Mamdani vs. Skeffington: Maybe American Politics Is Getting Less Anti-Rational?

We can hope that at least one positive thing to take from Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary victory in NYC is that the American electorate is now suffering from at least a bit of outrage fatigue. At least the primary electorate. At least in NYC. At least for the Democratic Party. At least this summer. Why do I counterpose a sober and quiet New York progressive selling concern for the lunch-pail and at least the simulacrum of competence to a a fictional Irish-American machine boss? As litmus tests of the electorate’s appetite for outrage and ethnic signaling…

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A very nice catch from Kamil Kazani: Mamdami avoiding a deliberate trap by acting more like a grownup than the other candidates:

Kamil Kazani: Why did Zohran Win? <https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-did-zohran-win>: ‘I think there may be some fundamental factors…. The vibe is changing… Public outrage does not work anymore…. Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and very rarely raises his voice… Oe thing that Mamdania—but almost no one else in the American public space is getting—is that the public is getting tired of the outrage…. Outrage used to be something that helped you get notice. Now, however, there is a massive oversaturation on the market of outrage…. All of your screaming just converges into the indistinguishable white noise….

As of 2025, you can stand out of the crowd, if you behave, show decorum, politiness and self control. In fact, a great deal of Mamdani’s success has been based not on “charisma” per se, but on the fact he was behaving like an adult in a room of toddlers…. He puts forward a moderate, restrained proposition, consciously framed in a way that it would very difficult to make a legitimate counterargument against it: A state with the equal rights for all its citizens. Now the opponents start screaming, and yelling and losing their minds…

kamilkazani
Why did Zohran Win?
Some thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s victory…
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2 days ago · 24 likes · 2 comments · kamilkazani

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If this in fact did matter—and was in fact a plus for Mamdami—it is an interesting moment to note. Let me approach it elliptically, along a train of thought I was already thinking about as a result of my breakfast last week with Bob Reich, were we talked among other things about the late, great Berkeley political scientist Nelson Polsby

In Edwin O’Connor’s not-quite roman a clef about Boston Mayor James Michael Curley’s novel The Last Hurrah, O’Connor places his protagonist-antihero, Frank Skeffington, in a scene that I always thought showed and was meant to show Skeffington’s deep contempt for his voters and supporters:

To Adam [Skeffington] said, “A good few minutes’ work. Could you hear anything at all”.

“Very little,” Adam said. “The wind took most of it away. But did I hear you mention Portugal a couple of times?”

Skeffington nodded. “Foreign policy,” he said gravely.

“Foreign policy?”

“Very important. A man can’t run for mayor on the domestic issues alone. Not in this day and age. We all have to cultivate the wider vision.”

“You mean that in a local election you have to talk about, say, Russia?”

“No. That’s one of the great handicaps for the local politician: he can’t call his opponent a Communist. It’s a shame, but there you are. Of course you can call your opponent a Communist if you really want to, but it won’t do you any good; nobody’ll believe you. They all know he goes to Mass on Sunday, so he can’t be a Communist; you might just as well say that the Cardinal and the Kremlin exchange pen-pal letters. No, Russia and Communism never have been much of an issue around here. We’re under the disadvantage of having to evolve a foreign policy that meets local requirements.”

“Which includes what?” Adam asked. “Portugal?”

“You’d be surprised how important Portugal becomes,” Skeffington said, “when you’re speaking to the Portuguese. These fishermen, almost all, came originally from the Portuguese mainland or the Azores. I find they appreciate an occasional reference to the glorious country of Henry the Navigator. I’ve been trying to find a more contemporary figure than Henry, but with Portugal that’s not so easy. However, it isn’t a major point. There aren’t enough Portuguese. When you come right down to it, there are only two points that really count.”

“Such as … ?”

Skeffington held up two fingers.

“One,” he said, ticking the first, “All Ireland must be free.

“Two,” he said, ticking the second, “Trieste belongs to Italy.”

“They count. At the moment the first counts more than the second, but that’s only because the Italians were a little slow in getting to the boats. They’re coming along fast now, though; in twenty yyears the Irish issue will be about as burning as that of Unhappy Ethiopia. Fortunately, I don’t expect to be among those present at the time.”

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If you wanted to be more friendly to Skeffington than I think O’Connor is to his character, you could say that even though the passage is satirical, it is not simply a Skeffington sneer at the voters’ intelligence, but merely a commentary on the transactional, performative, and sometimes absurd nature of mid-1900s urban machine politics, where ethnic identity and symbolic gestures often mattered more than policy substance, with Skeffington being not so much contemptuous as he is pragmatic and a little cynical about the rituals of politics. He knows the game, and he plays it with a wink.

