Urban millennials who are worse off than their parents embrace the mayoral candidate’s zero-sum politics. But are those voters the future of the Democratic Party?
One of the most important things to understand about Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist who recently stunned the political establishment by winning the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, is that he has spent his young adult life much worse off than his parents. He knows the sting of having grown up in bourgeois comfort only to find himself scrambling to pay the rent in a less fashionable neighborhood. That experience is a major reason why he’s emerged as the darling of the millennial left, a movement defined by its sense of downward mobility.
It would have been hard for any young adult to match the accomplishments of Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, a tenured professor at Columbia University and prominent left-wing intellectual, and his mother, Mira Nair, a renowned filmmaker whose directorial debut, “Salaam Bombay!,” was released to global acclaim when she was 31. But even the children of less successful Boomers often feel as though they haven’t measured up to their parents.
Drawing on decades of IRS data, researchers at Opportunity Insights, an economic policy institute, found that among Americans born in 1940, 92% earned more than their parents at age 30. For those born in 1984, only 50% did. And that decline has political consequences.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images