Tuesday, November 4th, was a bad day for Trump, for Republicans and for the American Right. There were serious electoral setbacks in the elections for mayor of New York and the governments of the states of Virginia and New Jersey. And yet, in California, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newson, managed to see the approval of a redistribution of electoral districts that will favor his party in the next elections. Not bad, for an “autocracy”, or for what some say is “gagged America”, directed and orchestrated by Trump.
The most significant of these elections was Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York: Mamdani is from Uganda, came to the United States at the age of 7 and waves all the contradictory flags of the new left. Beloved son of gentry left and the radical wing of the Democratic Party, with Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez among his most enthusiastic supporters, Mamdani is Muslim, socialist and wokeachieving the feat of bringing together Islam and pro-Palestinianism with the support of the gay community and the promise of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: low incomes, free transportation and taxation of the rich in New York. The elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey are, respectively, Abigail Spanberger, advocate of “gun control” and abortion, and Mikie Sherrill, former military and US Navy pilot. Finally, in California, radical progressive Gavin Newson’s redistribution of constituencies.
For the Politicothese victories mark the end of a a terrible year for the Democrats, with the elections on November 5, 2024, in which the Republicans won the Presidency and both chambers of Congress.
But is it really so? Democrats have considered this November 4th a popular referendum on the Trump Administration, to which Trump responded that he was not on the lists and that he is the shutdownthe government shutdown, the main reason for popular discontent.
In addition to all this, there is, in America, a deeper and deeper problem, which Rod Dreher mentions in European Conservative of November 5th, citing The Origins of Totalitarismby Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, societies would be ripe for totalitarian solutions when the atomization and solitude of mass cultures prevail, the lack of trust in hierarchies, authorities and institutions, the predisposition to accept fictitious, simple and conspiratorial narratives, which meet each person’s convictions and imagination, and the desire to transgress, for pure fun, social norms.
This would explain, for Dreher, both the triumph of culture woke in 21st century America, on the left, as well as conspiratorial radicalism on the right. Wokism is a typical “deconstruction” of French post-Marxist thinkers in apostolate in progressive America, a cultural totalitarianism apparently soft based on delusions about human nature, civilization and normality. It was the attempts to impose this utopia, its forced application to the physical body, the body of language and the social body, that made wokism a curse for the Left. Furthermore, alongside the economic-social inequalities created by globalist elitism, radicalism woke which is due, as a reaction, to the rise of popular nationalism.
For Dreher, the greatest danger that Mamdani could pose in New York will be to contribute to the rise or reinforcement, in the space of the right, of a radical antidote to Wokism, or of a combative Wokism, equally radical and delusional, but with the opposite sign.
Political scientist and writer
The author writes according to the old spelling