How Zohran Scrambles the Right
Conservatives, young and old, don't quite know what to do with him
I had a wonderful conversation about my novel, Glass Century, with the great writer Philip Graham. This was an in-depth exchange, conducted over many weeks, that got at the heart of the novel and my life as a writer. I hope you can check it out.
Glass Century is available in all formats—print, e-book, audiobook—and you should buy it now if you haven’t ready. The Wall Street Journal calls it “absorbing” and “charged with heart-in-throat suspense.” And if you like it, please leave a review on Goodreads!
For the last year or so, it’s become axiomatic to declare, in certain circles, that progressives are not cool anymore. Woke is done, and Donald Trump throttled Kamala Harris, bringing a definitive end to Brat Summer. While Millennials are still broadly liberal, there was enough evidence to suggest, coming out of the 2024 election, the younger generation was drifting rightward. To be subversive or join a counterculture meant, during the Biden years at least, one should scorn progressive pieties. Dimes Square, the downtown dissident scene, was built on this premise, and a host of writers, pundits, and podcasters sprung up under the banner of the New Right, fusing a vague economic populism with scorn for anything that might reek of political correctness.
With Trump in power, the right wing can longer claim to be dissident in any fashion. Anti-woke is the law of the United States. But until the end of June, at least, the New Right could argue, with some validity, the Democrats lacked for cool—there were few prominent politicians who weren’t, as the Gen Z cohort might say, cringe. Many either seemed past their sell-by date or caught up in what the right-wing writer Dudley Newright (a pseudonym, of course) aptly dismissed as “millennial snot.” Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the vanguard for so many years, was beginning to feel like a distinctly 2010s phenomenon, her rhetoric and online posting too trapped in the performative aspects of the social justice era.
Enter Zohran Mamdani.
Conservatives have tossed the usual playbook at him. They’ve accused him of being a pampered hypocrite, a bougie radical, and a global elite “theater kid,” in the words of the writer Isaac Simpson. Simpson, who is something of a thought leader on the New Right, argued that Mamdani is merely an expanded version of “the feminized Ivy League Brooklyn DSA rich kid,” the sort of person who might attempt to approach him and “have a bro-like sports conversation…about WNBA.” On first blush, it’s quite easy for the Right to parody Mamdani like this, to chalk him up as an unhip relic of the Woke Times.
Except this is not really true. Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, cool. This has less to do with his politics than his sensibility, his verve, a certain gravitas and swagger that cannot be taught. Whatever a Try Hard is, he is the exact opposite. He exudes streetwise charm. What the New Right hasn’t quite reckoned with is that, for the moment at least, progressives haven’t just found a new AOC—an optimized AOC, perhaps—but a new Barack Obama. Mamdani, Uganda-born, can never be president. Yet he’s already, in the span of a few short weeks, become almost as famous as one.