New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:
The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.
Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.
Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.
And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.
Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.
It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.
And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.
“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.
As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.
But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.
