Sneak Peek: Reihan Salam on the DSA and Mamdani's election wins

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
Hi, it's Dan. Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected. A place for clarity, context and honest conversations, at a time when those things can seem hard to find. That's what Ark Media is all about, building a truly independent voice, which means no one shaping what we say or how we say it.
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**Reihan Salam** (0:53)
You are listening to an Ark Media Podcast.

**Dan Senor** (1:03)
Welcome to Inside Call Me Back, our members-only edition where we open the door and let you shape the conversation. I want to encourage you to submit your questions on arkmedia.org. Today we have a special Insider edition covering the recent US primary elections here in the New York area that were held this past week. And that comes with a special Inside Call Me Back guest, Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute. Reihan has been on this podcast before, not only leads the Manhattan Institute, but he's a prolific writer, the author and co-author of important books on US politics and US policy.
He was the subject of a big profile in the Wall Street Journal recently, which we can link to in the show notes, with his, I think, pretty trenchant analysis of what is going on in New York under Mamdani. So with that, Reihan, welcome to the inside.

**Reihan Salam** (1:50)
I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Dan.

**Dan Senor** (1:53)
So, Reihan, we asked our community to send us questions about this topic, but since we don't typically have you on for special insider editions, I also get a vote here and have some questions of my own, and I've been wanting to do a download with you, and I tracked you down yesterday when you were like at LaGuardia boarding a plane or something. And so I didn't have a chance to get into all the questions I would have liked to have asked you. So I'm actually using my prerogative here as the host and as an insider subscriber myself to jam in some of my questions as well. So let me just start. Our audience is very much a global audience. What do you think is the significance of this election for the Jewish community, Jewish community in the United States and outside the United States? If you were trying to explain what happened in New York this past week, how would you explain it?

**Reihan Salam** (2:41)
I want everyone to understand that what we're seeing in New York City is very much a transnational global movement. This is a movement that you see manifesting in many different places. But when you look at this ideology, when you look at the worldview of, for example, a figure like Zora Mamdani, he really is a kind of post-national figure. This is actually a live debate when you're looking at the left. There's some folks on the left. Think about the Social Democrats of Denmark, let's say. There are many on the left who think, we want to be left patriots. We are invested in the nation state. We believe in the nation state as a vehicle of a working class coalition. Then there are others who see their movement as transnational, and they see themselves as part of a global movement that is anti-imperialist, that is trying to unite workers around the world, and their sensibility is almost that the US war machine and the NATO alliance, that these are structures that are actually the bad guys rather than the good guys. The fixation on Israel, the Gaza cult, this is something that is not unique to the five boroughs of New York City, as your listeners know extremely well.
So that's one thing people really need to understand. This is a transnational movement that happens to have a branch office in the United States responding to unique conditions in the United States. And their big fixation is foreign policy.
Domestic policy, there's an agenda there. There's a big revolutionary radical agenda there. But the thing is that the mainstream Democratic Party has also moved left. The thing that's really different is where they stand on Cuba, on Venezuela, on Russia's war against Ukraine, and of course on Israel. And that's been really galvanizing for them. That's very much at their core.