socialism

It’s clear why Zohran Mamdani has a double-digit lead in the New York mayoral race

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Trump & Cuomo

There’s a clarity about Mamdani’s message that stands in sharp contrast to most Democratic politicians

By Margaret Sullivan

For someone who exudes positive energy and seldom stops smiling, Zohran Mamdani certainly does provoke a lot of negative reactions.

“He’s not who you think he is,” one TV ad glowered over gloomy images of the 34-year-old state assemblymember who is the clear frontrunner for New York City mayor. The ad doesn’t make clear precisely what the supposed disconnect is, but the tagline clearly is meant to give voters pause.

“Never ran anything,” former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo charged, as he dissed his opponent on Fox News. “There’s no time for on-the-job training when any given morning, God forbid, you could have a mass murder or a terrorist attack.” Cuomo’s campaign yanked an ad that went further, using racist stereotypes to depict Mamdani supporters.And the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been on an anti-Mamdani run for many weeks, churning out opinion pieces like this one from conservative columnist Peggy Noonan: “New York, You’ve Been Warned.” Or this one from Journal editorial board member Joseph Sternberg: “Sorry Republicans, There’s No Silver Lining to a Mamdani Win.”

Another Murdoch-controlled newspaper, the New York Post, has not confined its views to the opinion pages but rather shouted them on its tabloid front pages. “SCAMDANI”, read one cover story, with a subheading quoting Mayor Eric Adams calling the state assemblymember a “snake oil salesman”.

The pro-Trump billionaire Bill Ackman has warned New Yorkers that Mamdani’s personality is a fraud. “The whole thing is an act,” Ackman posted on X after the mayoral debate last month. “After watching him recreate his fake smile, your skin will start to crawl.” Ackman gave $1m to the anti-Mamdani effort through the Super Pac Defend NYC, while former mayor Mike Bloomberg has contributed more than that to efforts to thwart Mamdani’s rise; Bloomberg gave $1.5m to a pro-Cuomo Super Pac, after spending millions to help Cuomo in June’s primary.

But if you ignore the ads, the headlines and the social media posts, another story emerges, as researchers from the Harvard Institute of Politics found when they spoke to young people during the recent early-voting period.

“I think my life could really improve if he wins,” enthused one young woman, quoted in an ABC News story about the Harvard focus group. Another respondent compared him in one respect to Donald Trump: “There’s no flip-flopping.”

And another approvingly described Mamdani as “badass”.

The democratic socialist holds a double-digit lead in the race and right now looks like a shoo-in.

It certainly feels that way to this New Yorker. I live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, an area that split its vote in the Democratic primary between Cuomo and Mamdani, and I also spend a lot of time on a university campus. What I’ve noticed is that Mamdani energizes people and while some of that reaction is skeptical, a lot of the people I encounter – from students to seniors – want to give the newcomer a chance.

New York City, after all, is unaffordable for too many, so Mamdani’s relentless focus on the cost of rent and groceries has struck a nerve. Mamdani’s embrace of his Muslim faith, his advocacy for Gaza and his willingness to stand up for immigrants has solidified his appeal.

There’s a clarity about it that stands in sharp contrast to most Democratic politicians, noted Astead Herndon, editorial director at Vox who wrote a recent New York Times magazine cover story titled The Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani.

“He works from the premise of his beliefs,” Herndon said on CNN. “A lot of Democrats … have mastered this triangulation dance … where it feels like sometimes, they’re trying to say nothing.” And what’s more, since the primary, his campaign has become more inclusive, as he reaches out to constituencies and powerful figures who have had serious doubts about him. He’s won at last some of them over.

Others, of course, will never be won over, but are becoming resigned to the reality of a Mayor Mamdani.

Governor Kathy Hochul, whose political instincts are well-honed and practical, endorsed Mamdani in mid-September despite significant policy differences. (At a rally in Queens, chants of “tax the rich” interrupted Hochul’s speech and the Times described the progressive crowd’s response to the centrist governor as “tepid”.)

Hochul carried on, though, and got a better reaction when she praised the candidate for refusing to “get down in the gutter” with his many critics, especially those who try to weaponize his faith or ethnicity.

Instead, Hochul said: “He rises up with grace and courage and grit.”

Hochul is expected to run for re-election next year.

She surely has calculated that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have the Democratic mayor of New York City in her corner. And there is little doubt who that will be.

The Socialism of James Joyce

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James Joyce

Joyce’s flirtation with organized socialist politics was brief, but he continued to find inspiration in socialist texts throughout his life.

By Donal Fallon | Jacobin 01.13.2021

Ulysses is a book in which everything happens and nothing happens. The story of a day in the life of a city — the Hibernian metropolis, as James Joyce saw Dublin — is a journey in a rambling flow of consciousness, where the very serious political issues of the day (the book is set on June 16, 1904) wrestle for space with the mundanities and excitement of the lives of his characters. Speaking of his appreciation for the book, Jeremy Corbyn noted how “Joyce references and richly describes what’s happening in the street. So somebody is holding forth about a big political issue and then the refuse cart goes by.” Edna O’Brien, one of Joyce’s finest biographers, has rightly maintained that “no other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.”

