This Independence Day, Americans will gather to celebrate their founding myths — that the United States is a nation born in rebellion, rooted in love of liberty, and committed to the proposition that all men are created equal. But nearly 250 years on, what counts as American, and who gets to define what that means in practical terms, remains as contested as ever.
Few recent stories illustrate this better than Zohran Mamdani. A 32-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda and raised in Queens, Mamdani last week won the Democratic Party primary for New York’s mayoralty. In doing so, he’s well on his way to validating what astute observers could feel for weeks: the man could become the “real Obama”, even as he dodges the 44th president’s vacuous “nation-of-immigrants” mythos in favour of progressive policies from housing to transport. Yet if Mamdani has the charisma, vision and social media savvy to be the future of American politics, he first needs to prove his Americanness.
That’s proving to be a struggle. Last week, Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee drafted a formal letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding that Mamdani — an elected official representing a district over 850 miles away from his own — be denaturalised and deported because he is a potential “terrorist supporter”. Earlier this week, when White House officials were asked about that possibility, none offered a clear denial. All of them, including President Trump himself, seemed quite open to the possibility. And though, of course, they were loath to bring up Mamdani’s background explicitly, The New York Times has proved itself similarly suspicious, its editorial board arguing that the candidate didn’t even “deserve” a spot on the ballot. It all speaks to the struggles politically active Americans outside the Protestant, small-state mainstream continue to face — and how identity and economics conspire to impede alternatives to the status quo.
One of the odder features of American political self-perception is that Americans, both Left and Right, wholly believe the myth that the country is “multicultural”. But multiethnic and multicultural are not the same thing. Even by 1830, more than two centuries after the Puritans landed at Plymouth, roughly 90% of American society remained Anglo-Protestant. This included denominations like Congregationalist, Anglican and Baptist, alongside various Puritan offshoots and an emerging network of black churches. As late as the Civil War, the population was still roughly three-quarters Protestant — over nine-in-10 of whom were some variation of Anglo-Protestant.
The mythology surrounding the country’s post-Sixties embrace of superficial “multiculturalism” has, in many ways, become a conceptual prison. It greatly hampers Americans’ ability to understand the true character of their own nation, so much so that few seemed to notice the actual religious composition of the 118th Congress, elected in 2022: where over 55% of its members identified as Protestant, about a third as Catholic, 6% as Jewish, and just 1.6% as Mormon. Today — over 400 years after the 1619 date The New York Times so loves to reference as our national start date — more than 93% of Congress generally comes from just four religious groups, with Anglo-Protestants still comfortably dominant.
From the vantage point of 4 July, this is unsurprising: Anglo ethnopolitics still greatly define the identity of this former British colony. Yet our demographic story is hardly a relic of history. From a political culture standpoint, the United States is the most ideologically policed nation in the liberal democratic world, and it’s not even close. It is a nation that’s been controlled by a two-party cartel for going on two centuries. This cartel rigorously works in harmony with allied media operations, and the higher-education apparatus, to prevent any ideas outside the Anglo-liberal consensus from ever being understood, much less taking root. Mamdani directly challenges this consensus — particularly its Anglo-liberal deification of markets, individual responsibility, and limited-government concepts that make citizens feel like they must beg for welfare state programmes like a street panhandler.
Mamdani’s Muslim faith, Indian ancestry, and Ugandan birth combine to expose what might be called the “LASP” nexus — the “Liberal Anglo-Saxon Protestant” framework that has shaped the American political imagination since the Mayflower. The United Kingdom, of course, has also been heavily influenced by Anglo-liberal and Anglo-Protestant thought. But, unlike its wayward colonial offspring, it at least has a major political party with roots in the labour movement, not to mention the historical influence of the Fabian Society. In contrast, the United States has never had a major political party whose formation can be tied to labour organising.
The Democratic Party, after all, dates back to the founding of the republic, when it was still called the “Democratic-Republican Party”— the party of Thomas Jefferson and, later, Andrew Jackson. It reflected their love affair with the “yeoman farmer”, and a democracy of smallholders. This ideal was totally incapable of reconciling itself with industrialisation, as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats fought a civil war clinging to slavery long after much of the rest of the world, including Britain itself, recognised its abomination.
