Zohran Mamdani and The Ongoing Pattern of Progressive Politicians

This article is based on a recent video of mine entitled “The Pattern Nobody Wants to Admit About Progressive Politicians.” There are minor differences, as the video was off the dome and this has been edited.

You ever notice how politicians seem more interested in proving that they care than proving that they can actually do anything?

The latest example is New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. During his campaign, Mamdani promised that if Benjamin Netanyahu entered New York City, he would have him arrested.

Netanyahu is overseeing a genocide against the Palestinian people, which I have been talking about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians since around 2014 (search my Twitter if you like). I have absolutely no problem saying that Netanyahu is a war criminal or that Israel is committing genocide. Fuck him.

The campaign promise itself, however, should have immediately raised eyebrows. If anyone had bothered to look into the matter before it was made, they would have discovered that the mayor of New York does not possess the authority to carry it out. It was never a realistic promise. That was already slippery enough, but what happened this week was considerably slipperier.

Mamdani recently released a video explaining that his administration had reviewed every legal avenue available to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Netanyahu came to the city. After reviewing the law, they concluded that New York City does not have the independent legal authority to enforce it. My immediate reaction was that this review probably should have happened before he made the promise in the first place.

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What interests me, though, is not simply that he walked the promise back. Politicians break promises constantly. The interesting part is how he framed the retreat. Rather than saying, “I was wrong,” or “I promised something that I cannot actually deliver,” the story becomes one of diligence. His administration searched every avenue, examined every possibility, and worked oh so very hard to find a solution, you see!

Mamdani doesn’t acknowledge that he wrote a check his ass could not cash. He never acknowledges that he campaigned on a power he did not have. Instead, he presents the discovery of his own inability to act as evidence of how seriously he takes the issue. The promise quietly disappears, but the moral posture behind the promise remains completely intact.

Most of the video consists of Mamdani (accurately) describing Netanyahu as a war criminal and the architect of a genocide against the Palestinian people. He talks about the more than 73,000 people killed, the tens of thousands of children maimed, amputations performed without anesthesia, and the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity-care centers. He says that anyone with eyes, a heart, or a conscience should understand the devastation Netanyahu has wrought and recognize that he belongs before a court of law.

I agree with all of that. I often criticize people with whom I agree, not because I object to what they are saying, but because they either make declarations without understanding that they cannot act or, worse, make those declarations while knowing it. I am willing to give Mamdani the benefit of the doubt and assume that he did not fully understand the legal reality when he made the campaign promise. That does not make this any less politically revealing.

After explaining that his administration cannot enforce the ICC warrant, Mamdani says that while New York cannot end the genocide on its own, it can decide whether its “silence will become another weapon.” It can “examine” every tool available to defend the humanity and dignity of all people. “That,” he says, “is my commitment to you.”

Commitment to what? Originally, the commitment had a clear objective: “I will arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.” That is a commitment because it describes a concrete action, whether or not the action was ever realistic. What replaces it is a commitment to continue opposing genocide, refusing silence, defending human dignity, and saying negative things about Benjamin Netanyahu. There is no longer an identifiable political action attached to the word “commitment.”

The only concrete action that had previously been promised has been removed from the table, and its removal is then presented as part of a renewed commitment. The speech transforms “this is what I will do” into “this is what I really wish I could do,” while preserving the emotional force of the original promise.

The commitment is now only to maintain a position. It is a commitment without a meaningful object, and yet the audience is supposed to experience it as continuity rather than retreat. Mamdani takes something off the table and then says, in effect, “That is my commitment to you.” It is a fascinating rhetorical maneuver because the promise disappears while the relationship created by the promise remains.

When Mamdani was elected, I wrote an article about what I called the democratic socialist hamster wheel:

The thrust is that the left continually invests hope in politicians who promise outcomes that the institutions they are entering are not designed to produce.

I do not know whether Mamdani is personally dishonest or simply a useful idealist operating inside a structure he does not understand. He may be completely sincere. He may genuinely wish that he could arrest Netanyahu, pass rent control, reduce housing costs, and fulfill every other promise he made.

I kinda just don’t care. Sincerity does not automatically make slippery rhetoric dishonest. Plenty of people with decent opinions and genuine intentions will do rhetorically slippery things in pursuit of goals they believe are worthwhile. Whether Mamdani personally believes everything he says is therefore not really the central question. The institutional reality remains the same regardless of what is happening inside his head.

When he said that he would arrest Netanyahu, I knew that it was not going to happen. When he promised rent control, I knew that was not going to happen either. I did not know this because I possess magical predictive powers. I knew it because the institutions within which he was attempting to act do not provide him with the power necessary to fulfill those promises.

Ultimately, I don’t really care about one broken campaign promise; I care about the kind of promise it is and how obvious its unfeasibility is. Politicians like Mamdani provide the Democratic Party with a form of ideological cover. They demonstrate that there are people inside the party who share your genuine demands, care about genocide, want universal healthcare, wish to lower housing costs, and want to make positive changes according to your understanding of what positive change would mean.

Even if you dislike the Democratic Party, these figures preserve a degree of faith in it. They encourage the belief that the party could be transformed if enough politicians like Mamdani were elected, if enough people voted, or if popular demands were expressed clearly and loudly enough. The implication of a retreat like this is not that the strategy has failed. It is that you need to support Mamdani and figures like him even more, so that one day these sympathetic people inside these institutions might finally overcome their limitations.

