What happened to wokeness? This is one of the most insistent questions in political commentary today. Do Donald Trump’s reelection and the much ballyhooed “vibe shift” mean that wokeness is gone for good? Or is it just in remission, soon to return as strong as ever?
Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary in June, and the reaction to his ascent, are striking data points. What they suggest, I submit, is that wokeness has indeed “peaked,” but also that peaking is not vanishing. The Mamdani campaign offers a glimpse of what a new, post-peak, phase of wokeness will look like.
First, the evidence for peaking. The chilly reception Mamdani has received from many institutions makes it clear that we are no longer in the Summer of Love. Several years ago, the mainstream media were declaring Black Lives Matter riots “mostly peaceful,” running “defenses of looting” and appeals to “defund the police,” and firing those who got on the wrong side of the cultural left. This summer, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post all expressed grave concern about Mamdani. In contrast to 2020, when leaders of the Democratic party fell all over themselves to embrace the symbols of the Great Awokening and run cover for the disorder BLM brought in its train, the response of Democratic leadership to Mamdani has been decidedly tepid. Their caginess is illustrated by the unwillingness of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to endorse his party’s primary victor. Perhaps most notably, several years ago we witnessed the Frankensteinian confection of “woke capital”: Leading corporations funded left-wing organizations, pledged to remake their business practices in accord with boutique personal identities and baroque political theories, and signed on to any number of novel progressive shibboleths. Nothing comparable occurred in response to Mamdani. Wall Street unapologetically funneled millions to Cuomo in the primary. Since Mamdani’s triumph, the business elite of New York has sounded the alarm, and threats of capital flight upon his taking office have proliferated.
Moreover, Mamdani’s approach indicates some awareness that wokeness has crested. There is perhaps no better encapsulation of what John McWhorter calls “High Woke” than Mamdani’s digital footprint from 2020, in which one finds Covid-maximalism, incessant appeals to racial identitarianism, calls for defunding the police, bald assertions of the irredeemable character of the West, the equation of the end of capitalism with the achievement of an anti-white utopia, and so forth. By contrast, in the primary Mamdani emphasized such traditional left-liberal themes as affordability, and he avoided the sharp elbows of wokeness at its height: There were no calls to cancel opponents, and he made a rather deft show of outreach to Trump voters. His attempted cooptation of the “abundance” theme, which many leftist diehards view as little better than an apologetics for “neoliberalism,” indicates that even politicians associated with the DSA recognize the need for centrist overtures if they actually want to get into office.
But if the Mamdani phenomenon testifies that wokeness is far from its peak of power and stridency, it equally testifies that wokeness is far from dead. Woke themes ran through Mamdani’s persona and platform. He stands by his previous record of activism, which is strongly anti-capitalist and ceaselessly, virulently anti-Israel. His messaging is unfriendly to the rich, to be sure, but he serves class conflict with a side of racial identitarianism. He has reiterated his endorsement of reparations. In an ironic overlap with Trumpism, his platform includes taxing Columbia (and NYU)—not, in his case, as one front in a war on higher education, but as a Robin Hood maneuver to funnel money to CUNY. This class war within higher ed is just one part of an economic program that resembles not so much Stalin’s plan to collectivize agriculture as a series of (very expensive) “one cheap trick” ideas beloved of “equity” proponents—from free childcare to redressing the harms of “racial zoning” to eliminating bus fares to setting a $30 minimum wage. (Many of these proposals are not within the mayor’s power to enact.) Mamdani’s plans for construction are larded with interest-group giveaways and “sustainability” requirements. His “green schools” proposal pledges—in the appalling argot that marks expertise in the world of professional progressivism—to combat “environmental racism.” Greta Thunberg may have replaced climate change with Palestine as her cardinal cause, but Mamdani can keep both balls in the air at once. “Climate and quality of life,” he assured New Yorkers, are “one and the same” issue. A promise to transform New York into an “LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city” sits alongside a reaffirmation of DEI in education, like precious relics from those halcyon days when it looked as if Trump might wind up in jail rather than return to the White House.
Mamdani’s continuities with aggressive cultural progressivism stand out in two other important ways. His program elides the difference between citizen and noncitizen, implicitly endorsing open borders. He promises to refuse all cooperation with ICE and expand healthcare and “protection against Trump” to all immigrants, making no distinction between the legal and the illegal. Likewise, the suspicion of law enforcement that animated BLM persists, if in more somber language. Mamdani makes plain his indifference to public safety and order in various ways: from preferring that social workers respond to domestic violence calls, to focusing on “hate crimes” at the expense of ordinary crimes, to proposing the subway system as a center for homeless services, to cutting police numbers and hours, to endorsing the DSA’s “agenda for decarceration.” Mamdani has refused to confirm that he will retain Jessica Tisch, the very successful police commissioner, which would have been an easy way to signal openness to common sense on this issue.
All in all, though some sharp edges have been smoothed, Mamdani still operates by the late-2010s academic-radicalism-escaped-from-campus playbook that we call wokeism. He demonstrates the approach we can expect to see from the far left of the Democratic party in a post-peak-woke age: in some ways softer in presentation, more capable of retailing an economic message, but still laced with a cultural radicalism that clashes with American traditions.
