A circuitous comment on Zohran Mamdani's "stellar emergence" (per NYT)

When I reflect on the Age of McCarthyism — reflections recently accelerated — I see it as less an era of national injury than as a time of exorbitant opportunity costs. This view is superbly expressed by historian Ellen Schrecker in her magnificent work on the mass movement's witchhunts, Many Are the Crimes. (The title comes from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, 1950: Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.) Schrecker:

As we assess the consequences of McCarthyism's assault on the left, we encounter a world of things that did not happen: reforms that were never implemented, unions that were never organized, movements that never started, books that were never published, films that were never produced. And questions that were never asked. We are, in short, looking at "might have beens" and a wide range of political and cultural possibilities that did not materialize.... McCarthyism destroyed those options, narrowing the range of acceptable activity and debate.

Republican Joe McCarthy and his malicious ism — something of a misnomer; its poison spread throughout the bipartisan bloodstream — were scarcely unique in propelling obscene costs of healthy alternatives lost. The sociopolitical burrowing of 1980s reactionaryism and the 2000s' soft authoritarianism also rocked America's better angels.

Further, they set the conditions for today's far deeper undermining of the nation's long struggle to rise and embody antiquity's cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and the fortitude to face challenges with honor. Under Trumpism, we're descending ethically, spiritually, materially and more precipitously than ever in its vortex of jackbooted injustice, ignorant extremism and historic dishonor.

So many are the crimes being committed in the names of "national security" and "America First" — unoriginal euphemisms for the cruel throwing of forward gears into reverse; indeed so wretchedly, systemically shocking as to transport the United States not really back to but into the immediate post-Weimer Republic era of the fascistically gothic, and foreseeable ruination.

The question of What is to be done? in opposition brings us, perhaps oddly, to New York City's fresh primary-winning mayoral candidate, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Good for Zohran, I say, since I too happen to be of that ilk. On the other hand, I have differences — after all, democratic socialism itself is merely a titled subphilosophy of larger and internally contentious world views — with some of his, I'll call them, counterattacks on the putrefaction of Trumpism. Such as this, from the coauthor of Abundance, Derek Thompson:

This past weekend, I spoke with Zohran Mamdani,... a rising star on the far left.... [He told me] that despite the "simplified and caricatured" conversation around the book, "Abundance is really interesting." In a recent speech, he hailed an "agenda of abundance."

I appreciate that the by now familiar, progressive Abundance Agenda is, as Mamdani noted, much more nuanced than it's often portrayed. I'll go further. Its agenda may be the greatest national-development mousetrap invented since the New Deal. But there I stop. As political strategy — its highest aim: to win elections — it is wantonly premature and extraordinarily perilous. Because bloody self-evident is that there can be no workable progress agenda as long as America's oppressive authoritarianism reigns.

Democrats must pour all their resources, their strategic and tactical potential into waging a war against and triumphing over Trumpism, which undefeated will convert America into competitive authoritarianism, a Hungary-like system in which the Democratic Party would languish as a permanent, impotent minority. In brief, the Abundance Agenda-as-strategy, even partial strategy, would be a catastrophic distraction from Dems' vital need to first kill the thriving ism that's killing us.

Two other items concerning Mamdani's "vision." A Democratic Party-wide label of socialism (any brand) would be as electorally lethal as would the GOP's official adoption of the campaign slogan, The Republican Party: Brought to you by Nazi Germany. It is, but they don't just come out and say it. And neither should Dems on the flipside. There's also the sure collapse of a Mamdani mayoralty caused by its concrete inability to fulfill extravagant promises, which would then, throughout the body politic, contaminate a quite possibly happy future in the name of democratic socialism.

As noted, I'm stationed within the philosophical camp of democratic socialism — certainly not ideologically, which would be detestably unthinking. Yet above that I'm a pragmatist, and that means winning elections comes first as a, the, political strategy.