HOWEVER you look at it, Election Day 2025 was not good for Republicans and those of us who believe in Burkean conservatism and Smithian economics. While I think Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was exaggerating somewhat when he claimed that the Democratic wins last Tuesday were ‘a disaster’ and ‘an electoral blowout’ for the GOP – let us not forget, they occurred in very blue cities and states – they are deeply troubling, nevertheless, most especially for those Americans, of which I am one, hoping and sometimes praying for the return of sanity, decency, and moral probity to this great land.
No, what happened on Election Day this year does not foretell the death of the American Republic. That will take much more than a few more woke leftists thrusting their pronouns down your throat and trying to cancel all who oppose them attaining high office. Still, it is sobering for people like me who are not yet completely free from that almost giddy elation many of us felt when Donald Trump won the presidential election last November.
Now it is time to move beyond complacency and start coming up with the strategies which will allow the national restoration that began with Trump to continue into the future and be continued by his successors.
While elections were held throughout America on Tuesday, from the proverbial dog-catchers to dozens of mayoral races and scores of elections for school boards and state and county legislatures, it was the mayoral race in New York City and gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey that attracted the most attention by far.
To understand better how America’s largest and most populous city, its cultural and artistic cynosure and the world’s financial capital, elected as its new mayor the 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim and a self-described democratic socialist, I refer you to Bruce Newsome’s brilliantly perceptive profile of Mamdani published recently here. Newsome deftly compares what will likely take place in New York City under Mamdani with what has already taken place in the London of Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan. Both Mamdani and Khan are Muslim and to the left politically, although the former, unlike the latter, does not identify as a democratic socialist. Still, am I Islamophobic in noting that the two greatest cities in what Churchill called ‘the English-speaking world’ now have Muslim mayors?
My beloved London, where I walked the streets of Notting Hill and Bayswater and the East End as a teenage boy, often late at night but never attacked or otherwise molested, is now gone, possibly for ever.
A recent visit to Whitechapel, where an older brother and I used to drink at the Blind Beggar, the pub where Ronnie Kray murdered George Cornell in 1966, was a shock to the system I will never forget. So was walking around Kensington Gardens, where I recalled sitting on a bench as a little boy 60 years previously with my mother and older sister, eating sandwiches and drinking tea from a flask after a busy day visiting museums and other sites of interest, almost at the exact spot where J M Barrie became acquainted with Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, who lived nearby and whose third son, Peter, was the inspiration for Peter Pan. Walking through Whitechapel and Kensington Gardens, where almost all the women I saw wore burqas of one kind or another, even little girls, with many of the men dressed like extras from David Lean’s cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, was like visiting a country in the Middle East or South Asia.
Yes, I am a big enough boy to concede that the London of my youth has now been relegated to what Leon Trotsky called ‘the dustbin of history’, and is now a lost cause, despite its lovely images living on in the memories of many of those born before 1960 and those afflicted, like the present writer, with inoperable stage 4 metastatic nostalgia.
But vibrant, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated New York City? Surely that great centre of world capitalism and artistic creativity is no lost cause and certainly not gone as London is gone.
Actually, if one is being honest, NYC has been gone, or at least on the verge of going, for some time now, despite its being briefly resuscitated by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s, when crime and anti-social behaviour were reduced dramatically by applying the principles of the so-called ‘broken windows theory’ of law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, Giuliani is ridiculed and hated by leftists for his support of Trump, but the number of lives, especially young black male lives, which were saved due to his ‘stop-and-frisk’ policy is, though impossible to calculate with any precision, believed by me and many others to have been considerable.
In more ways than one, Mamdani’s election can be seen as a win for identity politics. Again, Bruce Newsome outlines how Mamdani has used racial and ethnic identities to advance his political career. He even misrepresented his racial background to gain an edge in his college application, which is, incidentally, a common but under-reported practice. I am often critical of my fellow conservatives for their overuse of terms such as ‘communist’ or ‘Marxist’. In an echo of the past, commentators on right-wing radio are even referring to Mamdani as ‘a commie’. He is, to be sure, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organisation dedicated to the deconstruction of laissez-faire capitalism and its replacement with social ownership of the means of production and distribution run by worker cooperatives. Sounds pretty Marxist to me.
But no self-respecting old-school Marxist would play the race card and pander to identitarian politics to the extent to which Mamdani has been doing since he entered the mayoral contest. Until quite recently, Marxism looked to a person’s relationship to the means of production and distribution, that is, to their status as members of a social or economic class, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, not as bearers of contrived and officially designated identitarian immutable characteristics.
Born in Kampala, Uganda, Mamdani grew up in South Africa and New York City, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 2010. Unlike some other Democratic politicians on the far-left of American politics, toxic clowns such as Jasmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, Mamdani is slick, articulate, credible, charismatic, and doesn’t come across as a charmless, irrational fanatic – unless, of course, you unpack what he is actually saying, which many are reluctant to do these days when image invariably trumps substance. Indeed, he possesses that rare ability to say nonsensical things in such a way that unlettered and gullible people are convinced by their veracity.
Indeed, Election Day was not a good day for Republicans like me. Not only was Mamdani, a man who clearly hates this country, elected to the highest office in New York City, but Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill beat their Republican rivals in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey respectively.
Normally, an off-year election like this, that is, one ‘held in an odd-numbered year when neither a presidential nor a midterm election takes place’, attracts scant attention, at least nationally. This year, however, with Trump in the Oval Office again, the situation has been markedly different. These Democrat wins, despite their taking place in blue cities and states – Harris won both Virginia and New Jersey by close to six points in the 2024 presidential election, and Mamdani won in arguably the bluest and wokist metropolitan area in America – will invariably be interpreted as a rejection of Trump and all he and his millions of supporters represent.
The degree to which Election Day 2025 should be read as a litmus test on Trump and MAGA will be much discussed in the days and weeks to come.
After Tel Aviv, New York City has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world. According to one source, well over 2million Jews reside in metropolitan New York, an area that includes Newark and Jersey City, around 10.6 per cent of world Jewry. I think it goes without saying that New York is a very Jewish city indeed and has been so since the early 20th century. More power to it, I say.
And yet we have just seen a man being elected Mayor of New York who is considered by a prominent Rabbi to pose a danger to the city’s Jewish communities, has refused to condemn anti-Semitic slogans such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, threatened to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu if he shows up in New York, has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has frequently referred to Israel as an apartheid state, and has even questioned the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish nation. He is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to destroy the Israeli economy. Still, this did not stop New York Jews voting for him, especially young voters and the religiously non-observant.
To conclude, Election Day 2025 was a bad day for Republicans and, indeed, for the Republic itself. It was also an especially bad day for New York City. However, it was an exceedingly good day for those who hate the police, despise Israel and all she stands for, believe that abortion on demand should be applied until the moment of birth, that chemically or surgically mutilating children is a form of healthcare, think drag queen story hour is an edifying experience for their little ones, love free stuff but are iffy about free speech, maintain that illegal immigrants should enjoy the same rights as American citizens, and see no problem in allowing men to compete with women in sports and letting them use female changing rooms. Above all, it was a resounding reminder that Trump Derangement Syndrome is alive and kicking in the USA and continues to be an overriding force in the calculus of American politics.
Ultimately, what took place last Tuesday, most especially in New York City, was a win for Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci and a loss for Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. What it tells us about the future of this great nation is anyone’s guess. Stay tuned.
