It saddens me to report that one of the two principal political parties in the US shows signs of most unfortunate disunity. Not that the Democratic Party has ever spoken in one voice, but these days the sound is especially discordant.
In my day, the Democrats used to split more or less along the Mason-Dixon Line. Those to the south of it overlapped with the bulk of the Republican Party, while those to the north tended to be what Europeans oxymoronically call democratic socialist, and Americans misname ‘liberal’.
The good news for those who, like me, favour political harmony is that such a geographical demarcation no longer exists. The bad news is that it has been replaced with a different split: one between Trotskyists and bog standard socialists.
Neither group bears any relation to what used to be seen as a mainstream political party in the West in general and America in particular. And the Trotskyist wing is most visibly championed by Zohran Mamdani, who in a couple of days is likely to be elected mayor of New York.
President Trump routinely refers to Mamdani as “100 per cent communist lunatic” and “total nut-job”, which, contrary to Trump’s usual tendency to hyperbole, is an understatement, or rather a misstatement.
True enough, Leon Trotsky would have happily signed his name to every political idea Mamdani campaigns on, except perhaps those that reek of anti-Semitism too much. But it’s a mistake to ascribe extreme political views to mental instability.
Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Hitler was insane. Lenin’s cannibalistic ideas had been fully formed in his mind and put into practice long before syphilis made final inroads on his mind. Stalin developed some paranoid tendencies in the last few years of his life, but he had been perfectly rational in his criminal policies until then. And Hitler, although somewhat hysterical, kept his marbles almost to the end.
People who ascribe evil to madness should brush up on their theology, ideally, or moral philosophy, at a pinch. They’ll find out that evil has full residency in human nature, if only negatively, as the absence of good. The choice between the two is thus perfectly normal either way and it’s always free. Evil people are simply those who have chosen wrong. They aren’t insane – and neither is Mamdani.
Trump, however, is half-right: Mamdani is definitely 100 per cent communist, with a distinct Trotskyist bent. He describes capitalism as ‘theft’ and the police as ‘evil’. Consequently, he plans to crush the former with taxes and replace the latter with social services.
He also wants to freeze the rent for millions of apartments, even those that are already rent-controlled or rent-stabilised (I know a difference exists, although it escaped me even when I lived in Manhattan). New York landlords will respond the same way they always do when the local government plays silly buggers: they’ll keep their properties vacant and put repairs on hold.
To compensate, Mamdani wants to create 200,000 union-built, “100 per cent affordable” apartments, and fair enough, they would be affordable for the prospective tenants. But at a total cost of $100 billion over ten years, they would be zero per cent affordable to the city.
By comparison, his other project, free buses for all, costs a mere pittance of $800 million a year, while his plan to subsidise food to the tune of $60 million a year sounds dirt cheap. Both are likely to end up as a pie in the sky.
But it’s another brilliant idea that especially intrigues me since it illustrates both the economic difference between our two countries and the ideological similarity between Mamdani and our own dear government.
He wants almost to double the minimum wage to $30 an hour. In our money, it adds up to the magical number of £46,000 a year that holds a particular significance for PM Starmer and Chancellor Reeves.
They won their landslide partly on the promise not to raise taxes on “working people”. Since it’s obvious that neither doctors nor lawyers nor stock brokers, many of whom put in 90-hour weeks, do any work, analysts struggled with establishing how HMG defined that category.
Now, as the autumn budget is rapidly approaching, Rachel in Accounts has helpfully elucidated the issue. She won’t raise taxes for the “working people”, meaning those who are on – are you ready for this? – less than £46,000 a year. The fat cats who earn more than that will be “squeezed till the pips squeak”, as one of Rachel’s illustrious predecessors, Denis Healey, put it so robustly.
And there’s the rub: what the American Marxist Mamdani sees as the minimum wage, our homegrown Marxist Reeves regards as untold riches to be expropriated. Just think how much wealthier the US is – and hence how much richer the pickings for their communists.
Another difference is that Mamdani is more honest: he openly talks in rank Marxist terms, such as “public ownership of the means of production”, whereas Rachel still couches her Marxism in pseudo-democratic cant. However, when Marx talked about the means of production, he had in mind the burgeoning factories of the Industrial Revolution which in those days accounted for most of the economy.
By contrast, today’s New York City doesn’t produce much apart from services. The only NYC products I can think of offhand are pastrami, bagels and dill pickles, but I don’t think Marx would have counted these as industrial output. Mamdani ought to bring his Marxism up to date.
Of course, another difference between him and Rachel is that she’ll be able to act on her plans, whereas Mamdani will probably be held back by the harsh reality of New York finances or, barring that, by the state government. But it’s the thought that counts, and Mamdani’s is to the left of common or garden socialism – and way to the left of even such ‘liberal’ mayors of yesteryear as Lindsay, Beam or Koch.
But there is every indication that one law of socialism is still inviolable. The law says that, when Marxists take over or are even about to, people run away, and to this law there are no known exceptions. Apparently, this is already happening in New York, with many wealthy people and corporations fleeing to places like Florida and Texas.
As a former 10-year resident of the Lone Star State, I’m pleased to find out that it already boasts more bankers than New York. I look forward to the time when Wall Street ups sticks and moves lock, stock and barrel to, say, Sugar Land, Lubbock or San Antonio.
What I find amazing is the ethnic aspect of Mamdani’s meteoric rise. This Uganda-born Muslim is seldom reticent when spouting toxic pro-Hamas and anti-Israeli propaganda, with thinly veiled anti-Semitic overtones.
Jews tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing, and open anti-Semitism is seldom a way to electoral success in a city where Jews make up over 12 per cent of the population. Yet a curious phenomenon is unfolding, and not only in New York. Many Jews vote for those who hate them, thus going Jesus Christ one better.
After all, Jesus only said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. He didn’t say vote for them, and yet ‘liberal’ Jews do just that, by casting their ballots for candidates loyal to ‘Palestinians’, meaning Jew-hating Hamas.
This, I believe, is to some extent a reflection of a phenomenon widely described in psychological and psychiatric literature: Jewish self-hatred. Englishmen may hate England, and Frenchmen may hate France, but neither people are likely to hate themselves for being, respectively, English or French.
Some Jews seem to be different, and I for one struggle to see any other explanation of why so many of them support that virulent anti-Semite, as simple arithmetic suggests they must. Moreover, it appears that George Soros, himself Jewish, bankrolled Mamdani’s campaign. Some things seem to matter more than ethnic solidarity, and I wonder what they might be.
One way or another, I hope New Yorkers defy the polls and spare themselves what’s likely to become the most destructive administration in the city’s history. My thoughts are with them: one has to renounce the devil on this All Saints’ Day.