One Score and Five
Ladies and gentlemen: it is a great pleasure to be with you tonight in the People’s Republic of New York. Two days ago the voters in their wisdom elected as mayor by a comfortable margin Zohran Mamdani—a socialist, an immigrant, a critic of Israel and of Zionism, son of a movie director and a Columbia professor of postcolonialism, the holder of a degree in “Africana Studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience extends to co-founding the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and being a backbench New York State assemblyman for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Except for being a member of Democratic Socialists of America rather than the Democratic Party, Mr. Mamdani is in every respect a worthy successor of Barack Hussein Obama as a modern-day progressive statesman.
In a book I wrote about Obama several years ago, I predicted that the Democrats’ accumulating problems, both fiscal and philosophical, would pressure them into either abandoning liberalism for socialism properly so called, or into getting out of the liberalism business altogether in favor of strongman leadership into the future, whatever the future brings. I fear that both predictions may be coming true, though not exactly as I’d foreseen. Many young progressives grow increasingly pro-socialist and in some cases even anti-American. Other leftists, and even many young reactionaries, grow increasingly post-American, that is, not exactly enemies of America but disillusioned critics of her—resigned to her best days being behind us, condemned, as they imagine it, to living ignobly with America’s betrayal of her own unrealized, or unrealizable, ideals.
However the proportions of anti-Americans to post-Americans work out, Mamdani is poised to be a leader of the new movement, and New Yorkers some of its earliest victims. So…welcome to the Red Apple, as the New York Post beat me to saying! But who knew in these strange times how many nominally right-wing think tanks and social media personalities would find themselves obsessed with visiting, and revisiting, the bizarre question whether Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler was the bad guy of the Second World War, or whether Israel or Hamas was the good guy in the latest bloody Middle Eastern wars. Why, if Harry Jaffa were alive today, as President Gerald Ford might have said, he’d be turning over in his grave. It falls to this magazine, therefore, to help to vindicate the country against its woke critics, whether on the left or on the right.
Twenty-five years of the Claremont Review of Books, which we are here to celebrate tonight, bring with them a prodigious accumulation of gratitude to our readers, subscribers, donors, publishers, writers, and editors. Let me begin by recognizing our editorial band of brothers and asking them to stand for your well-deserved applause: our indispensable managing editor John Kienker, senior editor Bill Voegeli, production editor Patrick Collins, associate editor Spencer Klavan, editorial assistant Ryan Gannon, and our contributing editors Christopher Caldwell and Christopher Flannery (Flan, due to illness, could not make it tonight, alas). In a special category all his own, permit me to offer my profound thanks to our art director of a quarter century, Elliott Banfield, whose grace and genius render each issue, and this whole evening at the Metropolitan Club, so beautiful, inspiring, and fun.
Read the rest here.
The post One Score and Five appeared first on The American Mind.