What Zohran Mamdani's Strategist Gets Wrong About the ‘Working Class’
Plus, Netanyahu on Israel’s economy; Exeter’s next head
New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s “26-year-old political strategist,” Morris Katz, has an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition that exposes some of the flaws in Katz’s analysis. From Katz’s comments in the interview:
“I want to see a party that reflects what this country looks like. Right now we have a party that reflects what a lot of different C-suites and Ivy League reunions look like. Congress should be a place where we have farmers, and where we have mechanics as well as having lawyers, as well as having business owners. It’s only 2 percent of Congress right now is from the working class. For so many in power right now, it’s been decades since they were actually working in 9 to 5, or since they knew what it means to struggle to make that mortgage payment or put your kid through pre-k.”
The flaw is that class divisions, occupations, and financial stresses are more fluid and less permanent than Katz’s analysis assumes. People have parents and children and siblings with different financial circumstances, and people’s own circumstances often vary over the course of a lifetime. The Ivy League has first-generation students on scholarships. The idea that someone’s congressional behavior is primarily driven by their prior year’s job and wages is nonsensical, or at least a vast oversimplification.
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s tax return shows taxable income of $873,953 in 2024. Yet she constantly talks about how, “After my dad had a heart attack, my mom worked a minimum-wage job at Sears -- and that was enough to save our house.” That was in 1962, sure, “decades” ago, but surely it still shapes Warren’s outlook, even though Warren was a Harvard law professor before entering politics and her husband still is one.
Ben Sasse, who was a Republican senator, has a Ph.D from Yale and was a college president but also worked a summer job detasseling corn. The governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, worked in high school frying eggs and washing dishes in a diner before eventually becoming co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker both worked at McDonald’s.
And any business owner knows that the job includes hard work, not just “9 to 5” but in some cases longer. Michael Bloomberg’s 1997 autobiography, “Bloomberg by Bloomberg,” recounts how at the start of his company, he and a half-dozen colleagues installed terminals on weekends. “During the summer, with the air-conditioning turned off in those sealed skyscrapers, the heat sometimes hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit under the new customers’ desks where we crawled to lay our cables. Amid old McDonald’s hamburger wrappers and mouse droppings, we dragged wires from our computers to the keyboards and screens we were putting in place, stuffing the cables through holes we drilled in other people’s furniture,” Bloomberg writes.
This essentialist idea that you’re either an owner or a worker comes from European Marxism or from its adherents on American college campuses such as the one, Columbia, where the Bowdoin-educated Mamdani’s father is a tenured faculty member.
There may be more truth to it in some parts of Europe where there is less upward mobility and class distinctions are more permanent, but in America, it just doesn’t match reality.
If anything, one danger of the hard-left economic policies of Mamdani-ism is that if implemented, the policies—big ObamaCare subsidies, high minimum wages, rent freezes on rent-stabilized apartments, earned income tax credits—create incentives that trap people in the “working class” with punishingly high effective marginal tax rates associated with benefit phaseouts.
Netanyahu on Israel’s economy: From Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement November 9 at the start of his cabinet meeting:
Another piece of good news – Israel’s credit rating was raised today by the S&P agency, and there are two reasons for this: One – it must be understood that Israel’s geopolitical standing has strengthened significantly. It has strengthened significantly compared to what it was before October 7. Israel is perceived as stronger, and the greatest geopolitical and security threat to it – Iran – has definitely been ‘reduced,’ in the language of the professionals. Iran suffered a great blow, Israel’s power increased, Iran’s power decreased, and the existential threat that it posed to us and the entire region – that threat has been greatly pushed back. This is one basis for what is currently happening, although in my opinion, the rating agencies have not yet fully internalized the major change that has occurred here.
Something else has happened here: During the war, when our economy was supposed to shrink and investments in Israel, especially in high-tech, were also supposed to shrink – the exact opposite happened. Israel’s economy is growing. We will see this growth even more sharply in the coming year. Unemployment in Israel is at a historical low – less than 4%. Israel’s debt-to-GDP ratio is one of the lowest in the Western world – it is 68%. I want us to understand this – this is a very great achievement compared to, say, the economies of France, Italy, the United States, and Britain. Israel’s debt-to-GDP is lower than theirs, even though we have just gone through a difficult war.
We are also witnessing the strengthening of the Shekel against the Dollar – 13% this year. I’m not even talking about the stock market – what is happening on the stock exchange is, generally, is leading almost all the stock exchanges in the West. This is after two years of war. In other words, Israel’s economy is very strong, and it will continue to be strong under the responsible policy that we will continue to lead.
If you look at the market-based signals, they are contradicting the dire and false narrative of the New York Times that claims Israel is “more isolated than ever.” That misperception may help to make some Israeli companies a bargain relative to other possible investments. (Disclosure, I own some EIS).
Exeter’s next head: Phillips Exeter Academy announced this week that it has named Jennifer Karlen Elliott as its next principal—the 17th head of school in its 244-year history.
From the press release:
Elliott is currently the head of student and academic life at Choate Rosemary Hall, where she is responsible for nearly all aspects of the student experience across academics, residential life, wellness and community culture.
“When I learned of the opportunity to lead Exeter, I was immediately drawn to the mission, the core values, and the community,” Elliott said. “I have long admired and respected Exeter’s commitment to academic excellence, Harkness and non sibi.”
…Elliott was chosen after a global search that connected the committee with over 400 educational leaders. She formally begins her new role on July 1, 2026…
A 1994 graduate of Andover, Elliott earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree in elementary education from Lesley College and expects to earn a doctorate in education from Vanderbilt University in 2027.
It struck me as an interesting announcement on a number of levels. For one thing, this person probably could have chosen to get a doctorate in a lot of different places. She chose Vanderbilt. Second, a lot of these elite prep schools are traditionally driven by Harvard and Yale admissions. This person has no apparent Harvard or Yale connection. Third, these institutions have their own cultures that you almost need a translator to understand. “Harkness and non sibi”?
Exeter has some great background on Harkness—basically an approach to pedagogy based on an oval-shaped, made-in-Maine “Harkness table” named after philanthropist Edward S. Harkness: “small, seminar-style classes conducted around an oblong wooden table, with the teacher a participant in and guide of the discussion rather than the sole leader.”
As for “non sibi”—“not for self,” or “not for oneself”—that’s another aspect of Exeter culture. I have been reading Charles Murray’s new book, “Taking Religion Seriously,” and there is a section on “Christianity and Individualism.” It may be relevant in this context. Murray writes, “As Christianity evolved away from communal life in its early centuries, the importance of the individual’s salvation through a personal relationship with God grew. By the late Middle Ages, Christianity put the individual at center stage as no other philosophy or religion had ever done before. The potentially revolutionary message of Christian individualism was elaborated most influentially by Thomas Aquinas, who grafted a humanistic strain onto Christian theology, joining an inspirational message of God’s love and his promise of immortality with an injunction to use all of one’s individual capacities of intellect and will for the greater glory of God. It was a potent combination.”
New England independent schools or “prep schools” are a significant if idiosyncratic part of American elite culture. Lately a lot of them, like the country as a whole, veered too far in the direction of wokeness or diversity, equity, and inclusion, correcting for historical injustices but overcorrecting in a clumsy, overbearing, and guilt-ridden, unhealthy way. At their best, these are really great institutions and engines of upward mobility. We wish Elliott luck, both in finishing up that doctorate and at foregrounding academic excellence.
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