There are some very specific reasons everyone is scrambling out to post something negative about NYC Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.
The first is that right now his name and face ... sells. As a nation we have developed an extreme case of Trump fatigue. We know that everyone morning we have to wake up and discover what devastatingly dumb and/or harmful thing he's proposed overnight ...
... today I discover that instead of predicating tariffs at least on some demented idea that they will be ultimately positive for American business (read "billionaires" for "business" there), we discover that tariffs are also a weapon to defend out-of-power foreign autocrats like Brazil's ex-president Jair Bolsonaro ...
It's exhausting. It's as fatiguing and morally draining as Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, ICE, Texas floods, One Big Beautiful Bill, Make American Healthy Again, and all the other incipient disasters of the Donny Horror Picture Show ...
There's no fucking good news. By and large the Democrats have given up trying to give us anything to look forward to ... maybe the 2026 midterm elections, still 18 months of grueling body blows away, IF millions of votes are neither suppressed nor overturned by machinations, or IF they are not decided by sanity but the fear that some transgender woman will burst out of her restroom stall where instead of peeing she's been contemplating mass sexual assault ...
But Zohran talks about ... possibilities. About lower rents, about free transit, about cheap day care, and price controls on groceries ... and even the fact that society doesn't really need and probably cannot afford billionaires ...
He campaigns on the possibility of change for the people who remain closed out of the system. He is novelty, and novelty sells ... even when you are condemning it. Perhaps especially when you are condemning it.
Then there is his personality, his vibe. He is the first person in the last few years of Trump fixation to establish himself so quickly and so centrally in the consciousness of at least the America media ... and despite the tendency of journalists and political elites and those writers of ludicrous op-eds ... he does not remind one of a "progressive Donald Trump," and he is not tapping into the same vein of political discontent on the left that MAGA has opened on the far right.
If he is anything that resonates from the past, he potentially conjures an updated version of ... Barack Obama.
They said Obama was a Muslim. Mamdani IS a Muslim.
They said Obama was born in Africa. Mamdani WAS born in Africa.
They said that Obama, as only having been a "community organizer," state legislator, and a newly minted US Senator, was not prepared for greater things, like running for President.
Mamdani is a community organizer and state legislator, and they constantly tell you he's not ready for greater things, like running for Mayor of New York City.
Then there is part two: Mamdani is like all populists who are also policy wonks, ... transgressive. He breaks down the barriers of the categories we have all become too comfortable with, to our great detriment.
Mamdani -- far better than any other highly visibile political figure on the American stage -- stands in that space so many Americans silently occupy -- in which being pro-Palestinian is not to be a genocidal terrorist, and being critical of Israel is not to be antisemitic. This is deeply controversial ground to hold, which is strange, very strange.
Why is it strange?
We live in a country that is currently stepping into the mass deportation of millions of people primarily based on brown skin and the lack of a particular piece of paper rather than "the content of their character."
We live in a country being managed by overtly homophobic white Christian nationalists who hobnob happily with dictators and piss in the face of our long-time democratic allies.
We live in a country where one of our largest cities has been occupied by the US military for over thirty days with no end in sight, and the general commanding the operation tells us to "get used to it."
We live in a country wherein the goddamn Secretary of Agriculture just floated the idea of sending Medicaid recipients into the fields for re-education ala the Marxist Cultural Revolution; where the Secretary of Health and Human Services uses ChatGPT to make up sources that condemn vaccination and make autistic Americans into monsters ...
... and the media is telling us to be repelled by a Muslim-American telling us that killing or deporting all the Palestinians in Gaza is neither necessary for Israeli (and American security) nor particularly fucking moral.
He's the problem?
He's the "lunatic communist" we must all be afraid of, put in jail, and denaturalize?
But ... but ... but ... he's a self-admitted Democratic Socialist who doesn't think billionaires should exist.
My fucking God, call out the KKK -- or at least Tom Homan and Stephen Miller -- cause we've got crosses to burn in somebody's front yard.
I have already written an extensive piece explaining that not only doesn't the American right actually know what socialism is, but they are condemning him for suggesting that in NYC we might try that are ... either already in operation quite successfully in other parts of America, or which are ... the same as those proposed by his opponent in the mayoral race.
If you still think those right-wing attacks on Mr Mamdani hold water, you might want to read it.
But what got Forbes so riled up that somebody actually loosened his tie to tell this reincarnation of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Sulieman the Great off, is his comment that we probably shouldn't have billionaires in today's world.
That got their attention, since (a) Forbes is the magazine for people who think they'd like to become billionaires one day (or at least 100-millionaires like Dr. Fucking Oz) and (b) as the great (but now silenced by age and aphasia) Noam Chomsky never tired of observing, America doesn't have a liberal and a conservative political party, America has TWO business parties. Both funded by billionaires and 100-millionaires.
See, it works like this, as George Orwell once observed: you know who rules you when you figure out who you are not allowed to criticize.
And while you can still criticize (just barely) Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk, or Bill Gates -- those individual billionaires -- what you cannot do is question the very existence of the entire billionaire class.
I need to make sure you understand the rules:
1. The billionaire class is more important to America than the idea that the bottom sixty percent of American citizens (that would be about 205 million people) should have decent housing, health care, food, and education. It's not up for debate you goddamn socialists, that's just the way it is.