Due to the legacy of slavery, colourist concepts of ethnicity — along with the enduring “nation of immigrants” folklore — have so thoroughly dominated our historical narrative that modern Americans operate with almost no awareness of the cultural homogeneity that defined their country for the first 300 years of its existence. The reality is that non-British immigrants did not begin arriving in numbers that threatened the country’s Anglo supremacy until the second quarter of the 19th century. By then, the so-called American “experiment” was already two centuries old, and well on its way to congealing into a rigidly Anglo-Protestant and Anglo-liberal nation. Yet when waves of Irish and German Catholics — as well as proto-socialists and abolitionists fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848 — began arriving by the hundreds of thousands, the Anglo-Protestant majority swiftly rejected them as fundamentally un-American, just as today’s establishment routinely recoil in horror at people like Mamdani.
All across the US, nativist mobs formed to prevent Irish and German immigrants from voting or holding office, meeting them at polling stations with bats and brass knuckles. They assaulted nuns and clergy, torched Catholic churches, and vandalised immigrant schools and meeting halls. What was happening was simple: white Protestants threatening non-Protestant whites, demanding they assimilate politically and morally into the country’s dominant LASP worldview — or face severe violence. These now-infamous but poorly understood “Know Nothings” operated as the shock troops of the American Party. Initially known as the “Native American Party”, at its peak it controlled nearly a third of Congress, either openly or covertly, as well as six governorships, all at a time when the union included only 31 states.
When this white-on-white violence is acknowledged in modern scholarship, it’s often framed as a racial problem — based on the now-common claim that the Irish weren’t yet considered “white”. As it is, though, that’s the assessment of the blinkered modern mind. So consumed with colourist conceptions of ethnicity — and ignorant of comparative political ideals, not to mention the history of intra-Christian prejudices — that it completely misses the Anglo supremacism that 19th-century nativists sought to protect religiously, politically, and culturally. After all, Irish and German immigrants were initially deemed unfit for office for the same reasons Mamdani is now: not just because they were foreign, but because their ethnopolitical ideals threatened an entrenched framework elites openly claimed as exclusively American.
Historically, indeed, politicians outside the LASP mould have only gained acceptance by first affirming the cultural dominance of Anglo-liberalism and Anglo-Protestantism — as Obama himself did, early in his career, by fighting to establish his bonafides in the mainline Protestant United Church of Christ in Chicago. Even then, suspicion and coded nativism remained thorns in the side of this decidedly conformist (and careerist) former Harvard Law Review president. Obama’s lengthy efforts to prove his Protestantism were still not enough to prevent him from having to fend off the “secret Muslim” label that dogged him for much of his first term.
Despite the paranoia of “Birther” nativism, which Trump helped lead, no openly Muslim candidate has ever been elected to the Senate. The same goes for Buddhists and Hindus. The lower chamber has been only marginally more inclusive. Just three Muslims have ever entered the House, all in the last 20 years: Keith Ellison, André Carson, and Ilhan Omar. The latter, in particular, has faced relentless xenophobia, with members of the GOP regularly smearing her as “un-American” and “terrorist sympathiser” — very similar to the alienating labels Mamdani has faced today.
Muslims and non-Western religions aren’t the only groups that have been met with prejudice by the country’s Anglo-Protestant majority either. Even the Mormons, arguably the whitest — and most Middle American — of heterodox religious groups had to abandon its practice of polygamy and dismantle their vast communal economic system before the Utah territory could be admitted as a state. Yes, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons were eventually welcomed into the American mainstream during the 20th century. But that only happened after a full century of cultural, and political, Anglo-centric assimilation. Each group had to prove they embraced Republican versions of democracy, Anglo-liberal “free” market economics and, no less important, Anglo-Americans’ unique take on the Protestant work ethic, which equates state support with personal failure.
