Why the Left Keeps Losing—and What Mamdani Gets Right

After my trips away for work, I was feeling rather tranquil and at peace with the world, but I was soon dragged back into the familiar routines; and the almost daily bubbling outrage on reading the news was back within no time.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to see last week that there remains a small flicker of hope glowing in the blackened and charred remains of that we call modern politics. I am talking about how Zohran Mamdani, previously a little-known New York state lawmaker, claimed the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor over far more seasoned rivals, including former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, and set the stage for a general election battle against the incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.

Although Mamdani will now face an antagonistic business class and many Jewish New Yorkers alarmed by his stark criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, it is fascinating to wonder how a virtually unknown Muslim immigrant with a rather thin political CV came to defeat a Democratic titan after initially trailing at one per cent in the polls.

Whether it truly represents, in that hackneyed phrase, a seismic shift in the political landscape, as many have breathlessly claimed, remains to be seen. (I don’t begrudge them their excitement, but I prefer a nice cup of tea when I wake up to a morning expresso.) But one thing is certainly clear: he represents a possible novel approach for the left to take in countering the wholesale takeover of modern politics from the hard right by self-proclaimed outsiders; people who want to take a huge slice of the collective pie out from under the people’s noses and establish a new kind of autocracy in all-but name, simply to line their pockets and join the new swindler elite.

Because, one thing is for sure: Business as usual in politics is no answer to Donald Trump or any of his wannabe lickspittles. Indeed, Damon Linker writes in The Mamdani Model for Notes from the Middleground that, though no lefty himself, he empathises with the anger felt by many in the US at the Democratic party establishment and has “long argued that responsible Democrats would be foolish to continue making the case for themselves in terms of defending a system in which many millions of voters have lost trust and lack confidence.”

This is entirely correct, and you could make the same argument for disillusionment in the establishment in general and, more widely, the entire democratic process across the Western world. Many leaders, such as Sir Kier Starmer in the UK, look like rabbits caught in the headlights, desperate not to inadvertently break the entire system with one false move, and find themselves landing unceremoniously on the pavement outside No. 10 Downing Street after having been booted there by the well-paced brogue of Nigel Farage, as he laughingly ushers in a new era of autocracy, modelling himself as a railway station pub version of Vladimir Putin.

I do prefer the approach that Emmanuel Macron has (perhaps always) taken, which is not to engage directly with figures on the far right, in particular Marine Le Pen (unless forced to in a televised presidential debate, when he made her look like what she is: an immature and resentful teenager masquerading as a party leader). Instead, he seeks to demonstrate that, in the right hands, the establishment, and democracy, can deliver for people, if they would stop sniping from the sidelines for a moment and actually compare apples with apples.

But that strategy interests no one in these flickering LED-drenched times, when if a message does not bark like a rabid dog egged on by a whistle only the supremely attentive can hear, it does not cut through the endless cascade of virtual trash that pours forever from the dump truck of modern life.

Don’t get me wrong, the establishment and democracy in general has failed at least one generation, maybe two or three generations, of people who have rightly become disgusted to the point of retching nausea by the way that politicians have been clearly operating within a closed and impermeable circle that serves their own needs, while allowing big business of every kind to side-step them and tie up the world in a pretty pink bow that they sell to us over and over again, so that we never have the time or inclination to look at the horrifying mess that lies beneath.

We can all see this, we all live it, day in and day out, especially those who live on or close to the margins of society. (In whichever way you care to define it, that amounts to a grand total of disaffected, disenfranchised, deprived and excluded people that far outweighs the tiny fraction who are actually doing well out of the current state of things). And yet what is the establishment doing? Trying to sell us more of the same, as Linker states so clearly.

Why would they do that, when we are vehemently uninterested in the product? Because, for now at least, they don’t have anything else to sell. They are so out of ideas (and have been for decades), that they don’t know any more how to come up with anything new. I was willing to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt, and thought initially that he was going to deliver for the British people, but I quickly became disillusioned and now I see that the cupboards are bare.

Look, for instance, at at the latest round of U-turns he is contemplating (I am not going to point to any one in particular, as I am sure there will be a fresh example between now and any time before he leaves office). As any political observer knows, any U-turn is a lose–lose situation. Either it is an admission that the original concept for a law was flawed, and so it, and by extension the politician behind it, are conceptually moribund, or it shows that the leadership are unable to face down opposition and will cave in all the more easily the next time. Damned if you do see it through against trenchant opposition, damned if you don’t change it to bend to their will. Either you’re stubborn to the point of damaging others simply to stick to your guns, or you’re weak.

And don’t try to argue that this, or the next, U-turn mess we are witnessing is the best of democracy in action, and that it shows the system is in rude health. Democracy in action would have been to have properly consulted with party members and the wider political community (and perhaps even the public, if that’s not too radical an idea) before developing a proposed change to the law that so many people from the government’s own party apparently cannot get behind. Ramming through something that flies against the principles of leftwing politics is not being strong or showing good leadership. It is blind belligerence. Proper leadership is to show the humility and grace to include people on the journey of developing something that will benefit the most number of people possible, while being fair to those who have not contributed enough to society.

But that this is not being done shows once again how politicians on the left are running scared and falling back on old habits; habits that were discredited long ago. I said recently, while commenting on Starmer’s electoral success, that political victories are won the old-fashioned way: going from door to door (either actually or virtually), talking to real people and building up a base of supporters that believe that their grievances are being heard. That’s how Marine Le Pen almost got the keys to the Élysée Palace, and his constant campaigning and speech-making across the length and breadth of the US is a considerable part of what got Trump into the White House. And, to his credit, that was the route by which Starmer’s Labour Party found itself back in power after a political generation in the wilderness, although it is exactly the same reason why Nigel Farage is giving him a run for his money now.

So when you see videos of Zohran Mamdani talking to real people in the streets, shaking their hands and listening to their woes, there is no surprise that he won the Democrat nomination for NYC mayor. What’s surprising is that people find anything surprising in his victory.