2. The continued existence of the billionaire class is the only thing standing between us and the total ruination of our society, to the point that without billionaires we would be eating tree bark as we dodged through the woods trying to avoid the killing fields while wiping our asses with our fingers because there would no longer be any toilet paper.
Those are your actual goddamn choices: prosperity for billionaires and their immediate sycophants, or an immediate return to Rousseau's "state of nature," but with machine guns and lots of transgender women in gangs trying to rape Nancy Mace in the nearest restroom where the plumbing has stopped working.
In that context Zohran Mamdani is the harbringer of the apocalypse, the anti-Mohammed about to bring on the tribulations of the end times so that he can feast on the roasted eyes of Jewish babies.
And -- as Forbes argues -- it is no longer even possible to visualize a society without the amassed wealth of billionaires.
First, we can't actually tax billionaires because, well, they aren't really patriotic Americans, and if something happens they don't like, they'll just leave and take Amazon with them:
Before I leave this incredibly stupid paragraph, let me point out some extreme idiocies.
The United States is NOT "a fiercely capitalist society," and never has been. The United States AT BEST is a mixed economy based on crony corporate capitalism that has MASSIVE elements of state socialism built right into its fiber, from the Hoover Dam to the Army and Air Force Exchange system to anti-competitive regulatory systems designed to keep new competitors away from the existing billionaires who receive TRILLIONS in tax breaks and corporate welfare at the expense of the people who aint' got health care.
The United States is not "based on the meritocratic idea that every has the opportunity to build their own futures -- and fortunes." The goddamn Constitutional Convention had a majority of delegates who fucking owned Black Americans and thought women should be submissively screwed as baby breeding machines, not allowed to vote.
For all but the past 20-30 years the word "meritocracy" came with the silent adjectival precursor of "white male" attached, and what we are seeing right now is nothing more and nothing less than the rebellion of angry white dudes who have seen the future and are not interested in EVER participating in a society based on meritocracy that does not give them personal bonus points for the color of their skin and the existence of their testicles.
"If the US were to enact a hyper-aggressive wealth and asset tax" to destroy billionaires ...
Except, of course, that's not what Mr Mamdani said at all, is it?
What he said was that he didn't think the world can really afford this concentration of wealth in so few hands, and -- completely separately -- that in NYC he plans to add about 2% to the tax bill of the wealthiest citizens to help pay for a few crumbs for the poorest ones, because, you know, noblesse oblige or something (all the worst communist ideas are usually written in French, or didn't you know that?).
Ironically, at the very end of the article, Forbes gets around to admitting that Mr Mamdani doesn't actually intend to do any of the dire things that the entire essay spent 1,500 words accusing him of:
Of course nobody actually reads a Forbes article to the end, because, well ... they are generally boring as shit, and a waste of time for anybody actually making money in the first place.
Yet these two ideas attributed to Mamdani -- which really have no relation to each other at all -- are conflated by Forbes into a reason to write an entire essay explaining that (a) we can't do away with billionaires because they won't let us, and that (b) if we did society would collapse patently ignore TWO GIGANTIC HISTORICAL REALITIES ...
The first is that BILLIONAIRES DID NOT BUILD AMERICAN SOCIETY. The success of the industrial revolution CREATED THE CONDITIONS THAT MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR BILLIONAIRES TO EXIST.
They are EFFECT, not CAUSE.
The second is that, surprise, surprise, most of fucking Europe, and Japan, and Australia, and New Zealand, and Canada, have far more massive social support systems than we do. We appear to be the ONLY industrialized nation in which OUR BILLIONAIRES are TOO FUCKING STUPID to figure out that universal health care makes workers more productive and gives consumers more cash to spend on their products.
Everybody gets a free college education in Germany. Which ... hasn't collapsed.
Everybody gets treated for cancer without fear of bankruptcy EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE GODDAMN DEVELOPED WORLD ... except here.
Because we cannot, apparently, exist without billionaires.
Forbes is the ultimate blind pig occasionally scrounging up a nut on the ground by pure luck. Read this paragraph in which they tell us that AMERICANS LOVE THEM SOME BILLIONAIRES ... but be sure to read all the way to the last sentence that screams, WELL, NOT REALLY ...
The problem here -- in social terms -- is that we've been sold the incredibly toxic bill of goods that we CAN afford billionaires and a society based on outright social darwinism, but not one one based on compassion and support for the least among us as the basis of any government policy.
The problem here -- in political terms -- is that the billionaires have NOT QUITE gotten around to removing the vote from the bottom 60% of society as effectively as they have removed the money from their wallets and the food from their tables.
So a man like Zohran Mamdani (Obama v.2 I like to think of his as) is DANGEROUS, and we must not only defeat him, but discredit his twin ideas of IMAGINATION and COMPASSION before that cancerous shit spreads.
(The irony here, by the way, is that Barack Obama was a secret if benevolent corporatist all along, whereas Mamdani -- like Bernie and AOC -- actually seems to believe what he's saying.)
As Edward R. Murrow used to say as late as in the 1950s (which is about the last time billionaires did not totally dominate American society), "Good night and good luck, suckers." I think I have that right.
No comments:
Post a Comment