Re: <nettime> Vivek Menezes: Moral Panic over Mira's son (Zohran M)

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Patrice, being stuck in this tin can or iron lung called the USA, I
appreciate the perspectives you send from India and elsewhere. Vivek
Menezes sees pretty well what's going on - and in some respects, probably
better than anyone here, because of the tin can.

It's clear there will be brutal attacks on Mamdani and many many millions
of dollars will be spent trying to smear and discredit him. Be certain that
the attacks will come primarily from the Democratic Party and the liberal
elites. These people are gripped by the fear that power will slip from
their hands. Anyone who attempts en entryist strategy, campaigning as a
Democrat with a socialist platform, can be sure that the liberal wing of
the ruling class will try, first to destroy, second to neutralize, and
finally, over the long run, to coopt them, discipline them, and reduce
their platform to mere window dressing over business-as-usual. This,
despite the fact that the policies they promote are extremely popular.

At Socialism 2025, the extraordinary conference with 100+ events put on
every year in Chicago by Haymarket Books (1), there was a panel to discuss
the strategies that leftists should adopt toward the Democratic Party.
Despite Mamdani, despite the electoral victories of Bernie Sanders and his
acolytes, this question really mattered to the people at the conference -
because pretty much all the participants have identified the Dems as an
active agent of the racist, extractivist and genocidal US empire.

It was broadly agreed among all speakers on the panel that both US
mainstream parties are really media-based vote-grabbing operations, with no
grassroots membership and almost no way to participate in shaping the party
platform. So neither of these parties is small-d democratic. Both will
resort to the police when the status quo is threatened by social movements.
Both will engage in pressure campaigns, subversion and warfare to defend US
markets abroad (read the Wikileaks diplomatic cables if you want to see
this in undeniable detail). We know this from direct experience. The hopes
placed in Obama came to a bad end. And in the case of Biden, where leftist
policy input was much much greater due to the strong ideas of Bernie
Sanders, the outcome was fully disastrous. Democratic hypocrisy ruined the
progressive agenda that people had voted for and it paralyzed the Biden
administration, until finally they threw in their lot with the Zionists and
the war machine.

One viewpoint on the panel - and a very well known one in radical circles -
is that a revolutionary party should be built entirely outside the
electoral arena and gain power through self-organization and solidarity
actions. Obviously this stood in direct contradiction to the DSA member who
opened the panel, talking about Mamdani. Another viewpoint, coming from the
Greens who have stood presidential candidates for decades, was that getting
someone elected as mayor or congressperson without elected allies in large
numbers of lower offices is bound to fail, because they will be unable to
push through any part of their program (witness our beleaguered Chicago
mayor Brandon Johnson, a union guy who has been thoroughly blocked and
calumnied by the aldermanic establishment, the press and the local
billionaires). A third viewpoint, from a member of the Durham For All
chapter of a North Carolina movement called the Carolina Federation, just
said (this is a paraphrase, not a quote) 'Look y'all, we are doing all
those things at once. We are building a membership party of the
multi-racial, multi-gendered working class. We are acting in solidarity
with communities at the chapter level. And we are winning elections across
the state, with concrete policy results.' The only difference I could see
between this speaker and the DSA member was the multitude-esque language of
queer inclusiveness, but that was likely more about personal style than
ideology.

I always resisted going to this conference, because years ago I got
terminally sick of hearing academics argue over outdated Marxist dogma.  I
encountered none of that at Socialism 2025. I have been impressed with the
DSA for years, and now I'm curious to learn more about the Carolina
Federation. Even more impressive, though, was the shared realization,
throughout this gigantic conference, that what we call democracy is in
reality a continuum of repression organized by cynical elites who will do
anything to maintain their wealth and power. Ten years ago it was very
difficult to convince the average American of this. During the election, my
liberal peers in the art world and universities claimed to be enthusiastic
for Kamala Harris. Now the liberals are really shaken. Their cowardice,
hypocrisy and lack of vision are on full display. The ferocity of their
leaders' attacks on Mamdani is a direct reflection of how weak they are,
how empty their promises are, how ugly the democratic mask looks on the
oligarchic face.

For the student who was just beaten and arrested for protesting their
university's involvement in an outright genocide, this is now blatantly
obvious. For those who watch the bombs on TV, or see the soldiers and the
unmarked vans in the streets, it is a dawning revelation, still too
horrible to put into words. Really existing democracy - capitalist
democracy - is on a continuum with fascism. It is fascism in waiting. It is
outright fascism in the US today.

I am not certain that there is a big enough and radical enough electoral
base to primary all these corrupt liberals and replace them with new
people. But I am still willing to participate in such an attempt. I am very
likely to vote for DSA candidates. Just don't ask me to believe an empire
can be a substantial democracy. The choice now is stark indeed. Change the
system - really, not just prefiguratively - or go on being an accomplice in
carceral repression, mass murder and ecocide.

