Vice President J.D. Vance said during a keynote speech for the Claremont Institute on Saturday that Zohran Mamdani represents a self-contradictory coalition unified by hatred of common enemies.
"His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected," he said. "And so, their own prospects, with all the college debt, may not, in fact, be greater than those of their parents."
"We have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It's about elite disaffection and elite anger."
"That base was supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as a knife," he continued. "That, by the way, explains Mandani's bizarre appeals to foreign politics intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another."
"I was once comforted by these contradictions within the modern left," he said. "How could privileged whites march around with a straight face decrying white privilege? How could progressives pretend to love conservative Muslims, despite those Muslims' views on gender and sexuality?"
"But the answer is obvious if you think about it—and it’s a very dangerous and very sad answer: The radicals of the far left don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against."
"Let’s ask ourselves—why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu, a country whose population is about the same size as that of New York, and threatening to arrest a foreign leader if he tries to come to New York City? Why is a New York mayoral candidate attacking Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, as a war criminal? Why is he talking about globalizing the intifada?" Vance wondered. "In fact, what the hell does that even mean in Manhattan?"
"What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists?"
"It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson—or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred," Vance said. "They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November.
"This is the animating principle of the American far-left."
"That’s why Mandani himself is such an appealing instrument to the left. He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being: a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity, yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors. These views, of course, are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza."
"This guy represents that contradiction. And how can you believe in the cause of the intifada while also holding views that are completely anathema to those people?"
"And the answer is: because he’s not building a positive program. He’s not trying to build prosperity. He’s trying to tear something down."
"They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals. They are arsonists—and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match."
"His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected," he said. "And so, their own prospects, with all the college debt, may not, in fact, be greater than those of their parents."
"We have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It's about elite disaffection and elite anger."
"That base was supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as a knife," he continued. "That, by the way, explains Mandani's bizarre appeals to foreign politics intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another."
"I was once comforted by these contradictions within the modern left," he said. "How could privileged whites march around with a straight face decrying white privilege? How could progressives pretend to love conservative Muslims, despite those Muslims' views on gender and sexuality?"
"But the answer is obvious if you think about it—and it’s a very dangerous and very sad answer: The radicals of the far left don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against."
"Let’s ask ourselves—why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu, a country whose population is about the same size as that of New York, and threatening to arrest a foreign leader if he tries to come to New York City? Why is a New York mayoral candidate attacking Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, as a war criminal? Why is he talking about globalizing the intifada?" Vance wondered. "In fact, what the hell does that even mean in Manhattan?"
"What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists?"
"It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson—or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred," Vance said. "They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November.
"This is the animating principle of the American far-left."
"That’s why Mandani himself is such an appealing instrument to the left. He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being: a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity, yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors. These views, of course, are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza."
"This guy represents that contradiction. And how can you believe in the cause of the intifada while also holding views that are completely anathema to those people?"
"And the answer is: because he’s not building a positive program. He’s not trying to build prosperity. He’s trying to tear something down."
"They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals. They are arsonists—and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match."
VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE: Before I talk about our positive vision and a particular theme that I care about, I think it's worth reflecting on the American left in 2025. Because if you're anything like me, I was very optimistic that the left had had such a beating in the 2024 elections that they might have a come-to-Jesus moment. They might look around and say, “You know, maybe the American people are not going to go for grown men beating up women in girls’ sports. Maybe the American people are not going to go for a wide open southern border that has allowed tens of millions of people to come into our country, undercutting the wages of American workers and of course making our society much less safe.”
Maybe the American left will realize that they have to change course and change directions. But I think that we've learned, if anything, over the last six months, that Trump Derangement Syndrome—that incredibly terminal and dangerous disease—is perhaps more virulent than ever among the American Democrats in the midpoint of the first year of President Trump's second term.
Now, last week, as has become sort of the main political story over the last couple of weeks, a 33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign beat a multi-million dollar establishment machine politician in the New York Democratic mayoral primary.
I don't want to harp too much on a municipal election, but there were two interesting threads that I think came out of Mandani's victory that I think are worth us understanding, because they're reflective of where the broader American left is at this moment in time.
The first is that it drives home just how much the voters in each of the respective parties have changed. If our victory—if President Trump's victory in 2024—was rooted in a broad working and middle class coalition, Mandani's coalition is almost the inverse of that. If you look at his electoral performance precinct by precinct, what you see is a left that has completely left behind the broad middle of the United States of America.