Mamdani, though, is clearly cut from a different cloth, and is about as far from the Wall Street-friendly Obama as you can imagine. Even so, would Mamdani be considered “radical” outside the rigid Anglo-liberal boundaries that still define American politics in the 21st century? Whether it’s his proposals for rent control, his plan for free public transit, or even the idea of state-owned grocery stores — nearly all of these proposals would be politically unremarkable in much of the developed world and, increasingly, many parts of the global south too.
In American political culture, however, the establishment has eagerly worshipped “wealth creators” while demeaning wage workers as lazy or entitled. This occurs regularly despite the fact that the US has, by far, the weakest labour protections and stingiest welfare state among wealthy industrialised nations. This mentality emerged early in the industrial era, as elites embraced a Robber Baron-style capitalist triumphalism, intertwined with the survival-of-the-fittest ethos promoted by Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner. The only serious resistance ever mounted against this ideology was the New Deal coalition, built on Franklin Roosevelt’s political genius and relentless popular appeal. The American establishment hysterically condemn Mamdani because they can sense he might have that same potential.
Despite Roosevelt’s unparalleled four-term popularity, when the New Deal coalition collapsed in the Seventies, the role of labour unions and the state in building up middle-class stability began to disappear from the national narrative. In its place, identity politics rose up to become the face of American “Leftism”. As the language of identity replaced the language of class, the establishment’s long-standing worship of wealth and material success became stronger still. That ultimately paved the way for Wall Street plunder and modern Silicon Valley hyper-feudalism where, since 1975, approximately $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American workers to the top 1%.
This astoundingly regressive wealth redistribution must, of course, be justified by ideology. That’s where the Social Darwinism of thinkers like Sumner come in, offering a uniquely American cauldron of disdain for the needy and indigent, what Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra once dubbed our “kill the poor” mentality. To put it differently, New Yorkers can’t have the free childcare that much of Europe takes for granted — not because the city lacks resources but because, as Sumner would argue, they don’t “deserve” it.
Many Americans, especially among the poor and working class, have internalised these low expectations. Mamdani, as some have noted, performed the worst among voters with little or no college education. So yes, his recent electoral success might be due primarily to an influx of college-educated groups. Yet that hardly explains why Donald Trump received 30% of the Big Apple’s presidential vote in 2024 — nearly double what he received in 2016.
Even in New York, then, wokeness seems to have crested. It may still dominate faculty rosters in America and many parts of the media landscape, but it doesn’t explain Mamdani’s rise. Despite the bemoaning of Mamdani as nothing more than a spoiled woke socialist, his surprising political success derives from his rejection of identity-victimhood fixations and — like FDR before him — his refusal to accept the elite dogma that the state is powerless to improve the economic conditions of everyday people.
Mamdani is routinely portrayed as a demonic immigrant antichrist for the same reason the German 48ers were declared an existential threat, despite their small numbers and political irrelevance. These early rebels openly challenged America’s LASP norms and dared to advocate for a different — multicultural and multi-ideological — vision of the country. Mamdani seems set to do the same. Whether or not you support his policies, the intensity of the reaction from the national media and Right-wing influencers toward a mayor’s race, in a place most of them openly hate, reveals something deeper, almost unconscious.
Rather, the ritualistic scapegoating of Mamdani across the US press arises because everything about the man stands outside America’s now-entrenched LASP boundaries: he’s not Anglicised morally and doesn’t pretend otherwise; he’s not Anglo-liberal in the “classical” free market sense; nor is he “Protestantised” in terms of the moral economy. Instead, he’s an open critic of Anglo-liberal politics, unapologetically pro-statist in his economic vision and a Muslim — a westernised one, yes, but a Muslim nonetheless.
Taken together, Mamdani is an avowed non-LASP — or indeed an anti-LASP. That doesn’t just make him a “radical”, it makes him an outsider, a contaminant, and a threat to the body politic. Should he ultimately win the mayor’s office of the nation’s largest city, it will be seen by many as a breach in the national fortress, a challenge not merely to our latently Anglo vision of multiculturalism, but also to the Anglo supremacist nexus that still dominates the American mind — nearly 250 years after declaring independence from Britain.
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Author: B. Duncan Moench
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