The "Centrists" Still Don't Get It

33-year old self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani beat billionaire-backed Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic primary for the mayor of New York this week. The racist diatribes coming from the right about a Muslim running the most populous city in the country isn’t surprising, but the shock and anger by the Democratic establishment is so profound as to make me question whether they quietly prefer Trump’s mayhem-masked upward wealth redistribution, and what we’re doing on this side of the border to reclaim the left.

Listen to Clinton-era Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers talk about how disastrous Mamdani’s rise is going to be…

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich explains the Democrats problem succinctly: “Leave it to the Democratic Party to snatch an existential crisis from the jaws of electoral victory.”

The Corporate Democrat’s Biggest Nightmare

In Canada and in the United States, voters don’t think the system works for them. High housing costs, high utility costs, high grocery costs, a disposable economy in which nothing we buy lasts, and stagnant income that is, in real terms, lagging behind the cost of living are leaving citizens feeling economically hopeless. It is what has allowed the rise of people like Trump and Poilievre: they may have whacky ideas, but they’re a change from a status quo that is hurting us, and anything must be better than what we have.

Failure to act quickly to solve these systemic inequality problems will eventually cause Canadian voters to be disappointed and be willing, once again, to try a change leader like Poilievre. Trump scared them off this time, but as he continues doing whackier and whackier things without serious opposition from the Democrats, voters are becoming inured to his insanity.

At the core, the inequality is caused by the very existence of a billionaire class, which increasingly sees the economy as owners and workers. It is clear that their ultimate objective is to restore a medieval feudal structure to our society.

Mark Carney’s government is taking a ‘move quickly and break things’ approach to fixing the our country, but is nevertheless leery about offending the billionaires. Voters may be happy to see progress in the short term, but if nation-building efforts the government is trying like Bill C-5 don’t show rapid and tangible results with positive impacts for the average person and not only the “investor class,” Canadian voters will give up on the “left” ever getting the job done.

This “left” keeps tripping to the right and not offering the genuine change the people actually want. Red states and blue provinces will continue voting against their own interests because it is not clear that the Democrats and Liberals have fully grasped the underlying voter angst that leaves voters open to far-right courtship.

The ever-increasing dichotomy of America

With the problems unsolved, right wing leaders pin the blame on immigrants and minorities rather than billionaires, and the voters, looking for an explanation, buy it. It is more tangible. It’s something they see. They can be convinced of the obvious contradiction that immigrants are both taking their homes and jobs and draining the welfare state because they see immigrants working while being told that there’s no money left for the services they depend on.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and now Zohran Mamdani represent a genuine left-of-centre perspective in the United States that seeks to ingrain basic rights and values like universal health care and a tax system based on ability to pay that is capable of supporting the social services and infrastructure needs without turning them over to private hands or blaming immigrants.

Productivity in Canada and the United States has risen very quickly over the past half-century. Wages for the working class have not kept up, while executive pay has grown by orders of magnitude. It is said that people don’t want to work any more, but this is non-sense. The people just don’t want to work for their feudal lords, they want to work for their own success and fulfilment, which is increasingly impossible for the average citizen.

Until the Democratic and Liberal establishment understand that exposing and undermining the feudal objectives of the billionaire class to those who haven’t got time to analyse the situation — because they’re still trying to live on $7.25 an hour — we will keep seeing two visions in every election: one which is unapologetically feudalistic, and one which is apologetically feudalistic.

Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic Primary should be an opportunity for the nominal left to try out some genuine left wing policies. Instead, the right wing apologists are coming out in force just like they did to block Bernie Sanders from stopping Donald Trump a decade ago.