The nihilism trap

The race for New York City mayor is heating up. Eric Adams — currently under indictment for taking bribes from Turkey and on legal life support because of his fealty to Trump — is still in the running. And Andrew Cuomo has entered the race in an attempt to bring his career back from the dead after he harassed some ladies and killed a bunch of grandmas and grandpas. It’s an interesting contest — a battle between two old, diseased, and limping alpha animals, each getting propped up by various wings of the establishment. (Andrew Cuomo, for instance, is getting support from Jessica Seinfeld, bestselling cookbook author, billionaire, hater of campus protests, and wife of Jerry Seinfeld.)

I’m personally much more interested in this race than I’d normally be because we’re moving back to the city this summer, and one decent candidate has come out of it: Zohran Mamdani. He grew up in New York and is the son of a Columbia professor dad and famous Indian-American director Mira Nair.

I’ve heard good things about him from friends going back probably a year and even randomly met him (well, more like was just introduced and shook his hand) at the antiwar encampment at CUNY last summer. People who’ve interacted with him all say he’s a good guy and, more importantly, has good politics. New York has gotten more and more expensive — and his campaign is focused on helping alleviate people’s suffering in whatever ways a city can. It’s nothing radical…just basic economic and social support programs similar to what you’d find in most European cities. One of the big ones that I noticed was his desire to help families with small kids by expanding free childcare starting with six weeks. Right now, parents have to wait until their child is three before they can get access to free childcare in New York, and New Yorkers are lucky — a lot of places in America don’t even have that. With a four-year old daughter, I know personally that universal childcare like this is a big deal.

A big reason why young people aren’t starting families in America, and especially in a hyper-expensive city like New York, is because they can’t afford to. For a lot of people, paying for a place to live is hard enough already. Adding childcare into that — not just daycare but medical costs and cultural activities — makes it seem impossible. Parents get almost no help from the state to raise a child — sports, music, and art classes are all privatized and cost ridiculous amounts of money.

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Caring for children, making it easier for New Yorkers to start families — Zohran is basically a trad. He’s focused on families. And so you’d think that the new trad downtown influencers championing children and the sacredness of the family unit would be singing his praises? He’s out there doing the work. But no. What these influencers are doing is poisoning the well. They’re out spreading their brand of nihilism, pushing the notion that anyone who says he cares about other people is a conman, a liar, and a manipulator.

As usual, Anna K of Red Scare, is leading the pack on this. She found a campaign video Zohran put out a year ago where he’s hanging out with various New Yorkers and said he was doing “barrio drag” because the video showed him hanging out in a bodega. Zohran is clearly privileged. So to Anna, he must be a faker pretending to want to help people who are worse off than he is. “Get these poverty peddlers out of here!”

It’s funny because I don’t remember Anna K writing anything like this when Donald Trump, a man with his own jumbo jet, did his own show of being “one of the people” at McDonald’s as he campaigned for president. Nor did she scream “Get these poverty peddlers out of here!” into the Twitter void when JD Vance trotted out his hillbilly struggles. I mean, the guy built his entire political career on talking up his childhood poverty. He wrote a book about it, and Netflix made a series based on it. JD is probably one of the most successful poverty peddlers on the planet, using his sad story to get to power and to use that power to prop up the richest and most powerful people in the USA.

Anna doesn’t bring it up because she likes Trump and Vance. She voted for them. Her nihilistic axioms don’t apply to her own people — “barrio drag” is just bad only when others do it. And she employs an ad hominem critique against the people whose politics she hates, and yet detests when it is done to her.

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I don’t want to get into the whole thing where Anna K constantly leans on her rough childhood immigrant identity for cred, even as she grew up in an upper middle class suburb and her father was one of the most well-known math and computer science guys of his generation who was poached from the USSR by the USA and given a top job at a top tier university. That’s not really important to this…

What is important is the worldview that Anna K and her crew spread. She has a lot of cultural power. And she wants the people — and especially young women who listen to her — to think that all politics is poison. In her world, no one is ever genuinely concerned with anyone or anything outside their immediate family and social circle. To her, any concern or empathy for others and any desire to help on a systemic level is by default manipulative — and you’re a sucker for believing in it. And that’s even more true for someone like Zohran. He comes from privilege. A person like him can’t possibly care about anyone other than himself.

I don’t know Zohran. Obviously, there is always ego and ambition involved in whatever anyone does. We’re human. That’s part of it. But Zohran doesn’t really need politics to get ahead. He’s a child of privilege — with a famous Hollywood mother. If he wanted to lead a cool, interesting, and public life, there were probably easier ways to go about it than having to get into public service from the very bottom like he did — attending boring state legislature sessions that no one cares about or watches and hanging out with taxi drivers and doing solidarity hunger strikes with them. With his mom’s connections, he could’ve been living in LA in the canyons somewhere, writing scripts and producing films and maybe espousing the same toxic nihilism that Anna does.

As someone who’s been a journalist for a long time, I’m not going to be the one to say you can’t go after politicians. It’s good to be strategically cynical and not believe everything people say. There is no doubt politics tends to attract some of the sleaziest people around — types with little talent and a lot of ambition. So there’s nothing wrong with scrutinizing and taking down those aspiring to political power. I’ve done it plenty. And Zohran might turn out to be a disappointment in the end. He might not live up to people’s expectations. It’s okay to look at him with skepticism. But that’s not what the nihilists are doing. Their goal is bigger and much darker. They’re trying to foreclose on the very notion of empathy, organized politics, and collective action. They are preying on people’s cynicism and disillusionment and feeding them spiritual poison.

They want to deny the fact that anyone can care. They want you to think if someone says they want to help they’re scamming you. That kind of thinking is a trap. It leads to isolation, depression, fear, and hatred. And it’s also just not true. We’re social animals. Helping each other is a major part of who we are. It’s why we’re so successful as a species…why we’re at the very top. David Graeber explored this idea in his last book.

And anyway, being a disappointment and helping people are not mutually exclusive in the political realm. Speaking of childcare…Mayor Bill de Blasio had a lot of flaws, but he also oversaw the expansion of free childcare — a universal pre-kindergarten program for kids three years old and up — and helped millions of New Yorkers in the process. I know people who use the program. We’re going to use the program ourselves next year. Maybe it’s not ideal, but we’re grateful it is in place. It’s way better than nihilism.

—Yasha

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Want to know more? Read Evgenia’s essay: