My Father’s Liberal Dream Gave Us Zohran Mamdani

From Trump derangement to moral blindness, the generation that once fought for freedom can no longer see who’s truly endangering it

This is not only about my father, though he embodies the people I am writing to; the generation that still believes they are fighting the good fight. I use him because his is the voice I have heard, the words I have read, and the ideology I have spent years unwinding in my own head. He is joined by friends, by countless voters, young impressionable minds, and thinkers who once stood for justice but now cling to a politics that no longer exists.

To them, liberal still means the courage of the Sixties: marching for civil rights, standing against war, speaking truth to power. They remain convinced that the spirit is alive in today’s Democratic Party, at least when narrowly viewed through the lens of our two-party system. Because they cannot bring themselves to imagine that the party to their right might defend faith, freedom of speech, kindness, or merit-based growth, they maintain the illusion that the same movement that once sought fairness and equality still protects them now.

That movement is gone. The refusal to acknowledge that reality helped create the world in which Zohran Mamdani could win.

Mamdani is not the fulfillment of their liberal dream. He is its hijacker. He represents what happens when idealism outlives self-awareness, when faith in progress becomes blind to the forces manipulating it.

For decades, people like my father equated goodness with liberalism and evil with conservatism. They could not release the memory that, in their youth, the Right was the camp of McCarthy and exclusion, while the Left promised fairness and inclusion. That memory hardened into dogma. The Democratic Party became righteousness; the GOP became sin.

While they were still fighting the last war, still lecturing about compassion and warning about fascism, the Left quietly morphed into something unrecognizable. The liberalism of free speech and pluralism yielded to an authoritarian moralism enforced by mobs and hashtags. The party of civil rights evolved into a party of racial hierarchy and permanent grievance. “Social justice” replaced actual justice, and beneath that banner, antisemitism found a new home.

Mamdani’s campaign is the end product of that evolution: a politician who uses the rhetoric of socialism to smuggle in an ideology of resentment and anti-Western, anti-Jewish hostility. He preaches compassion while dividing people by race and creed. He calls Israel genocidal while ignoring real genocides in Africa and the Middle East. He sells this as progress; the same word my father once used for integration, education, and freedom.

Some ‘progressive’ Jews have started to awaken, though belatedly. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch – a proud progressive who long believed his movement’s moral arc bent toward justice – has begun warning that the radical Left’s fixation on intersectionality and identity politics has become toxic. Hirsch still calls himself a liberal, yet he sees clearly what my father refuses to: that the language of inclusion is now being used to exclude Jews, that “justice” has become a license for hate.

Antisemitism exists on the Right, and it is dangerous. The difference is that the mainstream of the Republican Party condemns it. Senators such as Ted Cruz have raised alarms about antisemitism within their own ranks. The same cannot be said of the Democrats, whose leadership cowers before its radicals.

The center of the Democratic Party has become the far Left. It is no longer fringe; it is the norm. Senator Charles Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer-watchman-of the Jews, once the quintessential pro-Israel Democrat, cannot even bring himself to confront the antisemitism festering in his own party. Fear of being pushed out by the activists who now set the rules keeps him silent. To no avail, as he will still be pushed by them.

Donald Trump remains the ultimate heretic to my father and his peers. Their hatred for him borders on the theological, if not irrational. It does not matter what he does; the man, to them, is evil incarnate. Yet even now, Trump is calling out Boko Haram and ISWAP for the slaughter of Christians and non-aligned Muslims in Nigeria. It is an act of moral clarity that few Western leaders have dared to make. The progressive Left, meanwhile, ignores murderous Islamist regimes that kill anyone who does not believe as they do.

One doesn’t need to admire Trump’s tone or ego to recognize that confronting genuine genocidal evil is not “right-wing”; it is righteous. His message-that the world cannot fixate on Israel and the Jews while ignoring true atrocities elsewhere-is precisely the moral realism my father once preached. Still, he and his generation cannot acknowledge it. Doing so would collapse the belief system they have lived inside for sixty years.

That is what makes this so tragic. My father still believes he is defending the liberalism that made America safe for Jews. In truth, he is defending the illusion that it still exists.

The radicals are no longer storming the gates; they are the gates. They run the universities, the media, and the cultural institutions. They now define morality itself, and have weaponized it against the Jews, against Western civilization, and against the American way of life that made both possible.

This is how a man like Mamdani rises in New York City. This is how “social justice” becomes a mask for religious hatred. This is why so many people of my father’s politics refused to see what had happened, because seeing it would mean confronting their own role in creating it.

My father still quotes Torah about holiness, compassion, and righteousness. Yet those same ideals are being weaponized by a political movement that has replaced holiness with ideology, compassion with control, and righteousness with rage. He can cite every verse about justice, but refuses to see who is twisting it now.

That blindness, shared by a generation of well-meaning liberals who mistake nostalgia for virtue, is destroying Western civilization and threatening the very freedom, grace, and liberalism they once fought to defend.