Is Mamdani not a product of America? Everything about him I recognize as part of our society. I don’t celebrate it, but I don’t deny it. He grew up and mastered a system created by our brahmin class. He was nurtured in a family that was ensconced in the elite university system that holds sway in our country. He went to Bowdoin College, an exclusive, expensive retreat for the children of the well-off. He majored in African studies, as his father had, but he was not destined for the confines of a university library his whole life. He knew that he had charisma and wanted to shape American culture and politics in some way. He looked back at the student radicals of the ‘60s and said, “I want to fashion myself as one of them.” He wanted to take radical chic to a new level. He updated the rhetoric of the same era to reflect the fashionable causes of his generation, a muddled mixture of socialism, jihadism, and gay rights. He is an echo of a radical American tradition focusing on oppression and victimhood of race, class, gender. He is Angela Davis standing on the podium circa 1970 with her fist held high in the Black Power salute shouting “Power to the people!” Mandani is everything the ‘60s protest generation enshrined and everything the current generation of pampered narcissists crave.

We do not need to look outside of America for forces that want to dismantle the values which many of us still hold dear such as: free speech, private property, and personal liberty. A destructive strain is already deeply embedded in our culture just waiting to erupt and impact the political sphere. Mamdani is that manifestation.

Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.