Watching
@ZohranKMamdani's oafish, unprovoked attack on Ken Griffin blow up in his face in real time tells us so much about how contemporary leftism has been reconfigured by its elite practitioners.
Firstly, Mamdani is not a "have-not." He is a Bowdoin graduate, the son of a Columbia professor and an internationally celebrated filmmaker, whose path to a New York City mayoralty ran through exactly the credentialed-creative pipeline that produces most of his voters.
His base is not the working class. It is the downwardly mobile but college-educated, who were promised a particular kind of life by their degrees and are furious it didn't arrive, and who have decided the people standing between them and that life are not the radicalized professors who sold them seductive fictions or the ideologically captured universities that took their money, but a hedge fund manager in Miami.
This is what I'd call Privilege Populism. The aesthetics of class struggle, performed by people whose parents or grandparents technically already won the class struggle, but with the appropriated symbolism recast in the direction of people who won it slightly more.
It is war between the "haves" versus "have-mores," as some others have put it.
The Mamdani's inciting video, gleeful in its innumeracy about about whether a $500 million pied-à-terre tax can actually fund anything it claims to, defiant in its ignorance about the dynamic effects of such taxation on human behavior and wealth outmigration, is the genre's mature form.
Griffin's response is the part worth watching. He didn't argue or issue a statement offering a philosophical defense of capitalism. He simply pointed to his Miami construction project and said: this is the way.
Then he said the part that should make every blue-state mayor uncomfortable: that what's happening in New York is "triggering the trauma I went through in Chicago."
I watched that trauma play out for twenty years. Progressive politicians perform to excite the grievances and resentments of credentialed creatives, the productive class that subsidizes the city quietly relocates, the tax base hollows out, and the people who stay behind look at the resulting societal decline around them and misinterpret it as proof that they must vote even further to the left than before in order to improve things.
In a warped but unignorable way, liberal mismanagement of states like Illinois and New York helped nurse the conservative governance triumphs of Florida and Texas.
The Privilege Populists never figure this out, because the point is never truly to improve the lives of the "have-nots." It's to *perform* therapeutic acts of Resistance for them, on camera, against "villains" who can afford to leave and do.