The Rise of the Progressives
Or, Mamdaniphobia
To what do we owe this sweet Progressive moment? This calm within the storm of right-wing nationalism. Yet in the thick of the far-right tornado of a zeitgeist, seemingly never-ending, Progressives have been eking out some wins in significant battles over their 20th century nemeses in the neoliberal Centrist establishment. It’s the latest chapter in the struggle between what can only be properly construed as the right and left wing of the Democrat Party. I kind — but only in part.
The biggest and most attention-getting recent Progressive victory was that of Kampala, Uganda-born Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani over Albany’s choleric princeling, Andrew Cuomo. The defeat of the heir-apparent and 56th Governor of New York for three terms, from 2011 to 2021, was the shot heard round the Party.
And it is a particularly significant victory because of what the Democrats don’t hold. Democrats don’t have control of The Presidency. Democrats don’t hold either Houses of Congress or most state Governorships. Further, Democrats only control only 18 out of 28 state legislatures. After Trump’s victory in 2024, the general air in the party was one of deep, deep melancholia. So when Trump flooded the zone, immediately following Inauguration, shell-shocked Democrats of all types were duly overwhelmed, as Steve Bannon predicted we would be.
But New York made a statement. Because it is a big player, not the least of which because of its financial, media and technological contributions to the country. The New York City metropolitan area's economy is larger than all but nine countries in the world. So it is not just important as a source of tax revenues, it is important for New York to be seen as a prosperous city under Democrat control with a population greater than 38 states. And — the Progressive won. A fact that vexed proto-Establishmentarian Joe Scarborough to no end from, one imagines, his Manhattan penthouse. “Why can’t moderate Democrats … make that same compelling message?” lamented Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe earlier this week.
Let’s go back a bit. Immediately following the election rout, Scarborough and his wife, co-host Mika Brzezinsky, travelled to Trump’s Florida club to mend fences. This, despite the fact that Trump — always semi-savage with the riposte — graphically insulted Brzezinsky’s physical appearance. So, why would Mika and Joe bend the knee after an attack of such a humiliating nature? “According to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, Scarborough and Brzezinski were credibly concerned that they could face governmental and legal harassment from the incoming Trump administration,” wrote CNN media analyst Brian Stelter of the trip. Charmed, I’m sure.
The bent knee and the ring-kiss all smack of political performance. A calculation that whichever party wins or loses among the upper-crust, all will ultimately be just swell-and-lovely in Jupiter, Florida or Nantucket or wherever it is that Mika and Joe summer (Averted Gaze). The carrots are better than the bitter stick of governmental recrimination, political courage be damned! And, after all: for all the intellectual inconvenience of Trump’s re-election, and what he said about Mika’s face, the permanent tax cut will certainly be ducky (Or whatever they say in Jupiter, Florida or Manhattan penthouses). So — there’s also that.
In fine, Brzezinsky and Scarborough embody, if anything, a sort of brie-smeared, Marie Antoinettish neoliberal coquettishness that is far past its political expiration date. Mika and Joe’s ideological and cultural hypocrisies notwithstanding, their blindness regarding yawning chasms that persist within our system of democratic capitalism have rendered the both of them irrelevant. Their ratings immediately after this debacle bore this out, despite slight gains of late.
