would have to be attacking ‘the system’, including his own side. That’s what populism is, it pits the candidate or party against ‘the elites’ who run things and who refuse to make things better. It’s a promise to tear down the old guard, all of it, and put in the new people who will get things done.
He’s not _saying_ that. I haven’t heard him say anything about that. He’s just, you know, actually proposing to do things that elected Dems will not do. (We could get into the weeds of why they won’t do it, but it’s mostly because they are ineffectual buffoons who exist mostly to collect campaign donations and then retire into lobbying.)
Which I guess could be considered ‘an attack’, it certainly shows them as ineffectual buffoons who exist mostly to collect campaign donations and then retire into lobbying, but I’ve never heard him actually say that. He’s not saying ‘Elect me because other Democrats are useless’, he’s just…sorta…demonstrating they are useless by actually having some amount of actual policy proposals.
Yes, what Mamdani is promising is pie-in-the-sky things that might not work, and most of them won’t even get to the point we can even test if they work, but that’s never stopped politicians before…well, except recent Democrats. And it’s not populism.
We can debate whether or not we should have candidates promise things that cannot be done, but it is much better than the complete uselessness of most elected Democrats who mostly seem to exist to performative slightly complain about fascism for like five minutes and do nothing else. They never promise anything else, they never try anything else, they just sorta preemptively fail.
Promising things that cannot be done is actually pretty useful in politics, it’s used to signal goals and priorities, and it’s also moves the Overton window, a thing that Democrats have entirely ceded to Republican control at this point. (I believe there was a formal surrender ceremony under Obama.) Sometimes things that were not possible do eventually become possible, if you have a decade or so of politicians saying they’re going to do them and it seems vaguely popular!
I see two things going on (and neither one of them could really work without the other).
1. Low voter turnout. Back in 2021, about 1.15 million people voted in the mayoral election. That’s less than a quarter. If we want to argue that 2021 isn’t a good measuring stick for anything, fair enough. But we’re under 30% of the NYC voters for mayor going back to 2001 (which, I’m sure you’ll agree, also isn’t a particularly good measuring stick).
Fewer than a million voted in the mayoral primary which, I’ll grant, is a lot for a primary but still isn’t a whole lot in the big picture.
2. There’s a lot of unhappiness with Democratic Leadership.
“Democrats who say they want to replace their party leaders, 62% nationally say yes, compared to just 24% who say no.”
And when you meditate upon “who is most likely to go out of their way to vote?”, the answer is pretty much weighted toward “people who want to change things” versus “people who don’t particularly want to change things”.
Anyway, this isn’t about this or that one of Mamdani’s policies. It’s about how those folks most likely to participate in the primaries are those who most want the sclerotic leadership to be replaced.
It’s like Maga.
Re: (1) This was a primary. In 2021, there were, as far as I can tell, just under 840,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary; in 2025, it looks like there were about 906,000. So this is not a low turnout election, it’s a pretty typical primary with possibly a slightly higher turnout.
(2) Is absolutely right, though: the Democratic Party is at Dubya-Second-Term approval levels, and candidates with ideas, vision, a clear message, and clear values, like Mamdani, are exactly what they need to rebuild trust and confidence.
The “Abundance” movement, aside from its now admitted anti-labor ideology, is a pretty naked attempt to make it look like typical elite liberal technocratic thinking has vision, ideas, and values, but it’s pretty easy to see through the nonsense.
Ah, that was my second attempt to write the comment. The first time I wrote it, the opening paragraph talked about the distinction between “support for a policy” and “opposition to the status quo”.
I’m not saying that “THIS PRIMARY IS ILLEGITIMATE!” or anything like that.
I’m saying that the Mamdani Moment is likely to be misread as being about broad support for this or that policy of his when, really, it’s not about his policies at all but is instead about a couple of different things coming to head at the same time.
A “vibe”, if you will.
Politics is “vibes.” It’s how we got Bush, Obama, and Trump twice (I don’t know how we got Biden, exactly, but vibes likely had something to do with it). Vibes gave us the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act, as well as the rush to privatization under Reagan.
Who knows where this moment leads us? Is Mamdani a flash in the pan? Will he succeed despite almost every establishment institution, including the most powerful people in his own party, opposing him? Will he inspire candidates with similar politics? New voters who are inspired by his politics? Or will he flame out, either losing the election or failing as mayor? Who knows. We’ll have to see where the vibes take us, I guess.
Is Mamdani a flash in the pan?
He may or may not be. Was Maga a flash in the pan? We sure as hell thought it was on Jan 6th, didn’t we?
Will he succeed despite almost every establishment institution, including the most powerful people in his own party, opposing him?
There’s this weird dynamic where particular establishment players oppose in such a way that entrenches folks like Mamdani even more. Like they phrase it in such a way that makes people listening at home say “YOU’RE NOT LISTENING!!! THIS IS EXACTLY WHY I SUPPORT MAMDANI!!!!!”
Will the establishment communicate “I’M NOT LISTENING! I’M NOT LISTENING!”
If they can avoid that, they may be able to help scuttle him.
Note: They won’t be able to avoid that. They have, somehow, managed to cultivate a world view where avoiding that isn’t within their personal overton windows. Like, they can’t even comprehend a play where they don’t smash the “I’M NOT LISTENING!” button.
Will he inspire candidates with similar politics?
Depends on if he wins. If he wins, we’ll see copycats.
If he loses, he’s Kari Lake.
New voters who are inspired by his politics?
Indubitably. It’s just a question as to whether Adams is sufficiently Clintonian mixed with a dose of whether Guardian Angels Guy is sufficiently Perotian/Naderish.
Or will he flame out, either losing the election or failing as mayor?
What levers does the mayor actually have in his office?
