It is frankly astonishing to read some of the commentary in the European press about what happened in the United States on Tuesday, 4 November. I struggle to understand how veteran analysts and respected newspapers insist on viewing events through the prism of their wishes rather than through the lens of stubborn, uncomfortable fact.
The headlines were an endless exercise in wishful thinking—that incurable vice of confusing desire with reality. Among the laziest: “Unquestionable victory”, “Trump defeated”, “Democrats seize the advantage ahead of the midterms” and several even worse. Almost none of them even attempts to analyse contemporary American society. It is obvious they do not know it.
Why are these analyses so wildly off the mark at best—and frankly deranged at worst?
One of the gravest conceptual errors is the constant attempt to draw parallels between the United States and Europe. The two shores of the Atlantic are not comparable—neither in what works nor in what fails. For decades, American two-party politics served as a firewall against political extremism; yet in this new political era, the same two-party system has installed radicals in the very bedrock of the system, and in some cases into the actual command posts of power.
The extremists understood long ago that creating a viable new party was impossible; the American system would expel them and condemn them to irrelevance. The only viable path was infiltration from within.
That has happened, to varying degrees, on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference is that, in the Republican Party, the hardest-line extremists have largely remained at the margins; some have reinvented themselves as traditional conservatives, and others have folded into the MAGA movement. At the same time, the MAGA universe—broad, heterogeneous and far from monolithic—has drawn in constituencies that were previously outside political life altogether, citizens who had rarely, if ever, taken part in elections or in the sociopolitical life of the country.
Donald Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., who unquestionably has the sharpest political instinct of the siblings, put it in brutally simple terms: “The neocons and the ultra-conservatives”, and other factions in that broader ideological world, “are there to support the MAGA movement, not to run it.” It was a very clear warning shot at the critics of his father’s foreign policy, who had gone after Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio with particular ferocity.
Asymmetric Infiltration from the Extremes
On the Democratic side, by contrast, the far left has advanced with a deliberate strategy of occupation and control. It has captured seats in the House of Representatives, in state legislatures and senates, in key city councils, and—most worryingly—in the offices of state attorneys general and district attorneys in major cities. Because these are elected posts in the United States, the impact on public safety and on the weaponisation of the justice system as a political tool is not an abstraction but a daily reality. The case brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James against Trump is the clearest paradigm of this strategy.
Within the Democratic Party, the self-styled Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have entrenched themselves. The label is deliberately misleading. The word “democratic” has nothing whatsoever to do with European-style social democracy; it is there to underline their anchorage inside the Democratic Party. In reality, DSA is today the largest explicitly socialist organisation in the United States, positioned clearly on the left-to-far-left of the political spectrum.
Senator Bernie Sanders is a radical Marxist whose early attempts to conceal his sympathies for communism and his trips to the USSR belong to a past in which such baggage would have killed a national political career. Today he proudly presents himself as a democratic socialist and has twice been a serious contender for the Democratic presidential nomination—an unthinkable scenario barely twenty years ago.
In the House of Representatives there is now a bloc of very extreme members headed by the radical left-wing populist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Particularly radical are Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have openly defended positions close to those of the terrorist organisation Hamas. The self-styled AOC has launched an all-out war against “the oligarchies”—in practice, against the market economy as such—in a flamboyant nationwide tour that has done much to deepen the polarisation of an already divided, confrontational and embittered society.
One cannot simply ignore the relentless pressure exerted by this far left to prolong the federal government shutdown, with the explicit aim of attacking President Trump, weakening American democratic institutions and gradually colonising them from within.
Anatomy of a Radical: The Zohran Mamdani Case
New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, is an extreme example of the phenomenon I am describing. Those who focus primarily on his being Muslim (he belongs to the Shia minority) are missing the point. What should have set off alarm bells among European analysts are his deeply rooted Marxist convictions.
His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts and holds a PhD from Harvard. Professor Mamdani is a textbook case of a Columbia academic with unwavering Marxist convictions.
The Mamdani household is anything but the stereotype of a conservative Muslim family. Alongside a communist professor father at a university like Columbia—an institution now visibly and aggressively tilted to the left—his mother is Mira Nair, an Indian from Mumbai of the highest Brahmin caste and a global film star, who won major festival awards at Cannes for Salaam Bombay! and directed such landmark films as Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington, and Monsoon Wedding, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Zohran is therefore anything but a son of the proletariat. He is a product of elite education—solid but limited, with only an undergraduate degree, albeit with excellent grades—and with no meaningful work or executive experience, political or otherwise. Yet his programme of government is a blueprint for disaster. Anyone who seriously believes that New York in the 21st century—the richest city in the world—can be run on the basis of Soviet-style state shops has clearly skipped most of the reading one might reasonably expect from the son of a communist scholar.