But that is belied by the end of the story. Because the crux of the story told in the book is that Skeffington does not in fact know the new game, and does not play the new game successfully;

What happened next was not recognized by everyone. Characteristically, it was Skeffington himself who caught the first sign. The Ward Seven tabulation had stopped; the vote from Gorman’s ward continued to yield its comforting harvest; one by one, the other wards had begun to declare themselves. Now the blank spaces… received their first chalked markings; Skeffington examined them swiftly with a sharp, professional eye. He had hardly begun the examination when he stopped short. Like an engineer, powering at full speed down a long-familiar stretch of track, he was jolted from routine…. It was nothing more than a small return from a single precinct…. In this small, reliable precinct, the race was proving to be surprisingly dose; he was barely squeezing by…. [Was] the fluctuation was part of a pattern, or… in fact a freak….

“Sam,” he said in a low voice, “go into the office and get on the phone. Talk to Teddy, Charlie Ferrino, and Mike Gallaher. Don’t talk to anybody else; stay there till you get them but get them fast. Find out what’s going on. If anything.” Weinberg went off, wordlessly. In the same low voice Skeffington said, “What’s your guess?” “I don’t know, Frank. I don’t like it much,” Gorman said candidly….

He looked towards the door of the private office: the reappearance of Weinberg was what mattered now. Even as he looked the door opened: Weinberg emerged and came towards him…. “Well, Sam?”

“I dunno,” Weinberg said. “Something’s up, and it ain’t good. I don’t figure it yet, but I tell you this: I think we got trouble.”

“All right,” Skeffington said impatiently. “We’ve got trouble. Where? What kind of trouble? Come on, Sam, out with it. Fast.” In swift, blunt terms, Weinberg told his story; it was not a comforting one…. McCluskey was revealing unexpected strength. He was piling up respectable totals in a number of areas considered inviolable; in several marginal precincts he was actually leading. What it all meant, whether this was or was not the beginning of a turning tide, was not quite clear; the next half-hour would tell….

In the office, he snatched up the telephone and made a half-dozen calls to key points; in each call he snapped a series of abrupt questions and quickly cut short any sustained reply. He was after the bare bones of information, and by the sixth call he had them. He put down the phone and said, “All right. Now at least we’ve got some sort of general picture. It’s not a pretty one. We’ve got trouble: you were right, Sam. I should say reasonably serious trouble. The boy’s begun to pull in about thirty precincts, and widely scattered ones at that. In a couple of them he’s started to snowball.”…

Gorman agreed; he said thoughtfully, “I’d say it’d swell before it shrinks, that’s sure. It damn well could hinge on how the East End holds. You’ve heard nothing from Cavanaugh or Paddy Montgomery?”

Skeffington shook his head. “No. It’s too soon.”… He had wanted his position defined; it had been defined with a brutal clarity. He knew now exactly how desperate it was. And, faced with the fact, he could arrive at no reasonable explanation for it; he had been hit especially hard because he had been completely unprepared for the blow. Too shrewd and too experienced to be guilty of overconfidence, he had come to his headquarters tonight secure in the knowledge that he had kept his guard up, that he had taken every necessary precaution, that no stray sign of danger was to be seen. And yet the cyclone had struck, rushing out of nowhere, preceded by no warning; he knew now, better than anyone else, that in the face of this development his chances of winning comfortably had vanished….

He said steadily, “Very well. We may be all right. If the East End holds, we surely will. In any case there’s just one thing we can do now and that’s to sit tight and see what happens. Not a very aggressive course, but at the moment we haven’t a great many alternatives.”…

Skeffington’s right hand moved in a slight gesture of impatience. “No. Does it matter? At this point, that is? Obviously there were slip-ups all along the line. All right. We can attend to them later. What matters now - and the only thing that matters now - is what’s going to happen in spite of the slip-ups. We can play parlor games and fix responsibilities when this is all over.”

Weinberg had risen. Anger over probable betrayals had driven him from slouching immobility; he walked restlessly across the limited floor-space of the small office, his dull, lackluster eyes now bright with fury. “Those bastards!” he said. “O.K. So we fix responsibilities later. So what do we do now? Sit around on our keesters and wait for the moon to come up? Or do we go out and try to fix this mess?”

For just an instant Skeffington’s temper flashed through. “Fix it with what?” he said savagely. “What would you suggest? Sticking plaster? Staples? How in hell can you do any fixing at this stage of the game? Everybody’s voted. It’s all over. Do you think we ought to bomb the polls? Assassinate McCluskey? For the love of Christ, wake up to realities!”…

He heard the office door open; he sensed, rather than saw, the swift approach of Weinberg, bringing with him the news that, at worst, would be additionally unpleasant - at best, utterly useless. For the East End, which just a few minutes before was of such vast significance, now no longer mattered at all. With or without it, Skeffington was beaten, for the signs he had read did not point merely to defeat; they pointed to cataclysm. Everywhere, in all precincts, the McCluskey totals were on the move; of all the wards in the city, only John Gorman’s held firm in the Skeffington camp.

Throughout the room the loyal supporters watched these soaring figures but, mindful of the words of their leader, they were waiting eagerly for the turn to come; only Skeffington - and now Gorman - knew that there would be no turn. For he was not simply to be beaten; he was to be buried, buried under a great, roaring, sliding avalanche of votes which at any moment now would come sliding down for everyone to see. It was the thing of which he had not even dreamed: it was the McCluskey landslide. It was unthinkable, unimaginable, and yet - it was happening….