That is never going to happen.

I do not say this because I want to deflate people, make them feel pessimistic, or convince them that nothing can be done. I say it because I have been talking about this process for many years and have watched it happen repeatedly. It does not matter whether a fresh-faced man, woman, or nonbinary person arrives to carry out the promises that every predecessor failed to fulfill. They will encounter the same institutional limits because changing the face does not change the function.

Bernie Sanders introduced me to this dynamic. To put it bluntly, he fooled me (maybe himself as well). Here was a person saying the things that I thought someone in politics needed to say. Surely, I thought, if we could get this guy into power, something would happen. Later came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On PACD, we identified this process relatively early, received plenty of criticism for doing so, and were ultimately proven correct.

The same analysis applies here. These politicians are working within institutions that were created to uphold relationships that contradict what they are promising. This is a capitalist state. Capital has power within a capitalist state, and the state exists to maintain capital’s power, capital’s claim over property, and to enforce on capital’s behalf.

Within that framework, the role of left-wing politicians is not necessarily to deliver the demands they articulate. Their role is simply to prove that the correct desire exists! They demonstrate that people with access to these institutions agree with you. They show that someone inside the state cares about Palestine, healthcare, housing, poverty, and whatever other demand has been excluded from actual power.

Agreement, however, is not power. Representation is not transformation. The presence of someone who shares your opinion inside an institution does not mean that the institution has become capable of acting upon that opinion. “My commitment to you” actually means, “I will continue demonstrating that someone with access to power agrees with you,” rather than, “I will use power to accomplish the thing I promised.”

People can be angry with me for saying this. They can call me a contrarian and tell their friends how bad Peter Coffin is. None of that changes the fact that I am correct about these people and correct about this process. Electoralism does not work in the way its advocates continually claim it will.

That does not mean I am going to pivot into telling you that direct action automatically works either, or that a revolution is around the corner, or that I have one weird trick for you to overcome capitalism. There is a contingent of leftists who recognize the failure of electoral politics and immediately conclude that the answer is simply to recreate some earlier revolutionary model. It is 2026, not 1917. This is not Tsarist Russia, the Paris Commune, or the French Revolution. Whatever happens will happen differently.

I do not know what we need, and I am not pretending that I do. I recently published a documentary about how artificial intelligence is undermining the practical justification that the ruling class currently has and has maintained in various forms since feudalism. I would encourage people to watch it because I think it is useful, and it is only about an hour long (I also think it is pretty funny).

What I am not doing is telling you that we need a violent revolution, a peaceful revolution, direct action, electoral action, or any other prepackaged answer. I do not know what the next form of meaningful political organization will look like. Refusing to pretend otherwise is important because so many political commentators and activists are charlatans capitalizing on vaguely correct observations (often proposing “solutions” that I’ve previously warned are a distraction from engagement).

Healthcare should be available to everyone! People should not be living on the street! Children should not be killed in Gaza! No shit!

The problem is what people do with “going on record” saying these things many consider obviously correct. Some parlay them into a streaming career and a luxurious mansion. Others turn them into mayoral or senatorial careers. The exact career path does not matter as much as the incentive it creates.

I have a job that is not my YouTube channel, and therefore the incentives to tell people what they want to hear matter significantly less to me. Some of my money comes from this work. I pay some bills with my personal channel and with Very Important Documentaries. But my livelihood does not depend on continually assuring an audience that its existing hopes, strategies, and assumptions are correct.

The incentive generated by that dependence is expressed perfectly in Mamdani’s video. He tells you that he cannot do the thing that both he and his supporters supposedly want to do, but he wants to make absolutely sure that everyone understands just how much he still wants to do it. We all want to! Right guys?

The Democrats are using you, and it is entirely possible that they are also using Mamdani.

He could be one hundred percent sincere, trapped within the same structure he is helping to legitimize. His personal sincerity does not change the fact that what he says about Israel and Palestine has no meaningful effect on events there. He is a mayor. That is considerably more power than most people possess, but it is not power on the world stage.

We are not going to defeat the terrible things in this world simply by pointing at them and saying that they are terrible. We will first have to understand them, and then we will need to work with other people, including people who do not entirely understand them, do not agree with us, do not like us, or do not like what we have to say.

You can walk down the street with a crowd of people holding signs that say there should not be a genocide in Palestine. The question is what leverage you possess, and the answer is currently very little. Leverage is not automatically created because enough people gather in one place and yell loudly.

Leverage has to be attained and built. I am not going to pretend that I have one weird trick for creating a community, but I know that durable, interdependent relationships are necessary. We need bonds capable of withstanding disagreement, strife, and, most importantly, outside attacks. Without those relationships, we are left repeatedly demonstrating that we possess the correct opinion while the institutions we are appealing to continue operating as designed.

Mamdani’s reversal is a small example of a much larger process. A promise to act became a “commitment” to never stop believin’. The removal of the promised action was framed as renewed proof of his moral seriousness. His administration cannot do what he said it would do, but it can continue telling us that it wishes things were different.

Stop pretending that is power.

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