New York is effectively a state in its own right, not merely a city: 35,000 police officers and more than 10,000 personnel from other security services, just to begin with. City government runs schools, nurseries, water treatment plants, water supply, hospitals, clinics, dispensaries and a dense network of agencies. It is hard to imagine a young communist with no managerial experience succeeding where many of his predecessors—some of them formidable political heavyweights—struggled to stay afloat. Mamdani runs the very real risk of making the disastrous Bill de Blasio look competent by comparison.
The Alarm Bell: Why a Radical Wins
Having said all that, there are deep, structural reasons in American society that explain the Democratic Party’s successes on Tuesday 4 November. They explain in particular the victory of a Marxist who, to my mind, has little credibility and virtually no “political quality” beyond a silver tongue—and no record of executive competence.
Mamdani’s victory is not a blank cheque for Marxism; it is a distress flare sent up by young voters. It mirrors, on the left, the phenomenon that once led many young men to rally behind Donald Trump, but now driven by unresolved economic problems. The uncomfortable reality is that this is the first generation of Americans to live worse than their parents. Studies show that today’s young adults are less likely to own a home, have lower net wealth and shoulder heavier debt burdens than the baby boomers did at the same age. For many, forming a family or achieving even the most basic economic progress has become difficult, if not impossible.
Mamdani crafted a strategy that many voters found “comforting and empathetic”, obsessively focused on access to basic services and housing. His housing-centred platform—rent freezes, aggressively progressive property-tax reforms and new rights for tenants—spoke directly to the anxieties of a city where the cost of living has spiralled beyond the reach of ordinary workers.
The problem, however, is not just rhetoric; it is reality. Large sections of the younger generation no longer see the present order as a system of free-market capitalism, but rather as “crony capitalism”—a network of entrenched oligarchies. They see a system in which corporations and the wealthiest individuals design public policy for their own benefit. Nowhere is this more evident than in housing. In New York, California and other key markets, investors—large and small—are buying homes at record levels, often paying substantial premiums over median prices and, in some areas, accounting for more than a quarter of all purchases. In certain counties in California, investors own close to 20 per cent of the housing stock, with some rural counties far above that level.
Major firms such as Invitation Homes and Pretium Partners have amassed tens of thousands of single-family homes, becoming landlord-conglomerates on a national scale, which has triggered a wave of criticism and, in some states, legislative attempts to restrict hedge funds from buying up starter homes. Against that backdrop, many young Americans see a rigged game in which they are permanent tenants in a city increasingly owned by funds, LLCs and offshore money.
Mamdani did not win because of his Marxist ideology; he won because his voters are convinced the current system is rigged and has abandoned them. Commentators may decry his programme as utopian and unworkable—as I do—but they would be naïve to ignore the underlying revolt against an order perceived as stacked in favour of a tiny minority at everyone else’s expense.
The risks posed by Marxist “practical socialism” in a major Western city are crystal-clear: chronic inefficiency, fiscal irresponsibility and, as the tragic examples of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggest, a potential slide into implacable authoritarianism. But that does not magically erase the grievances of those who cast their ballots for him.
Conclusion: The Real Lessons for 2026
The Democratic victories in states like Virginia—where a highly effective and popular Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could not run again because of term limits—are anything but a political earthquake. For anyone who actually understands America, Democratic wins in Virginia and New Jersey are no surprise at all, nor is the re-election of a Democratic governor in New Jersey, a state that has not had a Republican governor since Chris Christie’s second term.
The key lesson, the truly “hidden” key for the 2025 and 2026 elections, is adaptation.
The MAGA movement and American conservatism more broadly must rethink their strategy. They cannot simply defend an economic status quo that alienates tens of millions of young people, nor can they afford to ignore independents and young women who do not share the radicalism of the new American left but are equally disenchanted with a system that seems unable to offer them a future.
Mamdani’s victory is not, in and of itself, a triumph of the radical left. It is an anguished cry for help from several generations of young Americans who feel desperate, unprotected and crushed. If the right does not hear that cry—and if Europe continues to misread it through the comforting fog of its own illusions—then the surprises of 2025–2026 will not be the last.
Gustavo de Arístegui is a diplomat and former ambassador of Spain to India, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
DemocratsDonald TrumpEuropeEuropean Union.MAGANew York CityUnited StatesZohran Mamdani