But most of all, the defeat was a mystery to Skeffington. Less limited than his colleagues, he could not bring himself to ascribe the catastrophe to the simple, single cause. He had thought immediately of the possibility of betrayal, of a failure in his organization; he had dismissed the thought. He knew that neither singly nor in combination could they have occasioned his defeat. Undoubtedly they had been there, but they had always been there, and what had beaten him now was not something old, but something altogether new. What it might be, he simply did not know. He tried desperately to think it through, but it was no use. His mind would not work properly. It churned away, but its edge had been dulled by the disaster; it bit into nothing, it merely raced by images and impressions, bouncing off them, assimilating nothing and arriving nowhere. In a kind of narcosis, he could grasp solidly only the one fact: he had ridden into the election a confident man, backed by four years of his most effective administration; in the twinkling of an eye, he had been knocked out of office, repudiated overwhelmingly, subjected to humiliation which he had never thought possible. And always the question returned: Why? Why the debacle?… All through these stunned minutes he came no closer to the solution; he stood staring straight ahead at the board, instinct and habit controlling him, warning him to be still…

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In the book, it is the New Deal, immigrant assimilation, and the rise of impersonal, bureaucratic government with its social-democratic social-insurance programs that have made the old boss system based on the idea that he can get your cousin Timmy a job with the fire department obsolete. Urban political machines like Skeffington’s had flourished when American cities were teeming with new immigrants—Irish, Italian, Azorean, Jewish, other Eastern European—who had arrived with little money, often, limited English, few social connections, and no social-network power to maneuver in the New World society. The bosses—archetypes like Tammany’s “Big Tim” Sullivan or Boston’s James Michael Curley—offered tangible help: jobs, coal in winter, legal assistance, and a sense of community. In exchange, the machine expected political loyalty at the ballot box. This system, for all its corruption, was rooted in a direct, personal quid pro quo that alltowed immigrants to cash in the societal power that was their ability to vote for concrete things that made their lives easier.

But the coming of the social-democratic New Deal Order shifted the provision of social welfare from the hands of local bosses to the impersonal state. No longer did a desperate widow need to petition the ward heeler for a city job or a bag of groceries; she could now rely on a federal check. The “iron rice bowl” was now filled by Washington, not the ward office. At the same time, assimilation and upward mobility eroded the ethnic solidarity that was the machine’s foundation. The children and grandchildren of immigrants moved to the suburbs, entered the professions, and shed the old tribal loyalties. They became less interested in the politics of the parish hall and more in the politics of the school board and the zoning commission. The rise of bureaucratic, professionalized government—civil service exams, regulatory agencies, and the like—further diminished the scope for personal patronage. In this new world, the old boss was not just obsolete; he was an anachronism, a figure of nostalgia rather than power.

And thus by the time of Edwin O’Connor’s novel in 1956 there were no longer elections to be won by, among other things, flogging over and over again the only two things you needed to know about foreign policy—that all Ireland must be free and that Trieste must belong to Italy. These gestures—and everyone knew they were gestures—mattered because they spoke to voters’ lived experience of exclusion and their yearning for respect and recognition. But the grandchildren of immigrants, educated in American schools and working in American firms, were less interested in the politics of Lisbon or Limerick and more in the politics of Levittown.

This is not to say that the kowtows to symbolic identity politics ever disappeared—they merely mutated. The politics of the old neighborhood, with its saints’ days and parades, gave way to the politics of television, polling, and mass marketing. Skeffington’s mastery of the old rituals became, in this new environment, a kind of fossil skill—impressive, but no longer decisive.

And we can hope that we see an analogous change now, and a change for the better.

What once seemed daring and effective early in the social-media age —public outrage, ethnic signaling, and performative politics—may have become, in the age of social media saturation, pure background noise. Kamil Kazani’s analysis of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York hopes so: Kamil claims that Mamdani’s calm, adult comportment stands out precisely because it is so rare in a marketplace glutted with outrage merchants. So Skeffington’s old dance moves flopped in the mid-1950s.

However, a warning: It may be that Mamdani’s victory is a sign of a similar shift. It may be that Mamdani’s position here was a plus among the turning-out Democratic primary electorate, and so a good sign for an electorate capable of pursuing a politics and ethics of responsibility, in New York City. But even if so, it is only in New York City. And it is only in the Democratic primary. It may not be so in the general election. It may not be so elsewhere in America.

The primary electorate, often more engaged and informed, may reward appeals to reason, policy, and civic virtue. Or the primary electorate may be composed of True Believers who demand ideological purity above all. It depends. On many things.

But what is true is that the general electorate is different. It is broader, more heterogeneous, less informed, and also less committed. It may or may not be more susceptible to spectacle, charisma, and demagoguery.

We have seen, time and again, that the politics of spectacle and unreason are never far from the surface—whether in the populist surges of the late 19th century, the radio demagogues of the 1930s, or our current social media hell The decline of the old boss system did not guarantee the triumph of reason; it merely changed the terrain on which politics was fought.

As then, so now.

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