Joyce is now eighty years dead, and yet his reputation as a writer whose work is difficult, even daunting to approach, remains. Anthony Burgess would insist that “If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer,” yet others saw only pretension and inaccessibility in Joyce’s work, not least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Today, Joyce is not thought of in his native city — or more broadly — as a “political writer,” in the manner that later writers like Brendan Behan or even nearer contemporaries like Seán O’Casey. Joyce’s enduring place in Dublin’s collective memory is that of a champion of the city, with the words “when I die Dublin will be written on my heart” sold in whichever form (fridge magnet, risograph print, or coffee mug) a visitor should choose to bring them home. Yet Joyce was a writer fundamentally shaped by politics — personal, national, and international — one whose work was much influenced by the political climate in which it was written and by the developing political ideas of its writer.

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The Radical Politics of Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wylde

Oscar Wilde is known today for his satirical wit, but he maintained a lifelong interest in political affairs — one which would lead him to Irish nationalism, women’s suffrage and the fight against capitalism.

That Oscar Wilde found much to ridicule in the conventional values of late Victorian society is evident to anyone who has turned a page of his work. What is less known is that the playwright and poet envisioned a very different society as not only desirable but possible, and penned a political essay—The Soul of Man Under Socialism—in which he outlined his political beliefs. One of Wilde’s most frequently quoted lines—often reproduced without reference to its source—is contained within that work: ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.’

Wilde lived a full life, albeit a short one. Born in October 1854 at Dublin’s Westland Row, but raised primarily at nearby Merrion Square, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was the son of two of the great eccentrics—and intellects—of nineteenth-century Dublin. His father, William Wilde, was a pioneering surgeon and medical authority, who accepted a Knighthood in Dublin Castle, the home of British rule on the island of Ireland. By comparison, his mother Jane Wilde spent much of her life seeking to break that connection with Britain. A folklorist, poet and essayist, she wrote under the pen-name Speranza, the Italian word for hope.

The Nation and Young Ireland

The household in which Wilde was raised was one of intense political discussion, encouraged by Speranza who saw the home as something of a political salon. The suffragist Millicent Fawcett was invited by Speranza to come ‘explain what female liberty means’, in a city where the question of women’s suffrage failed to gain the same traction as on the neighbouring island for some decades.

As a poet, Speranza’s output appeared in the pages of The Nation, a seperatist newspaper aligned with the Young Ireland movement. The title—Young Ireland, and thus the Young Irelanders—was a bestowed reference to the emerging national-republican movements sweeping the continent in the 1840s, in particular Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy.

A break with the conservative constitutional nationalism of Daniel O’Connell, the Young Irelanders heralded the Second French Revolution with the observation that ‘dynasties and thrones are not half so important as workshops, farms and factories. Rather we may say that dynasties and thrones, and even provisional governments, are good for anything exactly in proportion as they secure fair play, justice, and freedom to those who labour.’ The movement led an abortive insurrection in 1848 against the backdrop of famine and starvation, Speranza’s poetry encouraging ‘Fainting forms, hunger-stricken’ into revolt.

Speranza, later quoted by James Connolly in the pages of Labour in Irish History, frequently hosted veterans of the Young Ireland movement in the family home, Wilde later recalling that ‘with regards those men of forty-eight, I look on their work with peculiar reverence and love, for I was indeed trained by my mother to love and reverence them, as a Catholic child is the saints of the cathedral.’

A Different Kind of Separatism: Wilde in America

Wilde’s comments on the Young Irelanders were made during a speaking tour of the United States in 1881, the young poet embarking on a journey across the country speaking on aestheticism, but discovering that audiences were instead drawn by the chance to hear Speranza’s son.

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The Socialism of James Joyce

by

James Joyce

Today marks 80 years since James Joyce’s death. Joyce’s flirtation with organized socialist politics was brief, but he continued to find inspiration in socialist texts throughout his life.

By Donal Fallon | Jacobin

Ulysses is a book in which everything happens and nothing happens. The story of a day in the life of a city — the Hibernian metropolis, as James Joyce saw Dublin — is a journey in a rambling flow of consciousness, where the very serious political issues of the day (the book is set on June 16, 1904) wrestle for space with the mundanities and excitement of the lives of his characters. Speaking of his appreciation for the book, Jeremy Corbyn noted how “Joyce references and richly describes what’s happening in the street. So somebody is holding forth about a big political issue and then the refuse cart goes by.” Edna O’Brien, one of Joyce’s finest biographers, has rightly maintained that “no other writer so effulgently and so ravenously recreated a city.”

Joyce is now eighty years dead, and yet his reputation as a writer whose work is difficult, even daunting to approach, remains. Anthony Burgess would insist that “If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer,” yet others saw only pretension and inaccessibility in Joyce’s work, not least Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Read more