Soberly, Brian

(1) The panel I discuss here, called "Debate: Socialists, Independent
Politics, and the Democratic Party," unfortunately does not figure into the
virtual conference put online by Haymarket Books - although maybe they'll
put it up later, I don't know. The full conference schedule and virtual
program are available here:

https://socialismconference.org

On Sun, Jul 6, 2025 at 11:48 PM Patrice Riemens via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

>
> Original to:
>
> https://www.heraldgoa.in/edit/by-invitation/moral-panic-over-miras-son/424669
>
>
>
> Moral panic over Mira’s son
>
> Already unhinged by the erratic antics of Donald Trump, the American
> political scene has become even further deranged by the emergence of
> 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani as lead contender for the next mayor of New York
> City.
>
> Idealistic, charming and persuasively progressive, this obviously beloved
> only child of highly accomplished parents of Indian origin (his
> Rourkela-born Harvard-educated mother is the famous film director Mira
> Nair, and his Ugandan Ismaili father Mahmood is one of the leading public
> intellectuals of our times) has become an instant litmus test that is
> polarising opinions far beyond the borders of his city and state. It has
> been absolutely shocking to observe so many powerful Americans including
> Trump himself come straight out and attempt to destroy this literal kid -
> even our young Panjim mayor is older than him – in the same week their
> Congress approved an astonishingly regressive bill cutting hundreds of
> billions of dollars from medical insurance, food benefits and green energy,
> while dramatically ramping up the controversial Immigration and Customs
> Enforcement agency to the point where it will be the sixteenth-highest
> funded military on the planet (for example, both Israel and Italy spend
> less on their actual armed forces).
>
> Of course, it is precisely because Mamdani represents an impressive
> resistance to this overtly fascist and increasingly openly
> enthno-nationalist Trumpist takeover that he is being hammered with slurs,
> slander, and outright lies. This incessant drummed-up vitriol – the term
> “moral panic” accurately describes such hate campaigns – was already
> getting very bad during the young candidate’s energetic and super-exciting
> primary campaign, when he came up from 1% in the polls to soar far ahead of
> Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic party heavyweight and former Governor of New
> York whose father was also Governor before him. One morning, fighting back
> tears, he shared that “I get messages that say the only good Muslim is a
> dead Muslim. I get threats on my life, on the people that I love. When I
> speak with emotion, I am then characterised as being a monster [with]
> language that describes almost a barbarian, looking to dismantle
> civilisation. And part of this is the very sad burden of what it means to
> be the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor, is to deal with
> dehumanising language.”
>
> Sadly, everything has become even more volatile and vicious after Mamdani
> won the Democratic ticket, by striking an unconventional and notably joyous
> close-knit bond with Brad Lander, another primary candidate who is the
> highest-ranking elected Jewish official in New York. Side by side in
> comfortable camaraderie, they showed up Cuomo as irrelevant and out of
> touch, thus neutralising the senior politician’s massive funding
> advantages. Their remarkable partnership played out like pure magic, and
> that is when seemingly everyone everywhere began to tune in to what really
> does represent a potential better politics of the future. Here is just one
> relevant take, from the venerable Jewish-American publication The Forward:
> “Lander modelled what principled solidarity looks like. His actions helped
> ensure that a powerful, justice-oriented Muslim leader remained in the race
> for mayor. He demonstrated that Jewish safety does not require Muslim
> silence. That, in fact, our safeties are intertwined. Israeli politicians
> who believe in democracy, who believe in equality, who believe in a future
> where all citizens belong — this is your moment. Speak up. Say the thing
> that’s hard to say. Stand with your Palestinian colleagues. Be like Brad.”
>
> Such commentary comes across as almost unthinkable in our fraught times,
> and it is true that even if most people recognise this Mamdani moment as
> pure lightning in a bottle - the very definition of successful democracy in
> action - for others the young candidate is more of a lightning rod,
> attracting a firestorm of condemnation. So far, he has been holding up
> remarkably well, even deftly turning the tables, as in this fine response
> after the President bashed him: “yesterday, Donald Trump said that I should
> be arrested. He said that I should be deported. He said that I should be
> denaturalised. And he said those things about someone who stands to be the
> first immigrant mayor of this city in generations, someone who would also
> be the first Muslim and the first South Asian mayor in this city's history.
> It is less so because of who I am, because of where I come from, because of
> how I look or how I speak, and more so because he wants to distract from
> what I fight for. I fight for working people. Ultimately it is easier for
> him to fan the flames of division than to acknowledge the ways in which he
> has betrayed those working-class Americans not just in this city but across
> this country, and the ways in which he continues to betray them.”
>
> There’s a lot of truth to the old line that “you can always judge a man by
> the quality of his enemies” and it is certainly valid for this handsome,
> hugely likeable idealist. An avowed democratic socialist – actually by
> Indian standards he’s barely on the left – Mamdani is hugely popular with
> young people, despite being continually vilified by an army of hacks and
> hypocrites from Trump on down. Earlier this week the hate was about eating
> biryani with his hands about which Congressman Brandon Gill – who is
> married to the Goan-American conservative commentator Danielle D’Souza Gill
> – tweeted sharply that “Civilized people in America don’t eat like this. If
> you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.” A couple
> of days later, another conservative commentator with Goan roots, Sadanand
> Dhume similarly lashed out in the Wall Street Journal that “Mamdani brings
> Third World prejudices to New York”. This weekend, there is an absurd New
> York Times hit piece about how Mamdani ticked off (complicated, stupid,
> typically American) boxes about his racial affiliations in an unsuccessful
> Columbia University application from when he was a teenager, and next week
> there will be some other manufactured outrage. We can expect much more of
> the same right until the election in November.
>
> (Vivek Menezes is a writer and co-founder of the Goa Arts and Literature
>
> Festival)
> --
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