Zohran & the pathway to progress

Zohran Mamdani has just been elected Mayor of New York. It's an interesting moment as he is both Muslim and radically leftist in his politics. 

Zohran Mamdani

An Australian political analyst, Kos Samaris, has published a newspaper article on Mamdani's victory, which is interesting for what it suggests about the liberal understanding of progress.

Samaris recognises that the two party system is fragmenting. He sees one group of older voters as turning toward right-wing populism and another group of younger voters as turning toward left-wing politicians like Mamdani. Samaris believes that the left turn is the way of the future.

Look at how Samaris characterises the right turn:

...conservatives who think they’ve found their answer in Trump and Reform UK are catastrophically misreading the landscape. Yes, right-wing populism has grown. But look where: outside big cities, in declining towns, among much older angry voters watching their world disappear. Trump and Reform succeeded by harvesting the rage of Boomers and older Gen X in exurban and rural areas, places losing population and economic wealth.

Why does Samaris present this so unsympathetically? It is because he shares the liberal understanding of progress. Progress, for liberals, includes discontinuity and deracination (or rootlessness). Liberals have a faith that in bulldozing the past, in an act of creative destruction, you clear the way for the intended future of humanity. In this future there will be a universal system, in which deracinated individuals will act within the settings of a global economy, of universal rights, of an international political system and of their own individual identities existing within one universal human community.

That is why Samaris can so easily accept the idea of a certain generation of people watching their own worlds disappearing. In the liberal mindset, this is supposed to happen. This is the clearing away of the past that allows for the bright tomorrow. There is an acknowledgement that there will be upset along the way - but no real sympathy and certainly no regret.

And this is how Samaris characterises the left turn:

Gen Z’s left-wing response to establishment failure is concentrated where the future is being built: in cities, in diverse communities, in places experiencing economic and population growth.

Unlike the older voters Trump and Reform captured, Gen Z refuses to blame immigrants or minorities for their economic exclusion. They are the first truly post-national generation, digitally connected to the world, comfortable with diversity, and deeply sceptical of nationalist rhetoric.

They identify that the landlord pricing them out of housing and the property developer sitting on land banks are local elites, not foreign workers. When conservatives try to redirect economic anxiety toward xenophobia – the playbook that worked brilliantly with older voters – Gen Z simply doesn’t buy it.

This explains the split in populist movements. Older voters in declining regions embraced economic nationalism fused with cultural backlash because their lived experience was of stable communities disrupted by change. Gen Z in growing cities experiences economic exclusion within diversity – their problem isn’t cultural disruption but wealth concentration by their own established elite.

For Samaris, the left turn is about rejecting the nation, being digitally connected to the world, accepting economic globalisation, and accepting "diversity" (which here means not having local forms of connectedness - not experiencing the stable communities and the communal culture that the older generations grew up with). 

As it happens, Samaris is not entirely right in suggesting that the younger generations are all orienting to the left. Right now the majority of young men in the UK support Reform and the majority of young men in the USA voted Trump. It is true that young women are pivoting left, but we will have to see if that lasts.

How popular is the idea of liberal progress? My feeling is that most people do not share the liberal concept of progress. It's common on social media to see posts about aspects of life that were better in the past and that should have been retained - this is a very un-liberal take. However, the liberal view is still very influential because it is strong in the corridors of power. We do still need to find ways to bring it more clearly into the light of day and to subject it to criticism. 

What are some examples of the liberal concept? I'm reminded, for instance, of the views of former Australian Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser. Back in the 1970s and 80s, he was criticised by the left as being an arch-conservative. But he was nothing of the sort. He held to a liberal view of progress and was therefore radical in his politics, not conservative. In 1968, Fraser gave a speech in which he noted that one Australian university, as an entrance requirement, "recognises the following languages - French, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Japanese". He criticised this selection by claiming that "the list as a whole is one belonging to the last century except for one of the languages mentioned". 

What Fraser is saying is that only Japanese was relevant to the Australia of the twentieth century, that the European languages represented a defunct Australia belonging to the 1800s. That was an extraordinary thing to say in 1968. It shows the degree to which he was willing to bury the culture of his own nation, to declare it finished in order to move on to something else, something more international. There was no sense in his own mind that there might be some sort of cultural continuity, or that Australia might have its own national culture worthy of conserving, or that people might need a stable form of community from which to derive a sense of connectedness. 

I'd note as well that the way to oppose liberal progress is not to reject the concept of progress in general. Any living tradition needs to be dynamic. It needs to respond to the challenges and the opportunities of its own time. And, like an individual person, it should always seek to develop and to improve. Just like an individual person, it is subject to the laws of entropy, so that a mere passivity is likely to lead to a gradual disintegration and decline. 

Not everyone on the left is committed to a liberal notion of progress. In the UK there are figures associated with the Blue Labour movement. The writer Paul Kingsnorth is also a prominent figure on the left who has written critically about the trend toward placelessness and globalisation in books such as One No, Many Yeses. Kingsnorth seems to recognise that liberal concepts of progress reduce the ontic triad of God, Man and Nature to just Man alone.

To try to clarify some of the distinctions I am trying to draw, I offer the following chart:

Liberal view of transformative progress

Conservative view of progress

A politics of discontinuity: bulldoze the past to clear a way to the future. Radical vision of a New Man morally transformed through universal solidarities. Rejection of the parochial and national.   Diversity understood to mean a multiplicity of individual identities at the local level.   Emphasis on participation in a global economy, on quantitative economic growth, on mobility in the pursuit of economic self-interest.

A politics of continuity: retain rootedness within given traditions, even as these adapt to new conditions and challenges. Vision of man embedded within a series of outwardly radiating communities, from which are derived identity, belonging, thick bonds of attachment, and social commitments. Diversity understood to mean a multiplicity of regional and national cultures, with each community existing in place and therefore viable through time. Loyalty to local and national economic interests; a commitment to people and place.