Zohran is breaking the system

Ruling class freak out and the house of cards falling

Panic has set in. The ruling class is freaking out. Republicans, billionaires, and much of the Democratic establishment is losing it. A mayor’s race (which they’re obliged to remind you is unimportant, trivial, non-representative) is making the elite as scared as they’ve been in a long time — they’re more scared of Zohran than they are of Trump. The people who constitute and maintain the status quo are afraid. And that’s a good thing.

Photo by Tarik Haiga on Unsplash

The deluded alarm of the ruling class is, of course, inevitable. We’ve seen again and again how any hint of people power drives them into a frenzy. Typically, the elite intervene earlier, but they were overconfident here. The polling, the name recognition of their disgraced governor, the millions they poured into the race; they thought they had this one in the bag, and by the time they realized the socialist candidate might win the primary for mayor in the most important city in the country it was too late.

So now, they’re responding like maniacs. On the investor channel, CNBC, you have hosts like Jim Cramer asking if the rich will be shot. You have talking heads pondering scenes from Batman movies where bankers are drowned in New York’s East River. You have slanderous accusations of antisemitism, calls for deportation, and billionaires like Bill Ackman claiming that hundreds of millions of dollars are available to any candidate who might be able to beat Zohran in the general election.

And, in many ways, all of this is a real shame. Islamophobia is atrocious, the fascists considering weaponizing the government against our presumptive mayor is frightening, the fact that endless money can be spent on elections is a travesty. But, in this case, all of the above also exposes the immense weakness of the ruling class. Every attack reveals both that the elites are scared and that they don’t know how to fight against simple statements like “life should be more affordable.”

We’ll see the weakness of the ruling class again and again between now and November, when Zohran is going to win again. Every reasonable analyst understands that after his strong victory in the primary he's the odds-on favorite to win the general. Millions of dollars might be thrown at him, but they’ll fizzle and crumple before tens of thousands of volunteers and surging momentum. Slurs and hate will be thrown at Zohran, but he’s a fantastic politician in addition to everything else at play, and he’s already shown a tremendous ability to weather those sorts of attacks. And, notably, we appear to be at a tipping point where many of the malicious attempts to discredit both Zohran and his policies boomerang back to hurt those who hurl them.

Fox News is illustrating this boomerang most clearly right now, oddly enough. In attempting to attack Mamdani on policies like free buses or a $30/hr minimum wage, the conservative network just keeps making him look good:

In trying to attack socialism and prop up the supposed virtues of our capitalist system, Fox manages to make the entire platform that Zohran ran on look great. More than that they manage to make democratic socialism look appealing to their audience and to the countless people seeing these images on social media:

The status quo propaganda is remarkably weak, because it has no legs to stand on. The capitalists got what they wanted. They got the deregulation, they got the trade agreements, they got this neoliberal world where human rights and worker power have been trampled on to make room for ever-growing profit margins. And that is the world millions and billions of people are now responding to. Despite the best efforts of the ruling class, people are acknowledging reality and tracing the roots of their problems back to a system and a set of people who demand more and more and more profit, a system and a set of people who are motivated by endless greed and have no concept of enough.

In this environment, challenges to business as usual are inevitable. Not every challenge will be successful, most will not be, but resistance is guaranteed. People get fed up and they seek redress. Sometimes they riot, sometimes they march, and eventually they organize for power when they realize it’s the only way through these times we live in. In the case of this mayor’s race, victory would never have come if it wasn’t built upon years and years of organizing, but it also wouldn’t have come if the ruling class hadn’t made New York increasingly unaffordable, hadn’t warped the city in their image. The billionaires got what they wanted, and now they’re afraid of the consequences.

The failure of the ruling class to corral this particular campaign, and all it represents, is the price of their past successes. They will never accept limits to their wealth, they must have limits imposed upon them. And the more they try to crush the democratic process, the more they try to stifle the will of the people, the more we’ll be forced into organizing, into revolutionary aims, into becoming a working class that can fight back. The billionaires cannot help but expose themselves in this moment, and in doing so this whole system is exposed.

Bill Ackman is the billionaire leading the charge. He’s posting endless paragraphs on Twitter, the image of an unwell man with too much time on his hands sweating at the thought of a Muslim socialist. Fears of magically having all his wealth stripped away, combined with Zionism and racism, have left this billionaire in a deluded fervor. Ackman is a hedge fund guy who has contributed nothing positive to society, but thinks he and his ilk inherently deserve to run the planet. He’s pledged “hundreds of millions” to a Zohran challenger, although that exact individual has yet to manifest, oddly enough.

Ackman has an unfortunate partner in his work. Or several partners, rather. Every Republican is replaying post-9/11 Islamophobia, combining it with deportation fantasies and ugly rhetoric about barbarians at the gate that only plays to an audience soaked in racism. But from Kirsten Gillibrand to Hakeem Jefferies to Chuck Schumer, Democratic elites are also lining up in the anti-Zohran camp. Some are refusing to endorse, some are labeling him ‘too extreme,’ and some like Gillibrand are peddling rampant bigotry and Islamophobia. All of them are dooming their party, which already polls in the gutter, to more years of irrelevance.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Zohran generated more enthusiasm than any Democratic candidate anywhere has created in years. Young people flocked to the polls. Plenty of voters who typically lean more conservative voted for him because affordability really is the number one question across the board. But a good chunk of Democratic leadership would rather attack someone to their left than win. These so-called leaders eagerly side with billionaires over their constituents. We are living in the post Citizens United world, and neither of the two major political parties is willing to accept even the mildest reforms that put people over profit.

Zohran’s victory has laid bare the self-destructive mechanisms inherent in this capitalist system. Democracy exists in name, but when liberal democracy comes face-to-face with a population that wants to curb the endless profits of the ruling class, suddenly an unspoken barrier rises up. The billionaire class, and the politicians they’ve bought, function as the bulwark meant to stop the will of the people from eating into the wealth of the rulers even the slightest bit. This is the barrier they form against the left — notably one that was not and still is not formed against Trump and the fascist movement. But we’re seeing this barrier fly up after an NYC mayoral primary won by a democratic socialist.

Except something is a little different now. The infographics on Fox are flailing. The Democrats are weak. Republicans are frothing at the mouth. It all looks pathetic and ineffective next to the surging energy of the people in New York, and the outpouring of support from around the country and around the globe. In the face of such momentum, some Democrats are getting on board. Some see the writing on the wall, the way the people will win this time. Some see that they can move a few inches left, that it’s preferable to falling on their swords for the billionaires.

Each supposed leader has a choice to make: side with us or end your career at the feet of the super rich. This campaign has laid bare that choice, laid bare which politicians jump when the donors say jump, and it’s most of them. Zohran and the thousands and thousands of people behind him do represent a real threat to the system. They represent a threat to the status quo. Even thought Mamdani is no revolutionary, and is in fact running a fairly moderate campaign, the very idea that the people should have decent lives and the rich should not always get everything they want challenges the way society functions, challenges the omnipotence of the ruling class.

A strong system could accept this challenge. A strong system could accommodate a threat, make concessions, bend instead of breaking. But our system is weak, lopsided, top-heavy with greed. Right now it’s on the cusp of breaking because it will not bend. And if that’s the case, so be it. A system of endless greed doesn’t deserve to continue. We can build something better — we know we can because we’re doing it, and we’re winning. - JP