Why Mamdani?

 I personally believe in highly taxed and regulated capitalism, not thorough-going socialism, and I regret that Zohran Mamdani has not abandoned all of the very woke positions he took a few years ago when they were so fashionable.  I would however have voted for him if I lived in New York City and I think his election is an important milestone in American life.  Far more than the career of Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, his victory in the nation's largest city reflects the political impact of the economic changes of the last few decades.  He may not have the best solutions to the problem in mind, but he is determined to face it head on.

Back on May 2, 2014, when I was nearly a year into retirement and No End Save Victory had just come out, I published the first of four blog posts here on Thomas Piketty's new book,  Capital in the 21st Century.  Reviewing what I wrote, I was struck by the breadth of his research, his knowledge of history, and his intellectual ambition, but most of all by the simple mathematical insight around which he had built the book.  Under capitalism, he showed, the natural tendency is for capital to grow more quickly than the economy as a whole.  I have never read Marx's original Capital but I have the impression that Marx had said the same thing, and he was right.  Piketty showed, too, that the United States and other western countries had overcome this tendency in the middle of the 20th century thanks to the consequences of the two world wars and the Depression, which had led among other things to almost confiscatory high marginal tax rates.  That era came to an end just as I was reaching adulthood, however, and the natural tendency of capitalism took over, making the rich richer while the lower half of the population stood still.  And that trend has had extraordinary economic and political consequences.

It makes perfect sense, therefore, that Mamdani won half the vote in the world's most capitalistic city.  Although the financial and real estate barons of New York are losing ground relative to the tech giants of the West Coast, they still dominate much of economy and our politics.  The crisis in higher education over the last two years has shown that they are the  ultimate authority over our universities as well, and they have enormous influence over some aspects of US foreign policy.  The economy those elites created helped give us Donald J. Trump.   Their wealth has pushed real estate prices in New York and other major metropolitan areas to undreamed of heights.  When I read Piketty, I had bought the property I live in in suburban Boston less than two years earlier, and Zillow tells me that it is now worth more than twice as much as it was then.  At that time the median US household income was $53,657.  Today it is $83,730, leaving my property considerably less affordable than it was then.  If one corrects the current median income figure for inflation, it becomes $61,206 in 2014 dollars--an increase of 1.27 percent per year.  During that period GDP growth has averaged 2.52 percent a year--almost exactly twice as much.  The rest of that GDP growth, presumably, has been turned into capital, which is held by relatively few people. Piketty was right.

Hysterical financial interests are now warning that the superrich will leave New York because of Mamdani's victory.  I am only speculating here, but I am not certain that would hurt the average New Yorker.  It could depress the housing market, but that is what New York needs to make it more affordable.  When the superrich ran General Electric and General Motors they created more ordinary jobs when they did better, but now it seems the superrich are at least as likely to reduce ordinary jobs as to create them--a trend that will become clearer as AI and robotics make new advances.  (See Bezos, Jeff.)  At least since Reagan we have been hearing from the leadership of both parties that economic growth benefits us all.  The lower half of the population knows better.  

And not only the lower half.  Harvard and MIT assistant professors can no longer afford single-family homes around here.  Two-career professionals see one salary eaten up entirely by childcare.  Etc.  Mamdani built his campaign around a simple message:  our economy is making life impossible for too many of us, and this can't go on.  That is the message that Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to emphasize, and the problem they did nothing about.  Donald Trump, meanwhile, inhabits a fantasy world in which we have no inflation (it's 3 percent, not 0, at the moment), and job creation is at undreamed of levels (it is actually quite slow and getting slower.)  He will do nothing about the underlying problem.

For a long time now I have been pessimistic about the growth of the new aristocracy and its consequences.  The trends we have lived with for the last half century may well have gone too far to reverse now.  But I am glad that the electorate of our largest city resoundingly delivered the message that this must not go on.  I don't know what Mamdani will actually be able to do to try to reverse the trend, but I wish him well.