This is a guy who won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers, especially young, highly educated New Yorkers. But he was weakest among Black voters and weakest among those without a college degree. That's an interesting coalition. Maybe it works in the New York Democratic primary. I don't think it works particularly well in the United States at large.
He did particularly well in the Bangladeshi areas of New York, but he did particularly poorly with non-Bangladeshi Asian immigrants, particularly Chinese Americans. If you look at the precincts where he did the best, it was in New York’s gentrifying neighborhoods—places like Ridgewood and Bushwick—places I haven’t heard anything about but I read about in a paper.
His victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected. And so, their own prospects, with all the college debt, may not, in fact, be greater than those of their parents. I say that not to criticize them, because I think we should care about all the people in our country—particularly those downwardly mobile, college-educated people who feel like the American Dream is not quite all it's cracked up to be.
But we have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It's about elite disaffection and elite anger. The party of highly educated but downwardly mobile elites—they comprise a highly energetic activist base. But it's important because it's not just the elites, the college-educated New Yorkers. That base was supplemented by carefully selected ethnic blocs carved out of the electorate using identity politics as the knife.
That, by the way, explains Mandani's bizarre appeals to foreign politics intended to signal to one particular group of New Yorkers or another.
Well, let’s ask ourselves—why is a mayoral candidate in our nation’s biggest city whining about banning Bibi Netanyahu, a country whose population is about the same size as that of New York, and threatening to arrest a foreign leader if he tries to come to New York City? Why is a New York mayoral candidate attacking Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, as a war criminal? Why is he talking about globalizing the intifada?
In fact, what the hell does that even mean in Manhattan?
But what might seem like a contradiction makes a little bit of sense if you peel back the onion. Consider a movement that rails against the billionaire class—despite the fact that the billionaire class remains firmly in the quarter of the modern left. A movement that idolizes foreign religions even as it rejects the teachings of those faiths. It rails—this new modern left—against white people, even as many of its funders and grassroots activists are privileged whites themselves.
Now, I may not speak for many of you, but I was once comforted by these contradictions within the modern left. How could privileged whites march around with a straight face decrying white privilege? How could progressives pretend to love conservative Muslims, despite those Muslims' views on gender and sexuality?
But the answer is obvious if you think about it—and it’s a very dangerous and very sad answer.
The radicals of the far left don’t need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against.
What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists?
It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson—or even of Karl Marx.
It’s hatred.
They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that president of the United States in the last election in November.
This is the animating principle of the American far-left.
Now to be clear, it isn’t true of most of the people who vote for Democrats. Most of the people who vote for Democrats—they’re good people struggling to get by, even if we think that they’re misguided in their political judgment. But pay close attention to what the leadership of this movement says outside of the glossy campaign ads and outside of the general-election-tested messaging themes. It’s obvious what animates the leadership of the modern Democratic Party.
The far left doesn’t care that BLM—the Black Lives Matter movement—led to a spike in violent crime in urban Black neighborhoods. And it did.
Because that same movement also led to anarchy in middle-class white neighborhoods.
They do not care that Islamism hates gays and subjugates women—because for now, it’s a useful tool of death against Americans.
And they don’t care that too many pharma companies are getting rich from experimental hormonal therapies—because in the process, they’re destroying the so-called gender binary that has structured social relations between the sexes for the whole of Western civilization.
And they certainly don’t care that deporting low-wage immigrants will raise the wages of the native-born—because they don’t mean to create higher living standards for those who are born and raised here, whether they’re Black, white, or any other skin color.
They mean to replace those people with people who will listen to their increasingly bizarre ethnic and religious appeals.
They are arsonists—and they will make common cause with anyone willing to light the match.
And that’s why Mandani himself is such an appealing instrument to the left. He captures so many of the movement’s apparent contradictions in a single human being: a guy who describes the Palestinian cause as central to his identity, yet holds views like abortion on demand or using taxpayer-funded money to fund transgender surgeries for minors. These views, of course, are completely incomprehensible on the streets of Gaza.
This guy represents that contradiction. And how can you believe in the cause of the intifada while also holding views that are completely anathema to those people?
And the answer is: because he’s not building a positive program. He’s not trying to build prosperity. He’s trying to tear something down. And he’s very effective at articulating all of the things that the far left hates in modern America.
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