Zohran Mamdani's win in the NYC democratic mayoral primary has been filled with deflections and pivots so that politicians and pundits don't have to focus on the core issues he's talking about. The left has a path worth considering. The democratic establishment is, for the most part, refusing to endorse him. Derek wonders if the rest of the left can avoid similar traps.
Show Notes
Globesonic On the Pier: 8 Years in NYC
Globesonic Sound System 5 Years On The Hudson River
The Cause That Turned Idealists Into Authoritarian Zealots
Why I Just Quit DSA
Ocasio-Cortez Loses the Democratic Socialists’ Endorsement Over Israel
Status of DSA National Endorsement for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez
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Zoron Mumdani's win in the Democratic primary is making me miss living in New York City.
I lived under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, and look, New York is New York.
There are so, so many communities living under this umbrella.
My 12 years in the city, after growing up 30 miles outside of it, predominantly involved being part of the world music scene and the yoga community.
As I said on Thursday's episode, New York is distinct in terms of its communities, meaning it's not like one big kumbaya party.
Yet it also forces you to grapple with tons of people from everywhere in the world all the time.
That's what I miss most about living there.
This is Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspirituality Bonus episode.
And I've been thinking about Momdani's victory for a lot of reasons.
I love how he's approaching this campaign.
I do agree with the majority of his politics, and I think he's the right person at the right time for a party that really needs some fresh energy.
I'm also aware of how easy it is to get charmed by charisma, given that's what we cover on this podcast in the wellness world.
I'm not fanatical, and I do have some critiques, but more importantly, I just think it's about time because democratic leadership is not cutting it right now.
I'm going to get personal before I spend most of this episode looking at the political.
After moving to New York, I ended up deep in the world music scene.
I worked as managing editor of a world music magazine and produced three albums and four EPs as one half of Earthrise Sound System.
But the most New York memory I have is from my decade plus as part of the DJ collective Globesonic.
Every summer for 10 years, we held monthly Globesonic on the Hudson parties on Pier I in the Upper West Side.
Up to 7,000 people showed up to these events where we spun African, Middle Eastern, dub, Latin, basically every genre on the planet that moves people.
I love the diversity of the crowd.
New York embraces people from everywhere, and people from everywhere showed up to these parties.
I've included a few videos in the show notes if you want to check out the vibe from back then.
I'm also always hesitant to overly romanticize the city or really anywhere, because every neighborhood is its own culture.
It's not like you're immersed in everything all the time, but the fact that all exist in close proximity and that you're inevitably going to be exposed to a dozen languages on every subway ride is a wonderful thing.
I'll also admit I was a little too enthusiastic in my 20s.
I was steeped in world music, interviewing hundreds of artists from around the world, reviewing and photographing multiple shows a week, touring as a DJ embedded in many cultures through the shared language of music.
I did, and I still do, believe in the transformative power of music.
As Globesonic, we put together an electronic press kit during our eighth summer on the Hudson, and you can hear my optimism.
I truly believe the country was moving in the right direction when it came to acceptance of people from elsewhere.
The audio mix isn't great, but you'll catch the gist here.
This is the future of what America is going to look like, whether people like it or not.
So we should rather make it a party and celebrate and learn to share and understand one another, or else we're only going to go further and further down the rabbit hole.
I don't think I was wrong as it is what America looks like, but I was a little too optimistic in thinking that most Americans would want it to look like that.
Here's the irony, and this video is also linked in the show notes if you want to see the visual.
In that video, even in that clip you heard, at first you see the dancers on the pier, then it cuts to me talking to the camera.
As soon as I'm done talking, I cut to a shot at what we all looked at all of those years from the pier.
Up on the hill, there sits Trump Tower staring over us like the fucking Death Star.
Pier I is off 72nd Street, right down a ramp to the water, and I can see the irony so clearly now.
There we were, a Muslim, my friend Fabian, a Jew, Bill, and then myself, an atheist, spinning music from every country on the planet with people from every country congregating for the shared experience of dance.
And in the background, the entire time is a sleeping giant that hates everything going on.
I'm not being hyperbolic either.
Every summer, residents from Trump Tower would complain about the noise, even though it was city-sponsored and they knew it was coming up.
There were many events there, even though we knew they could not hear us from where they were, because we would hear the music up on the top of the hill and you can't hear it there.
Someone just didn't like so many diverse people collecting on the pier listening to a range of music in a number of languages, and I have to wonder who was making those phone calls now.
I will always love New York City, and I love that Zoran Mamdani might finally be a face and voice that literally represents what the city is.
This bonus episode is not a critique of him.
While I don't have a political party, my politics most closely align with his party, Democratic Socialists.
What I want to discuss today is how that party, and more broadly the left, stands to hurt itself with this campaign.
And to be super clear, I don't mean Mamdani's campaign specifically.
I think he's doing a good job.
But his campaign has become a bellwether for liberal and leftist politics broadly, and the downstream effects can possibly be more divisive than unifying.
Let's get into it.
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