Zohran Mamdani, Die Linke and the Reconfiguration of the Left

A “democratic socialist” named Zohran Mamdani has won the the New York City mayoral primary for the Democratic Party. Friend-of-the-blog Alex Berenson has an amusing write-up cataloguing the man’s various lunacies, while Steve Sailer surmises on the basis of precinct voting patterns that Mamdani is basically the “white cool kids’” candidate.

Mamdani has views typical of the student left. In the past he’s called for defunding the police and voiced support for the BDS movement, and during the race he even appeared to defend the demands of pro-Palestinian protesters to “globalise the intifada.” More recently, he’s tried to moderate his rhetoric, but you can see easily enough who the man is. As mayor, Mamdani wants to make city buses free, freeze rents, provide free childcare, establish low-cost city-owned supermarkets, massively expand “affordable housing,” crack down on “bad landlords” and tax rich people more.

Free Palestine abroad, and more free stuff at home: If he were in Germany, Mamdani would just love Die Linke. This is the renamed Socialist Unity Party from the DDR, which until last year was basically on life support and in serious danger of disappearing entirely. Some combination of poor economic conditions, the growing salience of the Palestinian cause and the failure of Olaf Scholz’s traffic light coalition have transformed Die Linke almost overnight into a vital political force. Like Mamdani, our hardline native-grown socialists have campaigned on affordable housing and other redistributionist policies. One of their leading lights, Heidi Reichinnek, has even called for the overthrow of capitalism. Young university-educated German woman are their biggest supporters, and in the cities they are uniquely positioned to align with various migrant groups who sympathise overtly with the Palestinians. These dynamics and their basic strategy (Free Palestine plus Free Stuff) may just push Die Linke over the top in the Berlin elections next year.

Mamdani and Die Linke both signal a serious shift in left-wing politics. The progressive establishment has overreached and appears to be in terminal decline. In America, major activist projects like trans ideology and wokery failed to win wide social consensus and even inspired serious backlash, while in Europe climatism has crashed on the rocks of high energy prices and dwindling prosperity. Trump’s victory in the United States and the rise of populist parties like Alternative für Deutschland in Germany have cast the progressive establishment into crisis, just as the war in Gaza has opened the way to an older and much more potent leftist political style.

We see the effects everywhere: The left are becoming more internationally uniform; energy is bleeding from long-established parties and organisations to the fringes and the upstarts; adversarial student protests are back on the menu. In short, a largely institutionalised and tamed left – an increasingly elite political movement, represented by parties like the Greens and pantsuit politicians like Kamala Harris – is giving way once again to an anti-establishment, outsider left.

To understand what it means, I invite you to subscribe and consider my General Triangle Theory of Leftism. Leftism is often mistaken for an ordinary political ideology, but in fact it’s more of a political technology that consists of three interacting components. We generally see serious ideological changes on the left when any one of these components are switched out or modified. All three are undergoing serious reconfiguration at the moment, and that’s probably a big deal.