Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and the rise of politics of stupid

This core group of excited supporters don’t see this an embarrassing moral failure in an otherwise likeable persona. They see it as a mark of authenticity, a brave stand against the dark forces holding us all back from all the righteous and good. They’re not the reason Mamdani won this election – Trump and Cuomo, among many others, deserve much more of the credit – but they are committed and motivated and eager to transform the Democratic Party into a political force that takes onboard all the principles of what I have elsewhere called “geostrategic antisemitism.”

The elite-mob symbiosis of antisemitism which exploded in the immediate aftermath of October 7 and has not abated since has left too many Jews dumbstruck by what is happening in front of them, unable to come to terms with the urgency and unable to mobilise non-Jewish allies. Too many struggle to make the case that ideological antisemitism is inherently bad. Instead, they try to turn it into a generalised demerit, a harbinger of other evils. Jews are “the canary in the coal mine,” we are frequently told, with the implication that what strikes us now will find you in due time.

And indeed, that has sometimes been true, but the warning itself rings hollow. It demands understanding antisemitism as another form of prejudice against a minority rather than as a comprehensive ideological doctrine.

Some instantiations of antisemitism may indeed have appeared like a prejudice against a minority that looked and acted a bit different, especially in places where Jews were a new immigrant group concentrated in a few neighbourhoods and working in a few professions.

But most of the time, antisemitism has not functioned as a prejudice, but rather as a conspiracy theory. Not a supremacist bigotry so much as a resentment bigotry (similar to that faced by overseas Chinese in southeast Asia or Hindus in postcolonial Africa). This is why antisemitism’s violent manifestations are often acted out as a revenge fantasy. There’s nothing “new” about the antisemites believing they are the Jews’ victims; that belief has been central to antisemitism whenever and wherever it has manifested itself.

You can hear Mamdani tie racist and violent policing in New York to the “training” the NYPD supposedly receives in Israel in line with one very popular conspiracy theory that gained a lot of traction in the mid-2010’s, and you might react in a variety of ways.

If you’re sitting in Israel and reflecting on the bumbling ineffectiveness of the Israeli Police, you might think this is a deliberate bit of cynicism peddled by someone who must know he is lying.

If you’re in New York or New Jersey, where the conspiracy theory about racist American policing, Israeli training, and the sponsorship of local American Jewish groups has already been cited as the excuse for violent attacks against Jews in the city and, most notoriously, in the Jersey City kosher market shooting, you might worry that this is encouraging the next antisemitic assault.

If, however, you’re just an ordinary New York City voter, where the issue of crime and policing is hardly peripheral to the duties of a mayor, what might concern you is that the guy who soon will be responsible for dealing with this issue understands it through the rubric of a cognitive pathology, a barely revised mediaeval hoax with the same plausibility as, say, the belief that water fluoridation makes children gay.

The mass delusions of the past year that have been laid down as membership requirements in the community of the good – that Israel’s military response to the October 7 massacre is in the same legal and moral category as the mass murder of six million Jews in Europe in the 1940s, and that powerful forces are suppressing criticism of the most obsessively criticised state and society in the world – aren’t just dangerous because they lead to violence.

They’re dangerous because, among other things, they lead to stupid. They empower stupid, ranging it at the front of politics in a way that could never have been tolerated without the delusions’ iron grip. And they make otherwise smart political actors adopt stupid as a form of speech and ultimately a form of thought too. Sometimes this is for survival; often it is just a routine that breaks down resistance and, in time, becomes unnoticeable inside of a positive feedback loop. 

A politics of stupid is hard to resist once it takes over. In a reality where one needs to believe something that is verifiably false or logically incoherent just to prove your credentials as a serious thinker or, heaven help us, an expert, then the serious thinkers will either be genuinely stupid or will have so masterfully affected the pose of stupid that the habit becomes unbreakable.