But to trace the origin story of modern Centrist thinking, we have to go back to the post-war period. Social-mountaineer and historian Artie Schlesinger, Jr — always Jackie’s favorite — the ultimate moderate, wrote the Vital Center in 1949, constructing the parameters of the ideology. “Schlesinger’s vision championed a pragmatic, socially responsible liberalism, favoring government intervention to ensure economic opportunity and social welfare while safeguarding individual freedoms,” wrote Steven Mintz in Inside Higher Ed. “This centrist approach, he argued, was crucial for protecting democracy and advancing social progress, a countermeasure to the mid-20th-century rise of totalitarian regimes and Cold War tensions.” But the hyper-focus on anti-Communism left the Center resembling the right more than left on issues like civil rights, the antiwar movement and economic inequality. In retrospect, protecting democracy was almost as important to Arthur Schlesinger as advancing his own social progress …
Most recently the fireworks between the progressive and Centrist movements in the democrat Party date to immediately before the Rise of Trump. Back to the Democratic primary of 2016, which led to Trump’s election. There, Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in perhaps the first fissure in the neoliberal/Progressive crack-up that is widening, treacherously, even as I write this Substack post. That year, Bernie Sanders won key surprise victories in the Michigan, Wisconsin and the Democratic primaries, as well as the Maine caucuses. Trump went on in the general to win those important states and one of Maine's Congressional districts, splitting the state's electoral votes in twain, for the first time since the adoption of the proportional system.
Hillary’s weakness in the Great Lakes states was exposed by the Sanders run. The former New York Senator was not able to reclaim those usually reliable Democrat party voters. We will not entertain the possibility that the loss was also, in part, due to the Clinton name, which was a liability in states that were ravaged by NAFTA, a Centrist-obsession that did naught to improve the condition of the working class in the long run …
Still, it was not a good move for Hillary Clinton to alienate Bernie Sanders publicly, an unforced error, right after her victory. It didn’t have to be this way. They were both running for the Presidency, after all. Both sides knew what they were getting into (although some of the condescending sexism of the Bernie Bros was rightly called out). Despite Hillary’s victory and some reconciliation, things did not sit well with the “Bernie Bros,” an unfortunate moniker that persisted. Trump’s campaign, sensing the rift, started employing Bernie’s rhetoric, even going to far as to cite the “rigged” nature of the election in general and welcoming Bernie voters into his coalition. He exploited some of the historic rifts between progressives and Centrists. And some young men — sound familiar? — ended up voting for Trump in 2016. We cannot fail to add here that the Democrat party failed to have a message to those young men, that were (possibly) persuadable. And neatly tying together 2016 to 2024 — Trump’s electoral victories — is the endorsement of Joe Rogan, who publicly said he voted for Bernie in 2020. But by 2024, Rogan was all-in for Trump, who visited his podcast studio in Austin, Texas (Harris and Rogan could not settle on terms). According to Edison Research, The Joe Rogan Experience is the biggest podcast in America.
Even after the primary, quixotically, the bad blood continued between Bernie and Hillary. Trump never failed to exploit this, incorporating RFK, Jr’s pharma-conspiratorial wing as well as Tulsi Gabbard’s so-left-it-is-now-right elements into his Cabinet. Finally, in her 2017 post-mortem, "What Happened,” Clinton concluded that Sanders' attacks caused lasting damage to her campaign, making it harder to unify the Progressive vote, thus paving the way for Trump's "Crooked Hillary" campaign. But, for heaven’s sake: Why? Couldn’t his conversation have taken place in private?
There is a natural antagonism between Progressives and Centrists, the left and center of the Democrat party. Simply put: Progressives view Centrists as corrupt social climbers, more sympathetic to corporate power and their own personal advancement than workers. While Centrists — Think Al Gore and Obama — view Progressives as child-like and naïve: otherwise incapable of wielding power for the greater good. Both sides are not without some truths to their opposing perspectives. But nowhere — in no city in America — is that divide in the slow motion Democrat Party crack-up more pronounced, which I believe is right now happening, than in New York City.
