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America’s most crucial political faultline is in New York City | John R MacArthur

If, like me, you’re a faithful reader of the New York Post, the election of Zohran Mamdani as the new mayor of Gotham was the best thing to happen to my native city – and to journalism – in a very long time. All through the run up to “Zoh’s” remarkable victory, the queen of tabloids outdid itself in hysterical brilliance – to such an extent that I and apparently tens of thousands of other New Yorkers were left excitedly panting for more, unable to share in the mourning that overtook rightwing commentators and pro-Trump operatives all across the land. Moreover, whether or not you voted for the Ugandan-born Muslim progressive/socialist, his improbable triumph furnished a great political education for anyone who bothered to pay attention, even if you weren’t a Post reader. Now, with Mamdani inaugurated and the unofficial municipal host of Nicolás Maduro, the deposed Venezuelan president, and his wife – jailed in Brooklyn and arraigned in federal court just a stone’s throw from city hall in Manhattan – Donald Trump’s newspaper mouthpiece is also an excellent way to make sense of the growing fissure inside the Democratic party about everything Mamdani represents.

I didn’t say that the Post’s political reporting during the final month of the campaign was worth reading because it was accurate. Beginning with Miranda Devine’s 8 October column, whose headline proclaimed “The Dems are letting Antifa take over their cities”, the paper’s leading lights made analytical hash of what was really going on inside the Democratic party. “Portland and Chicago are emerging as the epicenter of anti-Trump resistance,” she warned. “[Governor JB Pritzker] and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson are endangering the lives of ICE and Border Patrol personnel,” apparently taking their cue from the “antifa militants” of the first Trump term who “terrorized” the country during the riots that followed the killing of George Floyd. “It will be a relief,” wrote Devine, “to find out who has been funding these violent groups that appear for all the world to be Dem street militia. How else to explain years of Democrats gaslighting us and Democrat governors and mayors covering for Antifa.”

But it wasn’t antifa, the putatively leftwing anti-fascist coalition, that was the culprit featured on the front page of 19 October; it was an alliance between the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary, Mamdani, and a fellow Muslim, Imam Sirah Wahhaj, who the Post claimed had called for a 10,000-man army to enact “jihad” on New York (“No, don’t pick up a gun, no. Just march,” Wahhaj reportedly said). Mamdani had campaigned at Wahhaj’s mosque and had his picture taken with the man the Post called an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. If you were confused by the apparent ideological contradiction between antifa’s leftwing and presumably secular conspiracy to take over the Democrats – via Pritzker, Johnson and Mamdani – and a competing, decidedly anti-progressive, anti-feminist, anti-gay, socially conservative jihadist Muslim movement, then you just needed to keep reading the Post.

Sure enough, before you could say Mamdani-al-Qaida-Bin Laden-9/11, the tabloid of record had discovered the insurgent candidate’s truer origins: not the Islamic State, but rather Marxism-Leninism. Suddenly the Post’s special correspondent in Washington, Trump, was denouncing Mamdani as a “communist” who would lead the president’s hometown to “Economic and Social Disaster”. A quick read of Wikipedia reveals communism’s traditional hostility toward organized religion (including God, Allah and Yahweh), but the Post wasn’t publishing footnotes. Of course, by then, headlines like “Keep the Commie Out!” on the front page had been tempered by numerous Post revelations about Mamdani’s alleged Jew hatred stemming from his “support for Muslim extremists” against Israel. Another perusal of Wikipedia might have noted the prominent Jews who participated in the Bolshevik revolution, but the Post stuck with the commie theme as long as it could – the day after the election the front page screamed “On your Marx, get set, Zo! Socialist Mamdani wins race for mayor”. “THE RED APPLE”, with a Cyrillic R, was placed adjacent to a victorious Mamdani, dressed in red, brandishing a hammer and sickle above his head. Whatever Mamdani’s plans for terrorizing the citizenry, he was good for newspaper publishers who still printed on paper. The Post was sold out in my neighborhood on 5 November – indeed, I couldn’t find any newspaper at all for sale at the six or so Upper West Side newsstands I visited.

