New York City is about to find out what it’s like to be governed by an “uninformed, entitled and self-important” product of the modern academe.
Writing for Spectator World, scholar Heather Mac Donald points out that newly elected NYC mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is “the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.”
Writes Mac Donald:
American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging. Zohran Mamdani, the quintessential product of the academy, is poised to take such performative grievance to one of the biggest stages in the world. The results will not be pretty.
…Mamdani fashions himself a champion of the working class. He chose not to attend New York’s most storied working-class college, the public City College of New York (then $6,330 a year), however, in favor of the private Bowdoin College, a bucolic, secluded retreat in Maine (then $59,900 a year).
… a Bowdoin education is awash with victim ideology, as documented by the National Association of Scholars in 2013, the year before Mamdani graduated. As an Africana studies major, Mamdani would have taken courses along the lines of “Race, Land and (Dis)/(Re)possession: Critical Topics in Environmental (In)justice and Subaltern Geography,” which examines how “race, gender, and class operate under racial capitalism and settler colonialism both in ‘the past’ and in ‘the contemporary.’”
… Mamdani’s governing philosophy can be encapsulated in the slogans beloved of undergraduates confronting supposed injustice for the first time in human history: “People before profits!” “Fight corporate greed!” “Housing is a human right!”
As Mac Donald points out, his platform rings similar to chants echoing the quad — free, free free — “he would freeze rents; make city buses free; offer free universal childcare; and open a government-operated grocery store in each of the city’s five boroughs.”
The end result will be a disaster, she argues: “The overgrown college student takes for granted all the miracles of affluence and the centuries-long evolution of private institutions and public stability that undergird his privileged lifestyle. Mamdani may think that those are eternal and inevitable aspects of the world. The city will learn under his leadership that they are not.”
Read the entire piece at Spectator World.
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