Zohran Mamdani, Petty-Bourgeois Radical

The uncertain prospects of a post-woke left

Madison Swart

I was on vacation when Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC Democratic primary hit the news, so I’m weighing in on it after a great deal of ink has already been spilled. My basic takeaway is that reports of the death of the left turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. This has been as reassuring to leftists as it has been dismaying to their enemies—although perhaps not entirely so, given that the lucrative media apparatus dedicated to skewering left-wing excesses had lately seemed short on targets.

The fact that the left’s electoral struggles in recent years led to an overstated account of its demise shouldn’t be too surprising: Donald Trump and MAGA were also the subject of premature obituaries after 2020, the GOP writ large was written off as a hopeless cause after its 2012 loss to Barack Obama—as had been the Democrats after George W. Bush beat John Kerry in 2004, and so on. Nothing seems to revive the fortunes of a political faction like its enemies being in power. For many, the anti-woke radicalism and trollish style of the current administration have made the excesses of 2020-era progressivism (in which Mamdani was a participant) seem like a distant memory.

Beyond revealing the thermostatic fluctuations of politics, what seemed noteworthy about Mamdani’s success was his confident command of the contemporary media landscape, something that a great deal of 2024 commentary had concluded was the exclusive domain of the right. Leaving aside the details of Mamdani’s platform, his success made clear that a left-wing candidate could run an effective campaign based on many of the same insights and instincts that propelled Trumpian populism. The conservative writer Reihan Salam has made this point as follows:

Mamdani—much like another prominent populist—offered simple, bold, clear, accessible ideas. Donald Trump ran on Build the Wall, No Tax on Tips, and Drill, Baby, Drill. Mamdani ran on making New York City affordable again: Freeze the Rent; Fast, Fare-Free Buses; and No-Cost Childcare, promises he’d pay for by taxing the millionaires and billionaires. It doesn’t really matter if his ideas are impractical or will blow up in his face, exacerbating the affordability crisis he’s setting out to solve. What matters is that he promised his voters something other than yet another creature of the Democratic gerontocracy.

Many had previously concluded, with some reason, that progressivism’s lopsided reliance on a highly educated demographic had rendered it woefully ineffective at broad-based economic appeals. Factors including its deeply ingrained seminar-room style and its acceptance of the moral demands of intersectionality, which require deference to a hodgepodge of identity categories, seemed to work against the majoritarian imperatives of electoral politics and populist messaging. But despite his elite credentials and cosmopolitan background, Mamdani excelled on both of these fronts, emphasizing broad economic concerns and proposing universal remedies.

I first became aware of Mamdani’s campaign—as I assume was true for many—by way of a viral video released late last year in which he interviewed voters in his state assembly district in Queens who had pulled the lever for Trump in November. Every one of the Trump voters he spoke to was non-white; most cited inflation and foreign policy—US entanglement in Gaza, but also Ukraine—as reasons they had soured on the Democrats, with several also faulting the party for being unable to speak to regular people.

There were many things that stood out about Mamdani’s approach, especially in comparison with the dominant tone and assumptions of 2010s progressivism. For one thing, he showed no interest in scolding or condemning Trump voters—indeed, he made explicit that he was seeking their votes, something he might have once been denounced for by fellow leftists. The way he framed the interviews made clear that he accepted these voters had legitimate reasons for having voted the way they did and for mistrusting the Democrats, and that he believed these misgivings deserved to be addressed. Moreover, on the most polarizing issue brought up by some voters—the Middle East—the video segments featured no radical anti-Zionist rhetoric and instead focused on the objection that the US government was investing vast resources in conflicts abroad (again, the choice to include mentions of the war in Ukraine as well as Gaza seemed notable) while average Americans were struggling to get by.

Mamdani concluded the video by making clear that he would attempt to appeal to voters as a mayoral candidate on the same grounds that Trump had appealed to them. It was already clear from this that his rhetoric, style, and approach differed from that of progressive Democrats back in the era when they were tripping over each other over how much taxpayer money they would spend on trans surgeries for detained migrants.

