Vice President JD Vance delivered a blistering indictment of the Democrats’ New York City mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, earlier this month. Speaking at Claremont Institute, Vance reflected on the Democratic Party‘s 2025 state, noting its apparent sprint leftward despite last November’s drubbing.
Mamdani, a millennial socialist, embodies the party’s spiral into faculty lounge extremism. He quotes Karl Marx verbatim: In 2020, he tweeted, “Each according to their need, each according to their ability.” In a 2021 interview, he cited “seizing the means of production” as an “end goal.” He advocates defunding the police and balks at American exceptionalism.
At Claremont, Vance delighted in skewering this new foil to his patriotic populism.
“[Mamdani’s] victory was the product of a lot of young people who live reasonably comfortable lives but see that their elite degrees aren’t really delivering what they expected,” Vance said. “We have to be honest about where his coalition is. It is not the downtrodden. It is not poor Americans. It is not about dispossession. It is about elite disaffection and elite anger.”
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Vance’s speech was more than a Mamdani takedown; it was a broader indictment of the Democratic Party’s growing disconnect with the voters it claims to represent. The lie at the heart of modern progressivism is that it springs from compassion for the dispossessed, whether in the Bronx or Gaza, rather than from seething resentment toward America and Western civilization. Vance masterfully drew this out at Claremont.
“The radicals of the far Left do not need a unifying ideology of what they’re for, because they know very well what they’re against,” the vice president continued. “What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and Big Pharma lobbyists? It isn’t the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx. It’s hatred. They hate the people in this room. They hate the president of the United States. And most of all, they hate the people who voted for [President Donald Trump] in the last election in November.”
This incisive illustration captures the absurd political moment for Democrats and their untenable coalition. The party not only lacks a coherent, unifying platform; its disparate parts alienate a growing share of the public, especially minority voters. Winning as a Republican today is primarily a matter of highlighting the other team. The mass protests and rallies, from “Tesla Takedown” to “Hands Off” to “No Kings,” have not increased Democratic support one iota or weakened Trump precisely because they’ve made the clown show more visible.
What greater gift could the administration receive than leftists waving Mexican flags in Los Angeles or burning American flags on Washington Square Park on the Fourth of July? What could make Republicans more appealing than throngs of middle-aged white people in REI gear dancing the electric slide outside a Tesla factory while brandishing swastika placards?
Democrats would be better served going dark. A few smart consultants said so after the November election, but they were ignored to the benefit of the GOP.
Moving toward the midterm elections, Republicans would be wise to follow Vance’s lead: push the Democratic agenda, such as it is, to the fore at every moment.
Let them rail against the cishet patriarchy while wearing keffiyehs, recite slam poetry about fighting the oligarchy. Hand Mamdani the microphone and step away slowly. Everything looks reasonable by contrast.
Red flags
Vance’s clarity in exposing the Left’s contradictions is a winning strategy — until it veers into a blood and soil nationalism that will almost certainly alienate more voters than it attracts. The second half of Vance’s Claremont speech is rotten with red flags for a Republican Party hoping to fend off the Left through the 2020s.
Of course, the GOP needs a unifying vision as the Trump era wanes, or it will fall into the trap of only being against things itself. But the vision Vance proposed at Claremont, rooted in rejecting America as a creedal nation while prioritizing ancestry over shared values, will repel moderates, minorities, and even some conservatives who favor a model of national identity rooted in universal ideals.
Reflecting on what constitutes an American in 2025, Vance asked, “Is it purely an agreement with the creedal principles of America? … That’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. … [That definition] would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow?”
More than a facile hypothetical — no one argues that everyone on Earth who holds to American principles should be considered de facto American — criticism of the declaration as insufficient will rightfully trouble voters beyond New Right online spaces. Vance’s insistence that America is “not just an idea where a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life” defies not only commonly held American beliefs but the values extolled by our greatest historical leaders.
In his 1858 “Electric Cord” speech, President Abraham Lincoln refutes Vance on immigrants and American identity: “If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none … but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence … and then they feel that moral sentiment … they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that declaration, and so they are.”
One can only imagine how Lincoln might respond to another of Vance’s ideas posed at Claremont: that people whose “ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America” than modern-day liberals.
Either Vance doesn’t realize this sets off alarm bells, which is difficult to believe, or he is in the full grip of hubris. The nation sided with Trump-Vance on immigration in 2024 following years of open borders. But with the border now secure, public sentiment on immigration levels and pathways to citizenship has shifted back to 2021 levels. The nation overwhelmingly concurs with Lincoln over Vance on the definition of an “American.” He and the Republican Party disregard this at their peril.
Vance’s rhetoric on American identity is not explicitly ethnonationalist, but he must realize it sounds that way, making it both dangerous and foolish. To be certain, dark forces lurk among the seedier elements of the New Right, and they are hardly below the surface.
They have their own clown show, and it’s every bit as full of freaks as its counterpart.
Consider highly influential activist and Vance booster Laura Loomer, who received a private White House audience with the vice president only one month ago. She recently posted on “Alligator Alcatraz”: “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” There are currently 65 million Latinos living in the United States, both immigrants and U.S.-born.
Then there’s alt-right podcaster Jack Posobiec, for whom Vance blurbed his most recent book. Posobiec echoed Vance on American identity at last week’s Turning Point USA Conference, saying, “Does commie Zohran Mandani seem like an American? No, he’s not an American. Is Zohran Mandami an American like we are? No. He’s absolutely not.”
Meanwhile, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, whom Vance gushed about immediately prior to his Claremont speech, posted after Mamdani’s victory: “24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City,” implying every Muslim is a 9/11 terrorist. A brief scroll through replies shows a majority of Kirk’s followers disliked the post because they believe the Jews did 9/11.
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Vance’s conscious, ongoing decision to inspire and even partner with this element is the surest way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and return the nation to the Left. The Mamdani Democrats have no hope of winning a battle of ideas, but an identity politics battle featuring two equally odious factions? That’s anyone’s ballgame.
Vance’s incisive critique of the Left will leave it in tatters. But his emphasis on ancestry over ideals and his partnership with ethnonationalists are the liberals’ only shot at exploiting divisions and weaseling their way back into power.