How Mamdani won:The collapse of patriotism among affluent white people fueled the socialist’s rise

Frida Ghitis: Some credit the success of the 33-year-old socialist’s insurgent campaign to the scandal-scarred Cuomo .

She says some blame Cuomo for his scandal-stricken campaign; others say demographic change is the inevitable consequence of demographic change.

But she says the best explanation of the Mamdani stunner is that Americans view their country, its system, and values, as something to be ashamed of, rather than proud of.

Ghitis says the collapse in patriotic pride among the electorate would never have been able to prevail.

Julian Zelizer : Zohran Mamdani 's anti-Americanism wasn't the driving force behind his victory in New York .

He says rich, white elites turned out in droves to support him in tony, liberal neighborhoods and Brooklyn .

Zelizer says he's a true-blue, or true-Red, believer in the ideology that underpinned the USSR . He's a critic of the American conception of merit, he says.

His radicalism wasn’t an embarrassing past phase that he disavowed in the interest of prevailing in last month’s primary but a feature of the, yes, rather impressive campaign that helped him dispatch the, yes, hapless Cuomo . That it worked is far less significant for what it says about the merits of Mamdani and Cuomo as campaigners than for what it says about a political landscape in which anti-Americanism is now a potent force. Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a Robert Novak fellow at the Fund for American Studies..