The Fall of Iran / The Rise of Zohran
On a recent visit to the Anne Frank exhibition in Manhattan I realized the connections between the setbacks of the Iranian regime and the end of the centrist Democratic Party with Mamdani's beatdown of Cuomo.
Iran down. Zohran up.
First off, you now have permission to stop talking about the Centrist vs Progressive struggle within the Democratic Party. There’s no centrist youth movement, there’s only DSA progressives, and they’ve won.
The Democratic Party now believes:
We fight against white supremacist settler-colonialism
We know there’s no gender binary. TransAm may have been a toxic masculine car, but it’s awesome ideology for this country
We demand government intervention and higher taxes
DEI or die baby!
Oh wait, I meant "DEI or die" as a joke! I didn't realize they were actually going to off themselves in the biggest media market in the country. That’s what we witnessed last week: the seppuku of an entire political party.
Zohran Mamdani will go down in history as the figure symbolizing the electoral death of his party. Certainly on a state and national level. He'll most likely win at the municipal level, much like progressives had been winning in West Coast cities like Portland, LA and San Francisco. How’s that going for them? Yes, SF recently got a new centrist (and Jewish) billionaire mayor, but there’s not a national movement coalescing around him. Like John Fetterman, Josh Shapiro and Ritchie Torres, Daniel Lurie is an outlier.
You can't mourn a suicide if you're Catholic or Jewish, but a loss is a loss. RIP folx. It couldn't have happened to a nicer party. If it’s not too soon to ask, can I have your PHEV? It’ll help me drive to your vacation properties I’ll also be inheriting. I’m thinking Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard or somewhere near the water in Malibu. I solemnly swear to dispose of your keffiyehs with eco-friendly upcycling.
OK, good times. So how does this relate to Iran?
Imagine this: I'm at an Anne Frank exhibition where you shockingly walk through a reproduction of the little annex the family lived in for two year. It's claustrophobic and oppressive. Soon almost all of them were murdered. Rage rose within in me until all I could think about was buying as many weapons as possible to make sure the Holocaust never happens again.
Then I walk outside in a city with the most profoundly anti-Jewish mayoral primary winner in history. The hits keep coming with this guy. He doesn’t just demand killing Jews in New York, i.e., localize the intifada, he also wants to double the $100 billion municipal budget, which he’ll finance with more taxes. Based on how New York spends the first $100 billion, what could possibly go wrong?
I need to pause for a moment to analyze his — and his party’s — bigotry. It’s a new form of anti-Judaism that’s a bit hard to follow because it’s not like classic right wing antisemitism that hates Jews regardless of Israel. Left wing racism has some nuance to it that a thousand editorials can’t understand.
It goes like this: we don’t hate weak Jews. A lot of them are in America and consider bagels and latkes the extent of their ethnic identity. They’re harmless. We hate the Jews with sovereignty. And we hate the Jews who enjoy the benefits of that sovereignty. Those are the bad Jews.
Problematically, you can’t tell if a Jew cares about Israel by looking at him, so clearly the, um, ultimate solution for the Democratic Party is to make Jews take a test. If they say they like Israel, then let’s take that intifada and bring it on home. If they say they don’t like Israel, and a handful of prominent Jews in the media and politics do say this, then they get a pass.
You don't have to walk through an exhibition of a cramped annex space to know where sorting Jews gets you.
What we've also seen recently is the failure of Iran. Before 10/7/2023, it was a terrifying regional powerhouse.
This changed when Trump delivered the B-2 coup de grace after Israel had wiped out most of Iran's air defenses and military infrastructure—with very few civilian deaths (627). Why so few deaths by the IDF? Because the IRGC, unlike Hamas, uses military bases instead of elementary schools for staging grounds.
Within 20 months Iran went from feared to failed.
The fact that the mullahs remain in control is a masterstroke by Israel and the USA. Better to have a weak state ruled by people you know, than a military dictatorship led by younger, possibly more effective people you don't.
