elections

The Ballad of Zohran’s Surrender: Why New York’s Radical Mayor Had to Kiss the Ring Before He Even Got It

by damagecollateral

Zohran and Alex Soros after the win. Reassurance!

There’s a beautiful irony in Zohran Mamdani’s victory that should make every American pause and wonder what democracy actually means anymore. Here’s a guy who just won the New York City mayoral race on the back of 40,000 small-dollar donors, who explicitly ran against the billionaire class, who faced a coordinated $40 million assault from plutocrats like Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb—and won anyway. A real David-versus-Goliath story, right?

Wrong. Because, no matter how many lefties cry “sell out”, the political reality is this: even after slaying Goliath, David still has to go meet with Goliath’s family in their Rockefeller Center offices and promise to play nice. A mayor is not a congressman whose job is to speak and write laws; a mayor is an executive position, and you need so many people to cooperate after you win if you’re going to pull off the mayor thing.

Welcome to 21st-century American politics, where you can win every vote that matters and still lose the only war that counts.

The Surrender Meetings

In mid-July, before he’d even formally secured his general election victory, Mamdani found himself sitting in a conference room organized by the Partnership for New York City—a glorified billionaires’ club masquerading as a civic organization—facing roughly 100 CEOs. These weren’t just any business leaders. These were representatives of the same financial titans who’d spent record amounts trying to destroy him.

What happened in that room tells you everything you need to know about the limits of electoral democracy in America.

According to reports, Mamdani softened his stance on “globalizing the intifada”—a phrase he’d previously defended on free speech grounds—telling the assembled executives he would now “discourage” its use. The man who’d built his entire brand on not backing down from principle was now carefully walking back positions to appease people who literally bankrolled his opposition.

But here’s the thing: He had no choice.

The Invisible Veto

Most Americans think the mayor of New York City is powerful. They’re right—sort of. The mayor controls a $100 billion budget, commands the nation’s largest police force, and oversees services for 8 million people. On paper, it’s one of the most consequential elected positions in America.

In practice? The mayor is a middle manager answering to landlords, developers, financiers, and CEOs who can’t be voted out.

Consider the arsenal of weapons New York’s wealthy have at their disposal:

Economic Terrorism: Real estate developers can simply stop building. Financial firms can threaten to relocate (and some already are—Florida business leaders are literally preparing welcome packets). When you’re sitting on billions in capital, you have the power to make elected officials suffer for policies you don’t like. One real estate lender already put New York projects on hold until after the election. That’s not business—that’s blackmail with a McKinsey presentation deck.

Legal Warfare: The rich don’t just have lawyers; they have entire law firms on retainer. They can tie up every initiative Mamdani proposes in litigation for years. Want to freeze rents? See you in court for the next five years while landlords bleed the city dry. Want to raise taxes? Better hope you enjoy depositions.

Media Capture: The New York Times—that bastion of liberal journalism—ran an editorial board piece essentially telling voters not to rank Mamdani. They later published a story using hacked documents from a self-described race scientist to question Mamdani’s college application from 15 years ago. The Post called him a “menace.” When the city’s major papers are working overtime to delegitimize you, you’re not just fighting an opponent—you’re fighting an entire apparatus.

Political Gatekeeping: After Mamdani won the primary, watch what happened: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held off endorsing. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stayed silent. Governor Kathy Hochul—who he’d need to pass any tax increases—waited. These aren’t personal slights. They’re institutional reminders of who really runs things.

The State Legislature Choke Point: Here’s the kicker that seals the deal: Nearly every major policy Mamdani wants to enact—taxing the wealthy, raising corporate rates, freezing rents—requires approval from Albany. The city council can’t just pass these things. The mayor can’t decree them. They need the state legislature and the governor to sign off.

Guess who has more influence with state legislators than a freshman mayor? The same business interests now demanding meetings.

The Realpolitik of Revolution

So why did Mamdani take those meetings? Why soften his language? Why tell business leaders he wants “partnership”?

Because he understands something that armchair revolutionaries on Twitter don’t: Martyrdom is cheap, governing is expensive.

Imagine Mamdani had refused to meet with business leaders. Imagine he’d doubled down on every position, told the CEOs to pound sand, and tried to govern as a pure ideologue. Here’s what would happen:

Year One: Every major development project gets canceled or moved. Real estate investment in the city plummets. Tax revenue drops. The budget crisis that exists becomes a budget catastrophe.

Year Two: Hochul and the state legislature—under intense pressure from business lobbyists—refuse to pass any of Mamdani’s tax proposals. They might even pass laws limiting what the city can do. The city council, seeing which way the wind blows, starts defecting from his agenda.