The vilification of a New York Progressive by the city’s power elite is not a new political phenomenon. Centrists tend to hold the Establishment institutions and utilize them to minimize the challenge of the Progressives — think Bill Clinton against “Governor Moonbeam” in ‘92. But one need only to go back to 1997, when New York City’s power elite faced the prospect of an openly anti-Establishmentarian Progressive candidate to observe all hell breaking loose. Then, Al Sharpton almost forced Ruth Messinger into a runoff in the Mayoral race, catching all the gatekeepers entirely off guard. “(Sharpton’s) campaign slogan was ‘I can see it’ and many voters apparently did, too, as the results suggested potency in the issue of police brutality, which Sharpton raised repeatedly after the alleged torture of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in the 70th Precinct scandal,” was how The NY Daily News described the stunning turnabout. Messinger, although Progressive, was the candidate of the Democrat Establishment. Sharpton — also Progressive, but unconnected the the patronage system — terrified the city’s power elite. Ultimately, the Board of Elections found that a mere 658 votes carried Messinger over the embarrassing prospect of a runoff. But the damage had been done, and she went on to lose against Rudy Giuliani. It was not until 2014 — seventeen years later — that a Progressive, Bill de Blasio, was elected Mayor of the allegedly liberal city of New York. And de Blassio, in the fullness of time, was duly vilified.
Enter: Zohran Mamdani and the collective conniption fit of the city’s elite. Regarding Mamdaniphobia, Mark Burleigh writes on American Freakshow:
The fear-mongering from the public relations wing of the one percent is no surprise. But the true measure of whether Mamdani is the real deal is how the Democratic establishment reacts. The Democratic establishment freakout suggests Mamdani might actually mean what he says. It seems that some of the powers that be in the DNC will never fail to smear, downplay, and sometimes outright cheat anyone who dares to be an actual progressive.
Remember when the once Democratic rising star and now Trump darling Tulsi Gabbard knocked Kamala Harris out of the race in the first debate with some very uncomfortable truths? The debate threshold goalposts were immediately shifted, and Gabbard was left out of further debates, effectively ending her campaign. And while Gabbard is no progressive and certainly no saint, it bears noting that Democrats chose to fiddle with the rules rather than actually engage with her claims about Harris’s actions as a prosecutor.
The chicanery surrounding both of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns is well known.
Indeed it is. It is instructive to note here that Joe Biden hugged Bernie close in 2020. Perhaps he absorbed the the lessons of Hillary Clinton’s loss and the bitter aftermath? Whatever the case, before there was Project 2025, there was the Biden-Sanders Unity taskforce. Biden, to his credit, went out of his way to extend a branch to the Progressives, through Bernie, running largely on what can only be properly construed as a true Biden-Sanders unity platform. The tragedy is, of course, that Biden’s re-election campaign ultimately imploded after the disastrous debate. And that Trump is, at present, in the process of erasing almost everything of value — including the creation of a sold, post-COVID economy — just as he did when following the Obama Presidency.
The battle continues.
“A huge percentage of jobs that have been lost in local media over the past decade is attributable to private equity. The number of ghost newspapers—newspapers that do not have a single journalist on staff, that are only running syndicated content—skyrockets every year. I don't think private equity firms care about journalism in the slightest. Publications are a widget, just like a hospital or a retail chain, etc. What motivates them is the chance to make money, which remains, for the moment, totally doable from downsizing newsrooms, selling off their real estate and the like.” (Megan Greenwell with Camille Bromley/CJR)
“Medicine to treat babies and infants suffering from malaria has been approved for the first time and is expected to be rolled out in Africa within weeks. Malaria treatment for infants weighing less than 4.5 kilograms has been unavailable until now, due to the risk of overdose. Coartem Baby, the new medicine, was produced by pharmaceutical giant Novartis and has been approved by Swissmedic, Switzerland’s regulator for therapeutic products. Nekoye Otsyula, global medical affairs director at Novartis, told Semafor that the medicine would be most effective when adopted alongside other anti-malarial tools used by families, such as vaccines and bed nets. She said the youngest baby involved in the two-year trial was just a day old. Eight African countries — Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda — are expected to approve the medicine within around 90 days after studying the trial findings used by Swissmedic to reach its decision, Novartis officials told Semafor. They said Ghana has already approved the medicine.” (Alexis Akwagyiram/SEMAFOR)