In my soon-to-be-released book, An American Slave in Barbary, the narrator, after sixteen years of imprisonment in Algiers, returns home and gains an audience with Jefferson at Monticello. It is 1817, the year Madison became president and put the final nail in the Federalists’ coffin. The political party of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay ceased to exist.
Although they just scored electoral victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, we may well be witnessing the death of the Democratic Party of FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton. The new party may continue to be called the Democrats, but it is something new and far more sinister.
The 34-year-old who just won the New York City mayoral race calls himself a democratic socialist. (Note the term, democratic, is only the modifier) As Alex Marlow at Breitbart puts it, “He didn’t just win the mayor’s race, he shattered turnout records, assembled a coalition that defied conventional political categories, and revealed fault lines in American economic life that neither party has adequately addressed.”
Over a million New Yorkers voted for Mamdani, the highest total for any mayoral candidate in half a century. He carried gentrified Brooklyn, Park Slope (+57), Prospect Heights (+67), Bushwick (+67), and did something nobody saw coming. He flipped working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods, Mott Haven and East Harlem, that Trump carried a year ago. And he won with the kind of margins found in uncontested elections.
The reaction from most conservatives was predictable. They dismissed their electoral trashing as performative radicalism and luxury politics authored by voters who’ve never struggled a day in their lives, but they were wrong.
Before the election, the writers at Breitbart warned—we risk disaster if we ignore “the economic pain of New York City’s downwardly mobile professional class.” Mamdani didn’t win because affluent Brooklynites suddenly discovered Marx. He won big because he tapped into and amplified a pervasive sentiment that shattered traditional class boundaries: the fundamental bargain of American economic life has broken down.
The Mamdani voters thought they had done everything right. They had followed the old playbook. They got educated, found professional jobs, and moved to the city for opportunity. But now, although they earn between $80,000 and $150,000 a year, they’re still financially underwater.
In the gentrified neighborhoods of New York City, renting a two-bedroom apartment now costs more than $4,600 per month. A guy earning $150,000, while he has made it into the top 10 percent of U.S. earners, spends over a third of his after-tax income on rent. He saves nothing and cannot afford to buy a house in the suburbs, marry, and have children. He owns nothing and wants the government to do something about it.
In addition, this is why the Democrats cannot vote to reopen the government. It is the case of the arsonists demanding firefighters come to put out the fire they set. Obamacare, delivered to us via the Affordable Care Act, has done the exact opposite of what the Democrats promised. For millions of Americans, it has dramatically driven up the cost of healthcare. Truth be told, this is precisely what they always wanted—the Americans demanding government-sponsored healthcare. It is the final brick in the wall, in their many decades-long quest for total control over the individual and power over the masses, in their quest to install one-party rule and preside over serfdom in America.
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