Zohran Mamdani, who once described himself as Trump's 'worst nightmare', reminded the US President that the city that 'gave rise to him' could also defeat him.
www.indiatoday.in
If people with Trump's ideology are winning elections , logically speaking it shouldn't come as a surprise people with Mamdani's populist ideology will emerge on the political scene & competitive populism on both sides of the political spectrum has been known to gravely damage the polity .
This is essentially a third world disease rarely seen till now in western democracies . The very fact you're seeing stuff like this should tell you how far politics has changed in the US .
You'd have to go back all the way to last century during The Great Depression to come across such instances & even then this was half true. Democrats under FDR favoured more public spending whereas the Republicans were staunchly opposed to it. Eventually FDRs policies saw the US out of its worst economic crisis. The present crisis seems never ending as compared to that .
This just goes to demonstrate the American Dream is over . Possibly been that way for a long time except it's manifesting itself in politics only in the recent past.
The social contract between the state & the citizens has broken down & while this has happened earlier as well like in The Great Depression , there are no leaders of the calibre of FDR to guide the American people out of this quagmire.
Seems unbelievable when you think of it but the US won the Cold War barely 3.5 decades ago & could've led the world order for at least a century if not more thereafter.
However within 3.5 decades thanks to greed , myopic policies , disastrous foreign interventions , financial profligacy aided by a currency the US could always print more of to get out of trouble , ever widening chasm between the have & have nots , political polarisation & so on , I see things only getting worse .
I don't see them collapsing any time soon but they're one major crisis away from unravelling . Let's hope the Chinese become the catalyst & both these entities cancel each other out in the bargain.
As far as Mamdani goes , I'd be very interested in his political trajectory . The more he rises , the more the US falls.
Alhamdulillah !