So what would it be? Pogroms, jihad or gulag? Perhaps all three. Well, none of them, as it turned out, at least not right away. When the mayor-elect visited Trump in the White House, the president was all friendliness and good will, even suggesting he’d be happy to move back to New York while Mamdani was mayor: “I would feel very, very comfortable in New York, and I think much more so after the meeting.” The next day, 22 November, the Post ran the headline “I ♥️ You, Mam!” on its front page with a photograph of the two men shaking hands in the Oval Office.

But what was happening in the real world of politics, outside the Post’s madhouse? In fact, contrary to the Murdoch press and the Trump saliva factory, the Democratic machine of party regulars, both national and local and surely including Pritzker’s many wealthy political allies, had been pulling out all the stops to prevent a “radical” takeover of its essential machinery, especially in New York City, where national and local party power merge. Charles Schumer, the Senate minority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, lead the congressional party in Washington DC, but they also are the effective bosses of Brooklyn, new home to the Maduros and still the most populous and machine-dominated of the five boroughs that make up New York City. Schumer never made an endorsement in the mayor’s race, and Jeffries, aiming to discourage a primary opponent against him from Mamdani’s camp, endorsed the eventual winner at the last minute and with little enthusiasm. The state party chairman, Jay Jacobs, declined to endorse Mamdani, although Kathy Hochul, the governor, did endorse the insurgent. She also fears a primary challenge in 2026 and has spoken out against Andrew Cuomo, the barely disguised stalking horse for a national and state party oligarchy that let Trump’s late endorsement of Cuomo pass without any public comment.

The bosses of both parties dislike popular participation in politics – just ask Trump’s primary opponents in 2016. When voters get excited about a candidate, they start making demands on the system, and top-down party patronage, candidate selection, log rolling and graft are all threatened. Mamdani helped double the turnout of registered voters compared with 2021, to at least 42%, and he won a slim but absolute majority of the vote with more than 1 million ballots cast for him. Good reason for the corrupted and cynical party pros to hate him. How did he do it? By pledging to freeze rents in a scandalously expensive city dominated by real estate interests, including landlords like Trump. Mamdani didn’t call for expropriation of private land as a real communist would have done – he merely made social democratic noises about reining in prices and imposing slightly higher taxes on the rich. Nothing the blueblood pillar of New York society Franklin D Roosevelt would have objected to.

Indeed, FDR’s “good neighbor” policy toward Latin America would have harmonized nicely with Mamdani’s short and unequivocal protest against the Maduro kidnapping, which contrasted sharply with the critical but far more muted responses by Schumer (the coup was “reckless, there’s no planning”) and Jeffries, who made absolutely sure they wouldn’t be accused of coddling the nominal socialist and “bad guy” Maduro. The Democratic party line almost seemed to suggest that a better conceived overthrow might have been acceptable. Mamdani, meanwhile, also revealed that he’d called the president directly to protest the invasion, which ended his truce with the Post: “Sources and longtime pals of Trump said Mamdani is playing with fire – jeopardizing his honeymoon with the president – by grandstanding in opposition to the capture of Maduro,” reported Carl Campanile. On Monday, the paper’s front page reverted to form with Mamdani’s photo adjacent to the headline “DO AS I CHE!” (referring to the communist revolutionary Che Guevara) followed by “Venezuelans celebrate fall of Maduro, but Mamdani’s pals and NYC protestors scold them – demand return of dictator”. Neither Schumer nor Jeffries were identified as pals of Mamdani.

I suggest reading the Post very carefully to try to understand our mad king’s thinking. I also hope the American military officers who violated their oath to the constitution by leading troops into Caracas show more restraint if Trump orders them to invade Greenland. But the more important political fight to watch at this moment is not Trump and JD Vance versus Charles Schumer and Gavin Newsom, it’s Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez versus Schumer, Pritzker and Newsom, the three most powerful Democrats in the country. And the crucial fault line to watch, where the real political civil war is taking place, isn’t the old Mason-Dixon line – it’s somewhere alongside a new, undesignated border that separates a large part of Brooklyn, including where Schumer grew up and that Cuomo won – and a large section of Queens, where Mamdani moved to in 2018 and won. The Brooklyn machine – the organization that produced the lamentable mayor Eric Adams – took it in the teeth on 4 November, and that should be good news to everyone who’s not a professional politician.