In all of this, Mamdani espouses the convictions of an important segment of the Democratic party base. Though support for many of these positions was never very high even in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death and has fallen off still more since, in New York City there is a key class of voter for whom these elements remain central to their worldview. The crucial sociological facts about Mamdani’s support are two. First, he won college graduates handily (though, tellingly, his advantage waned at the tiptop of high-education areas).
Second, the heart of Mamdani’s support is neither the poor—Cuomo dominated among those with yearly incomes less than roughly $40,000—nor the truly wealthy, among whom Cuomo again was preferred. Both ends of the income spectrum are averse to Mamdanism. Instead, Mamdani flourished among college degree-holders who make roughly $70,000 to $140,000 per year. Though in many parts of the country an income in this range is fairly robust, in the absurdly expensive environment of New York City, those in this bracket often struggle to afford comforts the American bourgeoisie largely takes for granted.
This is a group we might call, to adapt Karl Marx, the lumpencommentariat. They are those whose investment in education and induction into the worldview of university progressivism leads them to expect knowledge-work that is not only financially remunerative but also morally or socially fulfilling and valorized. Think here of NGO staff, grad students, many full-time academics, social workers, journalists, those in (or trying to break into) the city’s artistic scenes and cultural industries, and the medley of folks one acerbic twitterato calls “marginal creatives.” For several years, political scientists have been noting that the surest source of support for left-wing parties is now “high-education, low-income voters.” This cohort was the beating heart of wokeism even at its apex. (Wokeism was never, despite leftist self-fashioning, widely popular among the working class.) But now that wokeism has receded, this class is just about its last bastion. Mamdani’s own trajectory—graduate of an elite college, lifelong activist devoted to social justice causes, failed rapper, intern on his mother’s films, social media personality—was practically designed in a lab to provoke identification and empathy from this band of society, even if most of them are not backstopped by anything like Mamdani’s family resources.
As Reihan Salam observes, this class is in many ways the element of New York’s citizenry most likely to feel squeezed economically. They are too well off and too young to benefit from direct social assistance, which overwhelmingly goes to the truly poor and the elderly. And unlike the proletariat, the lumpencommentariat is by social connections and college ties proximate to the city’s very high earners. They resent their many acquaintances who, despite having similar educational attainment, live much better than they do without (as they see it) possessing greater enlightenment or virtue. Furthermore, compared to finance or consulting “bros,” who can easily relocate to Florida or Texas and buy a big house there, this stratum has limited mobility, as their industries really are in many cases tied to the city. Capitalists can leave New York more easily than aspirants to nonprofit or academic or artistic careers.
Not only does Mamdani’s cultural message resonate with this class’s values, but his economic message hits the sweet spot for them. He dangles the prospect of a bonanza of jobs for left-aligned degree-holders in legal and nonprofit and public-sector work. His signature promise of expanding rent stabilization is a great temptation as well, since rent stabilization in New York City is not means-tested, and often these apartments are passed down across generations. Extending this program will almost certainly harm New York’s housing stock in the medium- to long-term, but the short-term financial boon that “freezing the rent” would represent to strapped degree-holders is too enticing to turn down.
More generally, Mamdani’s vision of increasing free or subsidized public services while hiking taxes only on corporations and millionaires is maximally attractive for this class. Mamdanian economics gestures toward the European benefit system, while making America’s already progressive tax structure even more progressive. Unlike in Europe, where the middle and lower-middle classes pay heavily for the generous public services they enjoy, in Mamdani’s New York the lumpencommentariat would receive more largesse without making further contributions.
If Mamdani is a socialist, then his is a clerical socialism—targeted at the (aspirant) clerical class’s financial complaints, and framed in terms of their progressive moralism.
Mamdani’s success proves that in major cities—even cities like New York, which tilted rightward in 2024—it is still possible to win with an essentially clerical coalition. At least, it is possible to do so if one can complement this largely white demographic with outreach to minority voters. Mamdani fared very poorly with African-Americans, but he won among Hispanics and South Asians. (Interestingly, Mamdani also did better with men than with women, despite the #MeToo allegations against his rival. We may be entering not only a post-peak, but also a less Longhouse-oriented phase of wokeism.) Nationally, a more socioeconomically diverse coalition—one that would unite non-college workers, minorities turned off by progressive values, and some high-earners in friendly precincts of American capitalism (as with the tech sector in the Obama era)—would make for a much larger tent. But in places like New York, organizing such a disparate bunch against an engaged base of lumpencommentarians is not an easy task. This means that figures like Mamdani will continue to find prominent places on the Democratic stage—likely to the detriment of a party that is plummeting in popularity.
Shortly before his death, Edmund Burke defined Jacobinism as “the revolt of enterprising talents against property.” (By enterprising he did not mean, of course, hoping to start a business, but scheming and conniving.) It would be an overreaction to predict a great Terror descending on Gotham. But purely as coalitional analysis, Burke’s description tallies with wokeness in the mid-2020s. No longer the official credo of most mainstream institutions or the heights of the American economy, and certainly not a cry of despair from the downtrodden, wokeness has found its level as the authentic expression of a set of squeezed strivers: creatives, professionals, and knowledge-workers who feel that their compensation and social standing do not reflect their education, abilities, and moral insight. And Mamdani shows that even after its peak, wokeness is here to stay, a diminished force nationally but supported by a unified base in our most important cities.
Image by Bingjiefu He, licensed via Creative Commons. Image Cropped
