Whoever is elected New York City mayor in November, Zohran Mamdani’s impressive win this week in the Democratic mayoral primary marks a breaking point in the party, the city and US society as a whole.
A red anti-Israel activist as next mayor of New York? In the cradle of capitalism and the largest diaspora city in the world? It may still be unlikely but the meteoric rise of New York assemblyman, 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, tells us much about the potential of the redistributionist Left not only in America but across the West.
One might not easily associate Donald Trump with Otto von Bismarck. Yet like the Iron Chancellor, who was famous for embracing the realpolitik of “blood and steel” in forging the German Empire, Trump has found his own formula — based largely on America’s tech savvy and energy abundance — to intimidate enemies and control friends.
Gavin Newsom has changed direction once again. After a brief feint as a Maga-whispering moderate, California’s governor has “woken up” in the wake of the LA immigration riots to become the self-anointed leader of the anti-Trump #Resistance.
The deepening split between Elon Musk and the Trump administration speaks to broader divisions within an increasingly shell-shocked GOP. Musk, who left the White House only last week, has since denounced Donald Trump’s hodgepodge budget bill – the so-called Big Beautiful Bill – as a ‘disgusting abomination’, as it will add almost $4 trillion to the federal deficit. He had previously called Trump’s pro-tariff chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, a ‘moron’, reflecting the gulf between the populists and the oligarchs in the MAGA coalition. Oligarchs, whatever their party, do not favour tariffs, curbing immigration or raising taxes on themselves.
It turns out that this incoherence, married to one-man rule under Trump, has consequences. MAGA is a coalition based largely on a shared detestation of the ‘progressive’ agenda, but it has little else in common. It includes people concerned about free speech and anti-Semitism, as well as Christian humanists. And it also contains deeply troubling elements that appeal to a stew of authoritarian, nativist, racist and anti-Semitic ideas – tropes long peddled and platformed by Trump supporters such as the pro-monarchist Curtis Yarvin and the ubiquitous, ever-ugly Tucker Carlson.
Not surprisingly, the broader base that elected Trump is now fracturing into its constituent parts. This is not to say that there has been a shift to the self-righteous and rightfully ignored ‘Never Trumpers’ in the GOP. Nor have Republicans suddenly embraced the leftist meme that Trump is a ‘fascist’ with a plan. He is nothing of the sort: lacking any real ideology or disciplined movement capable of advancing a particular programme.
In essence, Trump is a grifting narcissist with a keen sense of how to take advantage of the sustained imbecility of his opponents. But there is no fixed core to Trumpism – only impulses more expected from a toddler with ADHD than a presidential administration. He may have been a builder in his past career, but he appears clueless when it comes to constructing a clear policy agenda beyond revanchism and grift.
This incoherence is now undermining his own coalition. The tariff blitzkrieg, for instance, could be seen as justified in response to the undoubted mercantilism of Canada, the EU and, above all, China. Yet instead of leading to concessions from other countries, the chaotic rollout of the tariffs has the potential to paralyse large swathes of the US economy, including the all-important auto industry – winning few allies beyond a handful of labour-union leaders, many of whom will probably never support him anyway.
One can feel the wheels coming off, as many of the key constituencies that elected both Trump and the GOP Congress resist his impetuosity and persistent dishonesty. Like most political movements, MAGA is a fragile alliance of groups that often have little in common – and in some cases, loathe each other. This is already evident in the widening chasm between Trump’s tech bros, who favour cutting government spending and care chiefly about personal enrichment, and the working- and middle-class voters who twice put him in the White House.
Beyond the loss of Musk, whose support was crucial to his 2024 electoral success, Trump is slowly dissolving one key alliance after another. One critical rupture has occurred with traditional, small-government conservatives, epitomised by the Federalist Society, which played a pivotal role in judicial appointments in Trump’s first term. As strict constitutionalists, they are naturally sceptical of Trump’s federal power grabs. In the future, he is more likely to appoint not principled conservatives but the kind of partisan hacks found in the district courts of blue states – or worse, the judges of the People’s Courts in socialist regimes.
