The Fall of the Democratic Gatekeepers

Ride the tiger, if you dare

My latest piece in The Spectator’s print edition:

For nigh on two decades in Washington, the political right has envied the ability of the left to control its ranks and silence its extremists. As Republican consultants and donors groused about the irascible “jihadi wing” of their coalition through the Tea Party and MAGA eras, the Democrats exercised control over their far-left cohort using a combination of bribery and fear.

Given how often the pens of Washington observers hailed the masterful ability of Nancy Pelosi to herd cats, you’d think she had aspirations of transitioning from America’s best investor to the next Andrew Lloyd Webber. What was often left out of the equation was any recognition of how the fealty of the far left was achieved: through a series of gatekeeping institutions owned or funded by Democratic donors and ideologically sympathetic corporations known to the public as the media. They were the ones whose coverage could guide and determine the limits of what the party should abide, rejecting the extremes as unacceptable to the country’s voters, tolerating their fairy tales and underpants-gnome strategies to a degree of op-ed page blather – only to stomp them whenever elections got serious. There is still only one Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only exists in the public eye because she snuck up and ambushed an out of touch ten-term boomer.

It has been hard, very hard to break through the Democratic gatekeepers, who still wield power on a completely different scale than anyone on the right – but there were signs it could be done. The left’s volunteer army of socialist aspirants who were denied their hopes in 2016, 2020 and again in 2024 – when the Democratic-media complex cleared the path for Hillary, for Joe and then (shockingly) for Kamala – are finally seeing their work come to fruition. The old guard of the left, the neoliberal and corporate-friendly media which entertained extreme racial politics and environmental doomerism (so long as it didn’t hurt their bottom line) has lost control. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the experience of America’s largest and most important city.

The Democratic voters of New York rejecting a Cuomo, even one with as troubled a history as Andrew, for Zohran Mamdani, an honest-to-goodness Democratic Socialists of America member, would have been laughable under the old regime. In the run-up to his primary victory, nearly every corporate media outlet of significance spoke out against Mamdani’s brand of hammer and sickle policies – the Atlantic warned “Zohran Mamdani Won’t Make Groceries Cheaper,” CNN fretted “Do Democrats have a Zohran Mamdani problem?” and the New York Times editorial board said that, given his extreme views and lack of experience, they “do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” All for naught. The 33-year-old failed rapper, whose big idea is a network of city-run grocery stores, triumphed in the ranked-choice system.

Cuomo and the scandal-ridden incumbent Eric Adams (who eventually dropped out of the race entirely) were forced to turn to other policy positions to retain their chances. And almost as soon as Mamdani won, the Democratic establishment lost interest in his calls to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes the next time he came to the United Nations, and started to accentuate the positives. Condé Nast publications went full throttle with their glowingly soft coverage of the mayoral aspirant.

The New Yorker followed Mamdani’s Instagram-fueled glad-handing with fans at the US Open (“Zohran Talks Love and Deuce With New Friends”), Bon Appetit talked to him about the challenge of eating with his hands (“For Zohran Mamdani, Food Is Personal, Political, and Powerful”), and Vanity Fair gave him the cover treatment and compared him to JFK (“The Legend of ZOHRAN”).

Media concerns about Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky promises vanished overnight. Having failed to stop his rise, the party organs had a different job to fulfill: whitewashing his defects for a credulous public while reassuring themselves that things would still be OK.