Nonetheless, the anti-woke commentariat has mostly responded to Mamdani’s rise by falling back on its usual repertoire, denouncing the candidate as a coddled Ivy League communist, woke extremist, and terrorist sympathizer. Matt Taibbi—once a serious journalist, now an anti-woke dead-ender for whom it will always be 2020—described Mamdani’s rise as “the electoral mainstreaming of dingbat campus socialism.” To be sure, in his earlier career Mamdani signed up for various woke causes du jour, and his track record on this front will no doubt continue to be dredged up (and is indeed worthy of journalistic scrutiny). Nonetheless, it is obtuse to ignore the fact that he seems to have learned some lessons the anti-woke left wanted leftists to learn a few years ago: Trump voters aren’t evil, activist rhetoric is alienating, inflation is a real concern, etc, etc.

If Mamdani sticks to his economic populist pitch, that will be good for his campaign, but also good for democracy and political discourse more broadly, because people want politicians to take them and their basic struggles with the costs of rent, food, and childcare seriously. In turn, one hopes, with due wariness, that his critics will debate his concrete proposals on their merits, as opposed to reacting with red-baiting hysteria in the mode of Taibbi or the New York Post. In my view, the problem with his most widely discussed proposals, such as pilot state-run supermarkets, isn’t that they’re particularly extreme; rather, it is that they’re gimmicky “one weird tricks”—but as with comparable Trumpian policies like tax-free tips, this is also their strength as campaign soundbites. (I have other misgivings about his policy agenda, but I’ll leave those for a future post.)

The bigger question worth revisiting in light of Mamdani’s stunning rise is how exactly the left-populist movements of the 2010s, which started out animated by economic discontents in the wake of the 2008 crash, came to grief, and whether and how it might be possible to avoid a repetition of the same trajectory in the 2020s. Much has been written (some of it by me) about the role of the professional-managerial class (PMC) in left politics; one major strain of that writing, to which I’ve been sympathetic at times, sees the PMC’s leading role as necessarily detrimental to any movement seeking to address economic inequality, for the simple reason that the PMC’s collective interests are in fact at odds with those of the working class, which it purports to represent.

Thinking about Mamdani’s win, though, I was reminded of a more ambivalent analysis, that of the Welsh sociologist Dan Evans in his 2023 book A Nation of Shopkeepers. Evans mostly uses the old Marxist term “petty bourgeoisie,” using “old petty bourgeoisie” to refer to the “shopkeepers”—small business owners and small-scale entrepreneurs—of his title, and “new petty bourgeoisie” to refer not to the haute-PMC (tenured professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers) as to the struggling, downwardly mobile degree holders who aspire, in many cases futilely, to its ranks. Both of these class fractions, contrary to Marx’s prediction of universal proletarianization, have grown in size and importance; both, Evans argues, are not simply or necessarily reactionary, as many traditional Marxists would claim. Rather, “[t]he new petty bourgeoisie, like the old petty bourgeoisie, has oscillated wildly in its positions, veering towards the working class in one moment and then the bourgeoisie/the state in the other.”

Mamdani won by stitching together a coalition of New York City’s struggling middle stratum, mobilizing groups we can identify with both Evans’s new and old petty bourgeoisie: grad students, interns, and NGO workers, yes, but also taxi drivers, halal cart vendors, and other small-scale entrepreneurs. As the left-wing writer John Ganz observed, “What I found particularly notable is Zohran’s outreach to small business owners … Rather than treat them as ‘petit bourgeois reactionaries’ ensorcelled by Trump’s politics of resentment, his campaign saw them as small-d democrats who were not wedded to either party … This is a real popular front strategy in the oldest sense of the term: an alliance of the democratic middle class and the working class.”

In the earlier Trump era, the “popular front” was a trap by which the Democratic Party establishment neutralized populist challengers on the grounds that the only alternative to the party was “literal fascism.” This blackmail was the means by which, in Evans’s terms, the disaffected new petty bourgeoisie was disciplined by and drawn back into the orbit of the bourgeoisie and the state. Whether this fate can be avoided and whether Mamdani’s broad petty-bourgeois coalition can hold together and generate a politics distinct from 2010s progressivism are perhaps two versions of the same question.

This week in Compact

• Thomas Fazi on the failure of the “European Green Deal”

• Chris Cutrone on Musk and Trump

• Laoise de Brún on the ambiguity of “intersectionality”

• Michael Tracey on the Epstein myth

• Helen Andrews on how Australia stopped grooming gangs