New York City as Bowdoin on the Hudson

The college-induced fantasy behind Mamdani's victory

Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary despite failing to carry the black vote, the working class vote, and the low-income vote. Which groups propelled him to victory?

It’s easy to picture one group of pro-Mamdani voters — young, college-educated voters who chose to live in New York to pursue a peak-hipster lifestyle. Disillusioned by the failure of their degrees in women’s studies and sociology to land them employment that pays enough to afford the city, they are easy prey for a candidate running on “affordability.” They crave free stuff.

Their parents would have been willing to settle for living outside the city, commuting into town for work and, on occasion, for a weekend night of fun. But their sons and daughters feel entitled to enjoy New York City as residents. They believe the world owes them not just a living, but an urban hipster lifestyle.

But this cohort isn’t large enough to have carried Mamdani to victory. To be sure, Mandami won with a historically small number of votes (little more than half a million), and that count was inflated by nearly 100,000 thanks to the ranked-choice voting system. But there aren’t enough disillusioned hipsters in New York to approach Mandami’s numbers.

Michael Lind, who analyzed voting in the primary by neighborhood, identifies a different (though not totally unrelated) Mamdani constituency. He sees Mamdani’s win as a victory for the “Haves” over the “Have Mores.”

Yes, Mamdani won what some call the “commie corridor” in Brooklyn and part of Queens, where hipsters “have created a bohemian culture similar to that of college towns.” But he also prevailed among affluent New Yorkers in the tier below the very rich.

Lind quotes Michael Lange of The New York Times who wrote:

In tony, liberal neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, known for their tree-lines streets and multimillion-dollar brownstones, Mr. Mamdani trounced Mr. Cuomo by more than 35 points.

These upscale liberals have “made it” in New York. They may have undergrad degrees in women’s studies or sociology, but they likely also have law degrees, medical degrees, or degrees from top business schools. Why are they voting with young hipsters who haven’t made it?

Lind offers an economic explanation:

Even a six-figure income may not enable academics, journalists, nonprofit staffers, lawyers, or doctors to afford a townhouse on the Upper West Side, a weekend place in the Hamptons, or a cook and a French au pair. . .

The division between the metropolitan rich and metropolitan professionals plays out on multiple fronts: housing, transit, and domestic help. In cities like New York, even professionals making a few hundred thousand dollars a year cannot afford to buy one of the townhouses or luxury condos they covet in nice neighborhoods. . .

But the biggest divide between the rich and the affluent has to do with servants. Truly rich households in America tend to be one-earner couples, in which the man is the sole breadwinner. . .

In contrast, the typical professional-class household in cities like New York consists of two college-educated professionals, both of whom must work so that their joint income allows them to eke out a barely-comfortable existence in one of the priciest places on earth. If they have children, they must rely on paid child care.

The truly rich can afford to pay Mary Poppins along with Jeeves quite well. But metropolitan professional households with children and two full-time working parents with professional careers cannot afford to spend much on nannies and maids. They may be progressive in their attitudes toward trans rights and DEI, but professional couples in big cities rely on a pool of low-wage, mostly foreign-born domestic workers who can be paid low wages in cash, with no payroll taxes, no benefits and no retirement security. . .

One way to keep the wages of menial servants low enough for professional households to afford them is to let taxpayers pick up the tab for many of their expenditures. The public grocery stores in New York City proposed by Mamdani are for the nannies and maids and Uber drivers – not their professional class and rich employers, who will continue to shop at upscale stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. Better yet, if the maid can drop her children off at a publicly-funded daycare center on the way to clean the professional couple’s apartment, the taxpayer’s assumption of her childcare costs makes it easier for her to survive on her paltry wages.

To be sure, Mamdani has proposed raising the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour. But everyone knows that is not going to happen, making it safe for progressive New Yorkers to pay lip service to high wages and unions while paying their menial servants in cash off the books in the black market for labor.

In this way, the benefits of cheap labor for elites are privatized while the costs are socialized. A century ago in the US, the non-Marxist crusade in favor of municipal ownership of water and electric utilities was called “sewer socialism”. The 21st century Left has come up with something new: “servant socialism”.

(Emphasis added)

The notion that any kind of socialism is the answer for young hipsters and upscale professionals seems far-fetched, But here’s where the commonality between the two groups comes into play. That commonality is what they learned and experienced in college.

Mamdani himself is a good example. His undergraduate degree is from Bowdoin, a small, elite college in Maine. It happens that the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published a study called What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students in 2013, a year before Mamdani graduated from that school.

As Peter Wood, president of NAS, describes it in a trenchant article about Mamdani, the study documented Bowdoin’s “transformation into a seminary of sorts for those drawn to the increasingly radicalized progressive worldview.”

Mamdani may have arrived at Bowdoin with his political views fully formed. But his college experience will have done nothing to challenge his ideas or complicate them. As we put it in our report, it was a campus with “no meaningful debate. Without hesitation, Bowdoin skips to certainties on some of the most contentious issues of our time…When critical thinking is most necessary, it is most absent.”

Bowdoin is hardly an outlier in this regard. Wood continues:

One of my friends observes that “Higher education mass produces Mamdani voters.”

Whatever delusive platitudes our college and university presidents emit about what they want higher education to produce, many of them have in mind someone like Mamdani. He speaks their language fluently: a natural-born purveyor of the dreams of a generation raised to hate their own civilization – or the civilization of their adopted country. Zohran embodies the worldview of college graduates who have no idea that the history of “democratic socialism” is written in blood, poverty, and moral squalor.

(Emphasis added)

Wood’s concluding remarks tie directly to the ones with which I opened this column:

Seemingly innocent of what his program entails, Zohran charms his way through the crowds of college graduates who expected more from life than “late capitalism” has so far bestowed on them. His is the disappointment of millions of young people at the moment. We used to call it entitlement, but it could be more soulless than that.

In any case, when we asked in 2013, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” we found a version of this disturbing story. A lot of Bowdoin students were poised, charming, and self-confident. They expected – or rather knew – that their lives after graduation were going to be vibrant, fun, prosperous, and fulfilling. What happened to them if and when things didn’t turn out like that? America has been running that experiment for the last decade. At least part of the answer is they will harken to the voice of one of their own. That’s Zohran. The campus activist who sees all of New York as his campus and is poised to turn New York into Bowdoin on the Hudson.

(Emphasis added)

New York City as Bowdoin on the Hudson? That’s an absurdity Mamdani could sell only to those “mass produced,” as he was, at colleges like Bowdoin.