Reconsidering American Chavism

Zohran Mamdani shows a similar, yet different path for the Left

Zohran Mamdani’s election victory is the big news this week. Both liberals and conservatives will ponder how someone so radical could end up as the mayor of New York City. Mamdani’s actual beliefs will be debated for a long time. I offered my own take on his beliefs in a new American Conservative column.

Many voices want to proclaim Zohran a “Third Worldist.” The apparent purpose of this rhetoric is to emphasize his anti-Zionism over that of his socialism, and connect domestic battles with Israel’s military endeavors. That’s silly. Mamdani is just woke, which is bad enough. As I explain:

The essays present an interesting overview of the ideology, its intellectual proponents, and how it shaped the Algerian Revolution. But it fails to tie all this into what Mamdani actually believes. Nothing he has said is cited in either Substack. There is a paragraph that interprets his stance on landlords as fueled by anti-colonialism, but that’s it. It’s just assumed that Mamdani wants to overthrow Western hegemony and replace it with a Third World dictatorship of the proletariat.

It’s hard to see that from the theater kid Mamdani. He’s okay with American global hegemony. He just wants it to be woker. The Third Worldist line can be useful to highlight the insidiousness of Mamdani, even if it’s not quite accurate. However, the term can also be a suspect way to connect Israel’s military campaigns with American domestic politics. The article primarily focuses on Mamdani’s opposition to Israel rather than his socialism. It insists anti-Zionism lies at the heart of Third Worldism. This strongly implies the purpose of popularizing the term is to sell a new version of neoconservatism to American right-wingers. In order to defeat woke, we must apparently back Israel against the mullahs’ cancel culture. It’s unnecessary and unwise to connect Israeli support with unrelated domestic matters.

You can read the rest here.

There is one related point to the article that deserves its own space. Two years ago, I predicted that the Left would eventually embrace “American Chavism,” which would combine anti-white racism with economic socialism in a militant package. This ideology bears some resemblance to the Third Worldism ascribed to Mamdani. I’ve often been asked if Mamdani and other radical leftists prove my theory. In some ways, yes, but the left-wing populism is a bit different than what I imagined.

When considering American Chavism in 2023, I imagined it as a more masculine, revolutionary movement than what Mamdani is leading. I thought it would be primarily led by the non-white proletariat, not bourgeois Yuccies. Zohran’s campaign and that of other socialists are theater kid affairs rather than the work of hardened street toughs. Mamdani’s campaign is also less explicitly anti-white than what I envisioned for a Chavist candidate. He’s not out there denouncing the white devil for colonialism and slavery. But his policies are still anti-white, such as his plan to tax whites at a higher rate than other races. Mamdani just manages to soft-peddle the anti-white racism with a platform that primarily focuses on economic populism.

I did get the general gist that leftism would combine anti-white sentiment with economic populism. My article also accurately predicted that leftism would tamp down on wokeness, particularly on trans issues, in order to strengthen its appeal to non-whites. The one aspect of woke that would be still retained is the intense focus on non-white interests and latent hostility towards whiteness. Mamdani has done that with his campaign. No matter how much Zohran tailors it, he’s still woke–and woke is inherently anti-white.

Mamdanism is lamer than what American Chavism implies. He’s no alpha male Hugo Chavez. There’s no machismo here. It’s pure theater kid shit. However, it’s pretty popular. There is undoubtedly going to be a Zohran-like candidate in the 2028 Democratic primary. (We’re thankfully saved from a Mamdani candidacy due to him being foreign-born). AOC, Ro Khanna, or some other candidate is going to take this playbook to the national level. Whoever runs on it will likely be a strong contender in the crowded Democratic field. Whether that “Chavist” will win is another story.

I still stand by what I wrote two years ago and what lays in store for the Left. That’s borne out by the rise of Mamdani. But the shape American Chavism is taking is a bit different than what I imagined. It’s more Reddit than militant, more Broadway than Third Worldist.