AOC and Hochul are crazy for Mamdani

New York’s Kathy Hochul isn’t a good governor. But, like a particularly empathetic house pet, she’s finely attuned to any change in the weather. So when a huge crowd in a Queens stadium rallied last night for Zohran Mamdani chanted “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” over and over again, and Hochul said, “I hear you, I hear you,” you can be sure that she actually heard them.

The rich, meanwhile, are in the process of moving their family photos to the Palm Beach town home or shopping for McMansions in suburban Dallas. It’s obvious to all but the extremely deluded that New York is going to elect Mamdani mayor, and that he’s going to win big. “Elect Zohran,” Hochul said emphatically last night, “and we take back America!” Fat chance of that, but the Democratic Socialists are about to take control of America’s largest city.

Any objective observer understands that the Mamdani administration will be a disaster, though the scope and contours of that disaster remain unclear. As for the tone of the vibe shift, let’s turn to Queens-representing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who bobbed back and forth onstage like a boxer. She excitedly sounded the clarion call of the people’s revolution.

New York, she said, is “a city built by the sweat of immigrants, unionists and suffragists. From the Irish who fled famine, to the Italians who built our subways, the Jewish families who survived pogroms, the black communities who fought for every inch of freedom, the Latinos who harvest our food and care for our elders, the Asians who innovate in our labs and shops, and the indigenous peoples whose land this truly is – we are all here because New York has always been a beacon for the weary, the bold, and the unbreakable.”

True, Italians did do a lot of labor on the subways, and I’m sure the Lenape, wherever they may now be, appreciate the land acknowledgment. The Jews who survived pogroms may soon find themselves surviving another; hopefully there’s nice housing for them in Orlando and Las Vegas. But one could also argue, as Republicans do, that New York as we know it was truly built by the likes of Robert Moses and Donald Trump. That might be AOC’s point, though. Capitalist development is exactly what she, and Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, are against.

“We must remember,” AOC told the crowd last night, ”We are not the crazy ones, New York City. We are not the outlandish ones, New York City. They want us to think we are crazy. They gaslight us, they mock us, they call us socialists or worse. But we are sane. We are the ones seeing clearly.”

I may be alone among my cohort but I don’t think AOC is crazy at all. If she is crazy, then she’s loco como un zorro. In fact, she’s quite clever, and knows exactly what she’s doing. For all the agitas that Mamdani (and AOC’s) New York is going to cause the building and finance class, it’s doing a service in some ways.

As the likes of Kathy Hochul genuflect to the DSA, it’s clear that the old neoliberal Democratic party is on its final breaths. Last night’s rally was no Chuck Schumer chanting “we will win” and pounding his fists on the lectern like he’s demanding an extra pudding at the senior center. It was young, alive and done with the weak, sclerotic politics of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. At some point, progressives might find themselves turning to Mamdani and screaming, like Obi-Wan to Anakin, “you were the chosen one!!!”

But for now, from the stolen land from where I now sit, I acknowledge that the fight is pure.