Year Three: The media narrative becomes “Mamdani’s Failed Experiment.” Every pothole, every delayed subway, every closed business gets blamed on the socialist mayor who scared away job creators. Fox News runs segments daily. The Times publishes concerned long-reads about the flight of talent and capital.

Year Four: A well-funded challenger emerges. Someone “reasonable.” Someone who “understands business.” The same billionaires who couldn’t beat Mamdani in 2025 spend $100 million to beat him in 2029. And they win.

Revolution without power is just performance art. Mamdani gets this.

The Trap Within the Trap

But here’s where it gets really insidious. By forcing Mamdani to moderate before he even takes office, the wealthy elite accomplishes something more valuable than just defeating him: They prove the system works.

Think about it. When a democratic socialist with massive grassroots support, funded by small donors, running explicitly against billionaire power, wins an election—and then immediately has to start negotiating with and placating the same billionaires he ran against—what message does that send?

It tells every future progressive candidate: You can win, but winning the most votes is not enough to translate your vision into reality.

It tells voters: Your vote matters, but only within parameters set by people you never get to vote on.

It tells the billionaire class: You’re safe. The system is safe. Democracy is just a pressure valve, not a threat.

This is the genius of modern American oligarchy. It doesn’t need to cancel elections or jail dissidents. It just needs to make clear that elections only determine who manages the empire, not whether the empire continues to exist.

The Impossible Position

So what was Mamdani supposed to do?

He could have refused to moderate, stuck to every principle, and watch his mayoralty collapse under the weight of economic sabotage and political isolation. He’d go down in history as a brave failure, memorialized in folk songs and graduate seminars about the limits of municipal socialism.

Or he could do what he’s doing: Take the meetings. Soften the language. Build relationships with people who hate what he represents. Work within the system he hoped to change. Try to deliver whatever incremental improvements he can while the billionaires hold a gun to the city’s economy.

It’s not a choice between revolution and surrender. It’s a choice between different flavors of defeat.

The real question isn’t why Mamdani was meeting with CEOs and moderating his message. The real question is why we have a system where someone who just won a democratic election had to negotiate the terms of his surrender with people who were never on the ballot.

The Lesson

Mamdani’s victory proves something important: You can beat the billionaires at the ballot box. The $40 million they spent against him failed. The media campaigns failed. The smears failed. Democracy, in the narrow sense of counting votes, actually worked.

But his randezvous with the powerful proves something more important: Beating them at the ballot box isn’t enough.

The real power in America doesn’t stand for election. It doesn’t need your vote. It just needs you to need something it controls—capital, credit, jobs, investment, development, tax approval. And if you want access to any of that, you’ll come to the table and negotiate.

Zohran Mamdani won the race for mayor of New York City. But he’s discovering what every democratic socialist before him has learned: In America, you can win the election.

You just can’t win.

If Dems Will Ever Earn My Vote, The First Step Is To STFU

by damagecollateral
Winning…

There’s a particular genre of political masochism I’ve been watching lately that deserves its own category in the DSM. Call it Electoral Tourette’s Syndrome, or maybe just advanced Brand Damage Fetishism. Whatever the clinical term, the Democratic Party has it. Bad.

Look, I get it. The party establishment’s position on Gaza has been, to put it mildly, positively atrocious. Senator Cory Booker—who someone brilliantly nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur” and the universe it still laughing about that—is hardly alone. The whole apparatus has been galactically, catastrophically wrong on this issue, in ways that make their base want to claw their eyes out.

But here’s the thing that really gets me: it’s not just that they’re wrong. It’s that they can’t stop yapping to world how wrong they are, at precisely the moments when shutting up would be the politically savvy move. It’s like watching someone methodically shoot themselves in each foot, then reload and go for the kneecaps.

Take Hillary Clinton. Back in May 2024—when Biden was still the candidate and the party desperately needed to contain the Gaza backlash—Hillary decided to go on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and deliver a lecture to student protesters.

“They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” she told Joe Scarborough. She claimed that under her husband’s administration, “an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96% of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4% of Israel to be given to reach 100% of the amount of territory that was hoped for.”

“If Yasser Arafat had accepted it, there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years,” she insisted, calling it “one of the great tragedies of history.”

Never mind that this narrative has been thoroughly debunked by actual negotiators who were in the room—including Robert Malley from Clinton’s own administration. As Professor Osamah F. Khalil of Syracuse University noted, “For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous.” He pointed out that Arafat had warned Bill Clinton before Camp David “that the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale.”