Read the rest of this piece at: Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Elon Musk speaks at 2025 CPAC, by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests. Overall, the greens see China as “pivotal” in the global green-energy transition, as states Sustainability Magazine.
Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction from the Trump administration. But it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the state’s increasingly dependent relationship with China. Read more
In American politics, the main beneficiaries of “dark money” have in recent years tended to be Democrats. Google representatives were reported to have visited the White House at least 427 times during Barack Obama’s two terms. And in 2024, big spenders like Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Alex Soros, James Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, and various donors from Wall Street helped Kamala Harris raise over US$1.5 billion for her campaign, the highest figure in history. This may be starting to change, as a number of powerful Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have shifted their money to the populist Republican Party.
However, political shifts like these are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture. In recent decades, the influence of billionaires on both of America’s two main political parties has grown. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which essentially ended any meaningful control over campaign spending, only accelerated this trend. In 2024, election spending, in real dollars, is estimated to have been more than twice what it was two decades ago.
Political shifts…are less important than the unprecedented degree of control that a handful of people and institutions enjoy over our communications, finances, consumer choices, and culture.
According to Pew Research, eighty percent of Americans now believe that wealthy donors have too much power, and they are right. Google and Apple account for nearly ninety percent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft, Android (Google), and iOS (Apple) account for roughly the same share of all operating-system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertising revenue, which in turn accounts for the vast majority of all ad sales. To find historic parallels for this kind of dominance, you have to go back to the Gilded Age, an era of money men and monopolists that lasted from about 1870 until the early 1900s.
The rise of very wealthy liberal tech entrepreneurs caused many commentators on the Right to worry that American politics would soon be dominated by an alliance of the Democratic Party and major tech firms such Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. That convergence of interests, they feared, would impose a radical progressive agenda on much of America and close down dissent across the internet and social media. Even the ex-wives, siblings, and children of tech oligarchs were now accruing enough money to become reliable funders of the Left’s agenda.
Read the rest of this piece at: Quillette.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: screenshot of front row at 2025 Trump inauguration, via YouTube.
Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants to create a movement that controlled the world’s biggest country for seven decades. Read more
As with many political movements, MAGA represents a fragile coalition of groups that often have little in common — and, at the extremes, may even detest one another.
This tension has been brought into clearer focus by Trump’s recent exemption of tech products from tariffs, a decision likely influenced by the oligarchs in the President’s corner. After all, firms like Apple depend largely on Chinese manufacturers, while Wall Street investors still see the Middle Kingdom as a potential source of future profits. In contrast, smaller firms — such as those who import toys or furniture —enjoy no such protection.
Clearly, the tariff proposals are far less popular than Trump’s moves on such things as the border, gender and the crackdown on universities. Indeed, tariffs are opposed by most Americans and are clearly eroding his support base even as many back protecting US manufacturing.
It is too early to see the impact of tariffs on ordinary people, but it’s not hard to see that higher prices for household utensils, clothing and even food are likely to affect them. Perhaps most disruptive will be the cost of imported cars — a mainstay of many families — which could rise several thousand dollars. Inflation did much to undermine Biden’s Administration, and Trump could suffer a similar fate.
Of course, these exemptions might be mitigated over time as companies adjust to domestic manufacturing or even break their dependency on China. Some companies — such as Nvidia — are already responding by promising to build up to $500 billion worth of artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US over the next four years. The problem, though, may be timing; it takes three to five years to build a new semiconductor plant, and the results may not be felt for several more.
Nevertheless, with these exemptions, Trump risks appearing as though he is giving preferential treatment to his wealthy donors. In theory, this should provide an opening for Democrats. Trump’s great achievement over the last decade has been to win over working-class voters; for the first time in decades, Americans are more likely to identify the GOP with the people than the Democrats. But Trump’s polling on his handling of the economy — a proxy for tariffs — is now underwater, and the Democrats have an opportunity to reassert themselves as the party of common sense.
Read the rest of this piece: UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: White House, Public Domain.
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