The.Ink

06/25/2025

Let me say this plainly, since more subtly has not worked. The Democratic Party establishment, and various others in its orbit, including many political commentators and opinion journalists and others, are brainiacs with a personal blind spot for how most human beings feel and think, and their discounting of the politics of feeling is risking the republic itself, and it needs to stop now.

Just ask Zohran. Mamdani had ideas — was full of policy ideas. He even has a website and everything. But he understood, as few in his party do, as few in his party want to do, that it’s hard to get people to think like you if you can’t get them to feel for you. He used his, yes, simple, memetic ideas to make people remember, and then, having remembered, he gave them something to talk about with their grandmother and their ex. He used a combination of these simple, repeatable ideas, shrewd and disciplined messaging, and in-person human communion to awaken people from slumber.

What is the counter-offer to Trumpism?

To listen to many Democrats in this moment is to hear warnings to play it safe, lay low, offer lite, moderate, no-jazz-hands incrementalism.

The theory is that Trump is self-immolating. So just be the guy who’s not on fire.

Mamdani did something different. He channeled what the progressive political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio has called animating the base to move the middle — her attempt to overturn the prevailing Democratic Party approach of catering to the middle at any cost, including, all too often, demoralizing the base.

Exciting the base to move the middle works like this: You give your core supporters something to write home about. Ideas they simply cannot shut up about. Wow? He proposed that?