A Tale of Two Op-eds

 Hundreds of miles north of me, a controversy is raging over the U.S. Senate candidacy of Graham Platner, a 41-year old Millennial who is running for the Democratic nomination to oppose Senator Susan Collins next year.  Platner, an ex-Marine and an oyster farmer, had been effectively pitching an economic program focused on the working class when two disturbing stories broke.  First, more than ten years ago, on reddit, he had made a number of offensive comments, including homophobic ones and ones that questioned the extent of sexual assault in the military.  Secondly, it turns out that while in the Marine Corps he acquired a skull-and-crossbones tattoo similar to the Nazi Death's Head, which he has only just covered up.  Meanwhile, the  Democratic Governor of Maine, Janet Mills, who will turn 78 at the end of this year, has also entered the race as the establishment Democratic candidate.  During the last week this situation triggered two very different op-eds by regular contributors to the New York Times that tell us a lot about splits inside the Democratic Party.

The first op-ed, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, aims more at senior Democrats who have stood up for Platner than at Platner himself.  The controversy over the posts and tattoos, she writes, should have ended up "as just another weird little political story in an extraordinary political moment in American history," except that "several prominent Democrats took time out of their remaining days on God's green earth to lecture Democratic voters on learning to forgive"--specifically Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.  This, she says, is a problem, because "This country is being ruled by a powerful minority that espouses deplorable minority views that polling shows a majority of voters in this country disagree with.  This is a big problem.  It is also the same problem as a guy wearing a Nazi tattoo." She continues:

"I cannot swear to know the minds of men like Murphy and Sanders. But, were I a betting person, I’d wager someone else’s riches that they know racism and xenophobia are inextricably linked to America’s inchoate understanding of class politics. They know that “working class” has become a powerful political totem of its own — a discursive sleight of hand used to separate out white voters’ concerns as more legitimate, more materially grounded, more important than other voters’ concerns."

In other words, even to refer to a "working class" that is by definition interracial--instead of simply focusing on "marginalized groups"--marks one as a panderer to racism.  She continues: "Their rhetoric — and the conventional wisdom that flows from it — suggests that we cannot talk about economic solutions without abandoning our commitment to the Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor that are the lifeblood of the Democratic Party’s base. The conceit at the heart of that belief is that poor white people are too racist, and too uniquely ignorant of their racism, to vote in their best interests. Therefore, Democrats have to accept a little racism to win the working class." The only way to prove that one is a real Democrat is to put "Black, Latino, gay, transgender and female poor" people first. And ramming that point home, she adds, " If the Democratic future requires us to exchange our discomfort with casual Nazism to advance a political agenda, I am not interested."  

The second column, which appeared yesterday, was written by Michelle Goldberg. She makes clear that she was initially anticipating writing a column similar to MacMillan Cottam's, but after talking to some people in Maine, she decided she had to do some good old-fashioned reporting and travel up there to see Platner in action for herself. She interviewed him at length and researched his Reddit posts, some of which suggested that leftists arm themselves against Fascism and even identified with Antifa--not the kind of thing a real neo-Nazi would write.  And she attended one of his wildly popular campaign events, which are filled with voters who warm to his insistence that the Democratic Party had to return to the traditions that had given the nation Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  Only such an approach would ever help the many ordinary Mainers who are losing out in our new economy.  He also urged the audience to begin talking to their neighbors, the only way that a real counter-movement to MAGA (which carried one of Maine's two Congressional districts and one electoral vote last year) could grow.  

MacMillan Cottam, it seems to me, focused so intently on using the power of "marginalized groups" to purge the Democratic Party of those with a different approach that she forgot a critical point: the main job of a candidate is to get elected.  By that I do not mean, as she suggested, that a Nazi-style tattoo would be more likely to attract than to repel white voters.  Goldberg found that very few of Platner's listeners seemed to be interested in the controversy at all.  I do mean that downplaying racial issues makes sense in a state that is 91 percent white, 5 percent biracial, 2 percent black and 2 percent Hispanic might make sense.  And last but not least, when Democrats face a choice between a 42-year old candidate and a near-79 year old one, the choice should be almost automatic.  That is why I will vote for Seth Moulton against Ed Markey (who is a year older even than Governor Mills) next year.  I no longer get any kick out of being represented by people my own age.  

The New York Times opinion page seems to be evolving.  MacMillan Cottum's piece would have appeared in 2020 or 2022, but I don't think that Goldberg's would have.  That's a step forward for the paper, and for the country.