The real question is: why say this now? Campus protests were erupting across the country. The party’s position on Gaza was already hemorrhaging votes. You’ve got students getting brutalized by police for protesting a genocide your party is funding.

What was the strategic thinking? “You know what will help? If I remind everyone that our party’s foreign policy blob has the same tired talking points they’ve had since Camp David!” Brilliant. Chef’s kiss. Really winning hearts and minds.

The response was swift. Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, which has a substantial Arab and Muslim population, said the city’s “young people” were not taking kindly to being lectured.

But wait—it gets better.

Fast forward to late October. Kamala’s now the candidate, desperately trying to hold Michigan—a swing state with the largest Arab-American population in the country. She’s already hemorrhaging support because of Gaza. The campaign knows this. Everyone knows this.

So Bill Clinton emerges from whatever Epstein-memorial crypt he’s been hiding in, and Good Lord. The man goes full Zionist-ideologue mode, so extreme that he doesn’t just torpedo Kamala—he retroactively destroys his own legacy. Suddenly everyone’s remembering that the Oslo Accords were overseen by this guy, this ghoul who apparently thinks Palestinians deserve whatever happens to them. The “peace process” is revealed as the sham it always was, because of course it was—look who was running it!

“The hardest issue here in Michigan is the Middle East,” Clinton, 78, shakily told the crowd at a “Souls to the Polls” event. “I understand why young Palestinians and Arab Americans here in Michigan think too many people have died. I get that.”

But of course, there’s always a “but.”

“Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself,” Clinton blurted.

Clinton wasn’t done. He decided to deploy the ultimate historical argument: “I got news for [Hamas]—[Israelis] were there first, before their faith existed,” The Times of Israel he said, referring to Islam. You know, just casually erasing the entire existence of Palestinians as a people who’ve lived on that land for thousands of years.

The reaction was swift and brutal. Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr said it is “baffling” how out of touch the Harris campaign is. “It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting than what Bill Clinton said about us. He invoked the oldest Zionist tropes in some bizarre effort to convince us to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn—the US’s first Arab-majority city—told Al Jazeera: “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating.” As one analysis put it, Clinton “appeared to suggest that they’re wrong to be outraged by the catastrophic death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Social media erupted, with journalist Sana Saeed calling it “one of the most horrific genocidal diatribes a U.S. leader has gone on in decades.”

Xavier Abu Eid, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, wrote: “Clinton is concluding what he started in Camp David, July 2000, where he adopted Israeli positions and blamed Palestinians for not accepting them. Don’t know what he had in mind, but this isn’t going to help the Harris campaign add a single vote from Arab Americans.”

And again: why? This was one week before the election. In Michigan. Speaking to Arab Americans. People were desperately searching for reasons to believe Democrats weren’t as monstrous on Gaza as they appeared. He could have lied! Many would have believed him! But nope—he had to make it crystal clear that when it comes to Palestine, Democrats are just Republicans with pronouns.

The pattern was everywhere. Pro-Palestine voices banned from the DNC. A Muslim delegate literally kicked out of a campaign event—not for protesting, just for.. existing while Muslim, I guess? And then—and then—Kamala skips Dearborn, Michigan entirely. The largest Arab-American city in the country. In a swing state. During a razor-thin election.

The message couldn’t be clearer: “We dare you not to vote for us. We’re actively testing how little self-respect you have.” So when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Harris rally in Detroit by simply stating they “won’t vote for genocide,” she shut them up with her catchphrase, “I’m speaking”. Even with polling data showing “growing support for Trump among Arab American voters in Michigan, with many citing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s stance on Middle Eastern conflicts as a primary factor”, the Democrats saw it coming and just… kept going.

So Trump wins, and—wouldn’t you guess? The post-election discourse from the Democratic establishment wasn’t much better. We’re talking photo-ops with Netanyahu, several visits to Israel by Congressmen, the hilariously names “50 States, One Israel” event where 250 states legislators went to Israel, many of whom were Democrats. Not only that, but to ensure not being outdone by future political flubs, freaking Pete Buttigieg decides to repeat atrocity propaganda about October 7th “babies in ovens”—lies that were debunked over and over for two whole years, even by Israeli media itself. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they’re trying to be funny.

I’ve covered a lot of political self-destruction over the years. I’ve seen parties implode, candidates crater, movements eat themselves alive. But this? This suicide-by-megaphone routine the Democrats are running on Gaza? I’ve never seen anything quite like this shutting up handicap.

Someone please explain what I’m missing. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a party that would rather lose elections than stop telling pro-Palestine voters to go fondle themselves.

And they wonder why people won’t vote for them.