This will relate back to Mamdani shortly. For now, let’s observe that Israel, the only western power in an otherwise Islamic region of over a billion people—the contiguous Islamic world spanning from the Atlantic Ocean in West Africa all the way to the western border of China—has demonstrated, alongside America, the vitality of the West vs Islamic rule. It can be either Arab Sunni or Iranian Shia. Both are empirical losers.
The American cost? A few months of planning. A few billion dollars of equipment. Israel bore the harsher costs with nearly two years of combat to destroy Iranian henchmen in the region, and it suffered nearly 30 deaths in ballistic missile attacks. As awful as any death is, it’s a pretty low expense considering US and Israel devastated Iran for decades. Even if they do magically conjure up a new nuclear program, our men in Missouri are just a flight away.
I hear you get better with practice.
This relates to the new Democratic Party because progressives are anti-western. They have two main philosophies, one is social, the other is economic. Their social philosophy is rooted in a heroic narrative of rebels fighting an evil white supremacist settler-colonial empire. It’s a quasi religious way of looking at the world: the lonely true believers versus the massed hordes of oppressors.
They further blend this Star Wars/comic book movie with gender identity and sexuality, since white supremacy is somehow also straight, male and cis. So now we’re freedom fighters and we’re queer. That’s why Mamdani once said defunding the police is queer liberation, or why his friends trot out “Queers for Palestine” signs at Columbia, where his father teaches something called “postcolonial studies.”
For a mere $100k a year, you too can get a Columbia degree! It comes with a lifetime of debt and the added benefit of no career prospects! But it’s elite so people in the Hamptons and Vail will definitely let you valet park their car.
Let’s take it one step further. The Democratic Party mythical narrative never explicitly says it’s anti-Christian, but in spirit, tone and practice, that's exactly what it is. They’re overt about being anti-Jewish but, for now, their anti-Christianity remains covert. It’s easy to see through their reticence because Christendom has significant overlaps with the West. Progressive are anti-West. Ergo...
Anti-westernism is the ideological core of the new Democratic Party. I can’t imagine this doing very well in the ballot box, but this is their movement, not mine. These people learn anti-western ideologies in universities. As noted above, these are the same universities who saddle them with debt and provide educations that don’t lead to high paying jobs.
Why it’s important to focus on this is because Zohran Mamdani may change his economic policies, but he will always be anti-Israel. And that steadfastness betrays his ideological rigidity that will ignore reality in favor of a compelling narrative, even if it’s false. Does that make a good leader?
To support Israel would undermine his and his party’s entire social and moral philosophy. Being anti-Israel means they’re brave freedom fighters. Since it's too late to fight the evil empire in America or in Europe, they can only raise hell in Israel. Again, this is why Mamdani said he'll happily abandon some of his municipal prescriptions if they don't work, but he will never drop his social, kind of mystical theory of anti-colonialism, which is another way of saying antisemitism, which is another way of saying anti-westernism, because without it, he’s just another careerist seeking power. This emperor is clothed in social justice. But really underneath is just a naked grab for dominance.
We've just seen those anti-Western fantasists fail in the Middle East. A tiny western power of 10 million took out armies that controlled hundreds of millions of Arab and Iranians. Yes, Israel had help from the USA at the very end, and I’ll note that the USA is the only other western power in the world that counts right now. Proof points: Europe alone won’t defeat Russia. Neither will Australia, South Korean and Japan stop China.
The new Democratic Party, the DSA Mamdani AOC Bernie Sanders save-democracy-by-rioting party, has been chanting the same message that Tehranis chant in Palestine Square. In Iran they yell “Death to Israel,” here they say “Free, Free Palestine.” It all means the same thing.
But now I want you to lean in. If you listen real closely to Democratic arguments about lots of genders, and how you must correct the indignities of racism by ranking and selectively promoting some people over others, and how “late stage capitalism” will usher in a new social order with expanded government control, you’ll also hear a whisper of what Iranians blast on loudspeakers: “Death to America.”
We’ve just seen the West triumph in the Middle East. Now we’re seeing the anti-west triumph in Midtown East.
How long will the Democrats be out of power? Can you count the years on one hand, or both, or should you also add your toes?