If the mayor doesn’t have the power to do much more than call a press conference, Mamdani may do very well. He’s charismatic as hell and anything that doesn’t happen will allow him to say that that lever is in someone else’s hand.
If he has the power to, for example, defund the police?
We’re gonna see some Boudinian emergent properties start blooming in that garden.
But it would have been better, no matter what happens, if there wasn’t so much opposition from selfish people.
Depends on if he wins. If he wins, we’ll see copycats.
I think this might necessarily be true. He’s clearly struck a nerve nationwide (even internationally; man, the Italian communist publications are loving him), and I think there are people right now who are thinking, “I should run on this stuff!” Even if he loses, we’ll see more. Some will be significantly less charismatic and talented than he, some as or even more. The fact that Bernie has been laying this ground for a decade helps, too.
I do not believe we will fix this place through elections with the two-party system — I don’t mean that we should vote for third parties; I mean third parties can’t win, and you can’t fix anything big while working through either of the two main parties — but I like the idea of raising consciousness through campaigns like Mamdani’s, so I hope we get a ton of them.
Well, the question is whether Karen Bass is a Mamdanish figure. Whether London Breed was Mamdanish.
If so, we’re in a place where we’ve already had Mamdanish leadership leading some fairly important cities in recent years.
I don’t think we’ve seen anyone quite like Mamdani, other than Bernie, who’s much older and whose focus is slightly different.
Bass had poorly thought-out and poorly implemented ideas about public safety, which differ pretty significantly from Mamdani’s, for example, which I think are much more well-thought out.
Huh. When I look at him, I immediately think “another one of these”. AOC is probably the closest at a national level.
Pretty much everyone on the left sees him as different, and has for months now. Hell, he couldn’t even get an AOC endorsement until very close to election day, and a some of the squad or squad-like national Dems endorsed Lander, who is probably closer to AOC, politically and personally, than Mamdani.
I get that with ideological distance, ideological differences tend to collapse or blend together, but he really is pretty different, from over on this side of the spectrum.
Well, my assumption is that he won’t be allowed to touch anything and that the mayor’s office doesn’t have *THAT* much power.
Guiliani did such a great job as mayor because he gave a handful of amazing press conferences following a horrific attack.
Bloomy? Di Blasio? Eh. Nothing notable.
Adams? I can probably name a couple of press conferences he threw (the dumpster one, the weed one) and the criticisms of him as mayor have to do with how weird he is rather than how he’s pulling the wrong levers.
If the mayor can’t touch the levers but can only give press conferences… Mamdani will be an *AMAZING* mayor.
I think most of the criticism of Adams is that he’s corrupt. The weirdness would probably appeal to New Yorkers otherwise.
candidates with ideas, vision, a clear message, and clear values, like Mamdani, are exactly what they need to rebuild trust and confidence.
If the ideas are workable. Some of his are clearly not, i.e. serious rent control will not increase the supply of housing. Others are marginal, reducing incarceration and increasing mental health outreach can go off the rails. The city building affordable housing can easily become a boondoggle and spend a lot to produce very little.
IMHO the thing that will make or break him as a mayor is less his big ideas and more his management and leadership skills.
We now have two politicians who didn’t win a primary but still somehow get to run in the fall against the one who did.
When that happens, it’s because the primary voters give the nod to someone who will lose in the main election. Often it’s because the existing politician is a moderate and the primary voters want a radical.
Here’s another positive, “what we can learn from this” take on Mamdani’s primary win from a Democratic insider:
https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/what-every-democrat-everywhere-should
I think those points are broadly accurate. Another good one would be don’t try to force everyone behind a stale, has-been institutionalist with a lot of baggage, particularly when your incumbent, whether disowned or not, has turned out to be a combination of corrupt and compromised beyond salvage.
Big picture I think the single pivot that would do core Democrat partisans and center left establishment a lot of good is accepting the asymmetric nature of the parties. Just because the GOP can run nakedly corrupt buffoons and get by on it at times doesn’t mean the Democrats can do the same (they can’t). While I’m pretty pessimistic about Mamdani’s ability to actually improve life for the denizens of NYC the more I read about his campaign the lest surprised I am that he over performed.
I am always suspicious of grand pronouncements from true believers but mutual things can be true:
1. The Old Machines/Democratic Establishment screwed up by getting behind Cuomo for governor. They might not have been able to prevent him from running but they did not have to line-up behind him and endorse him. It’s not like NYC is an area with a paucity of Democratic politicians. There were many people running for office and by lining up behind Cuomo, the establishment Dems gave Mandami the good-old fashioned Streisand Effect especially as the Don’t Rank Cuomo effort began picking up steam.
1a. Anecdotally, I’ve seen evidence of people ranking Cuomo first and Mandami second which indicates that they were just the two candidates with biggest name recognition.
2. There is a way to see the Cuomo v. Mandami frace as a fight between the old New York and the new New York (sorry) and this is partially evidence for the author’s claim that new New York wants democratic socialism.
Mamdani did best among college educated middle and high income neighborhoods. That is a strange audience for democratic socialism and government owned grocery stores.
They won’t need to live with the services.
The people who are supposedly walking miles to get food aren’t voting on that issue because they’re not actually walking.
I will also point out that New Jersey did not nominate a DSA person to be their nominee for governor. They nominated a pretty liberal rep but one who codes as a moderate mom. The Democratic nominee for VA governor is not DSA. US elections are incredibly diverse. What works in place A does not necessarily work in Place B. People persistently refuse to recognize this
Hochul, Nadler, and Schumer are decent human beings: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5d3579b586267ac9de00c6eb74142b3096cd2e14e9c4b71e233e7272fe1f0e1b.png
Gillibrand not so much now.