What Zohran Mamdani's Strategist Gets Wrong About the ‘Working Class’

Plus, Netanyahu on Israel’s economy; Exeter’s next head

Zohran Mamdani speaking at a May 11, 2021, rally to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.

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.