by Ezra Rudensky, Contributor
In mid-September, the Grape published “New York’s Mayor is Useless.” The article reflects a larger contemporary trend, which we can call “Figurehead Frustration.” It is characterized by general discontent funneled into a particular politician. “New York’s Mayor is Useless” exhibits this logic most egregiously in its conflation of interpersonal interactions between politicians with ideological integration. The article’s author writes that “Mamdani visited the White House and met with Trump and apparently they got along… what did they discover they had in common?” and later, “Mamdani has established a DOGE lookalike called COGE to cut municipal spending.” Conversations and acronyms are loose evidence compared with years-long careers that posit opposed politics. However, if we step back from particularized, personalized expressions of dissatisfaction, we can find other means of validating the broader political discontent “Figurehead Frustration” rightfully highlights.
Larger frustrations with individualized left leaders, such as Mamdani, derive in part from the problems of liberal electoral politics. Mamdani cannot fulfill all his promises because he operates through institutions composed of Republicans and centrist Democrats who will remain in office regardless of, and often despite, what New Yorkers actually want. As a politician, Mamdani must compromise with these contemporaries, but he also must contend with the roadblocks their predecessors put in place. His slow progress on rent freezes, more equitably distributed taxation, and government-run grocery stores and childcare is not a personal choice, but a bureaucratic battle against decades of New York legislation that prevents these measures from being implemented.
The rise of DSA has been widely lauded this midterm season because of its unprecedented success in the primaries, and the hope it created for change in the opposite direction. The mere presence of DSA candidates on general election ballots has already shifted the scope of nationwide political conversation. Affordability has become the basis of successful campaigning, a strategy that can be attributed to Mamdani. NASDAQ, the most tech-heavy market, dropped 5% (losing $1.8 trillion) the day after the midterms because of the anti-tech platforms of left-wing candidates who succeeded in data center-centric states such as Texas and Ohio. However, this momentum is on a promising trajectory that has already been construed as victory in the imagination of the American left. DSA members have won, but their constituents haven’t yet. Tangible legislation has not yet been written, let alone passed. Therefore, when we talk about DSA victories, we are not yet talking about material improvements in the lives of the American people.
The DSA’s rise into a party imagined as successful does not come from trust built on tangible change; it comes from trust built on promises of change. The DSA has been uniquely able to carry this trust because it has incorporated a condemnation of Israel into its party platform. This condemnation builds confidence in DSA’s morality as a party in a way the Democrats have not. It does not make sense to trust a Democratic politician to lower healthcare premiums while they actively support ethnic cleansing, because this politician is exhibiting opposite and incompatible logics. The DSA is a socialism rooted in the social demand for the morality degraded by corporate Democrats.
The DSA’s morality is not necessarily an illusion, but it also does not necessarily lead to the results it implies. I am not arguing that I have a problem with, for example, Mamdani reneging on his campaign promise to arrest Netanyahu. As described above, the DSA is fighting an uphill battle, and we must always keep this context in mind. In this case, the “uphill” was Netanyahu’s immunity as head of state, and Washington’s lack of ICC membership. However, it is interesting that Mamdani, an incredibly competent politician, likely knew this ahead of time and still made the promise. These obstacles are fairly obvious—they are not part of a Paragraph X Subsection Y Point Z technicality. Yet, for Mamdani, an ultimately empty promise was still worth making. It implies that for the American left, a promise sufficiently constitutes success.
One could argue that the promise to arrest Netanyahu raised “attention” and “awareness.” However, attention and awareness can bring political problems into discourse only by turning material reality into signs, referents, and ideas. Political promises remove politics from the tangible. The quintessential problem of American modernity is that we can construct a cohesive politics out of promises and language, not action. It is the larger Baudrillardian problem of a reality composed of signs and referents, where effects are divorced from causes, removing meaning from signs, such as political promises, that pledge to guarantee certain changes. When we live entirely enclosed in a world of discourse over action, discourse loses the compulsion and power to imply action.
The “Figurehead Frustrated” experiences the disillusionment of someone who experiences repeatedly delayed promises. Mamdani swims in these two seas, just like the rest of us. Making Mamdani the primary object of frustration not only distracts us from the more pertinent problem, but also paints Mamdani as a messiah of the left who can either win or lose completely. It is a fallacy to let Mamdani, or even the DSA as a whole, feed all our hopes and desires. However, I would like to emphasize what the author of “New York’s Mayor is Useless” wrote when he said that “politicians are insufficient” and that “the anti-ICE activity in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere shows the way forward.” We cannot be content to choose politicians as our personal avatars, connected to us because they say the right thing and trigger the right moral responses, then get butthurt when those avatars operate through bureaucratic removal, as designed. That kind of attitude will quickly sober the “Blue Tsunami” celebrations. We must localize our politics and disengage from discourse enough to engage with the world in front of us.
