If Zohran Mamdani, the surprising winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, wins the mayoralty in November, his victory will have much to do with an instinctive New York City response to the ugly hysteria opposing him.
Donald Trump called the democratic-socialist Mamdani – a 33-year-old New York state assemblyman who was born in Uganda to Indian parents and became a US citizen in 2018 – “a communist at the highest level”, and has since threatened a federal takeover of New York should Mamdani win. A Republican congressman from Tennessee demanded that Mamdani’s citizenship be revoked for supporting “terrorism”. (Mamdani nodded to the “Holy Five”, a group that had been convicted in 2008 of financially supporting Hamas, in a 2017 rap song.) Billionaire Trump gofer Bill Ackman deplored Mamdani’s “socialist/communist” policies. Eric Adams, Mamdani’s incumbent rival, and Andrew Cuomo, another potential competitor, both denounce him for being “antisemitic”. After declaring Mamdani “unfit” to be mayor, the New York Times shamefully published a hacked report by an anonymous right-wing source revealing that Mamdani checked a box identifying as “Black or African-American” on his college application to Columbia. In fact, that was the only box the application offered that came close to describing his background.
It’s easy to see why Mamdani is so reviled. As the immigrant son of immigrant parents, he can clear a path for left figures with national ambitions. He has the biographical equity to begin to pull the Democratic party away from the ruinous identity politics that opened the door to Trump and to move it towards economic issues that touch most people. And just as Trump is using the pretext of immigration to create the beginnings of a nationalist-populist police state, Mamdani can make the wholly disproportionate hammer-blows against immigrants symbolic of the harsh new forces the right is now ranging against ordinary Americans.
The son of a prominent filmmaker and a Columbia professor, Mamdani is, predictably, being portrayed by the right as a coddled elite. But far from coddled, he seems vulnerably authentic, for all his studied iron poise. He didn’t get into Columbia. The rap song seems more the result of artlessly transparent feeling than grim ideology. In the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel, he refuses to renounce his courageous insistence on Palestinian dignity and rights, though he is emphatic about Israel’s right to exist. (And yet it does remain inexplicable that he refuses to distance himself from calls for a “global intifada”, thus gratifying the right and fostering a divisive atmosphere on the left.)
If anything, Mamdani, who also enjoys substantial Jewish support, recalls the stubborn, ferociously independent New York Jewish intellectuals and political activists of yore. He is as honest as Adams and Cuomo are dishonest and corrupt. The former cut a deal with Trump’s Justice Department to avoid a criminal trial on charges of bribery; the latter, as New York governor, forced nursing homes to accept patients with Covid during the pandemic, then lied about the large number of deaths that followed. Cuomo also resigned as governor in the wake of numerous accusations of sexual harassment.
This isn’t to say there wouldn’t be legitimate worries should Mamdani go on to win. Mamdani has to prove that left populism is something more than rhetoric – something more than the toothless Occupy Wall Street protest movement 15 years ago. “John Lindsay was the best mayor New York ever had before he took office,” a wag said about another romantic upstart mayor, whose lack of political judgment and skill ran the city into the ground in the early 1970s.
Mamdani’s goals of freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, doubling the city’s minimum wage, implementing free buses, offering free childcare, opening city-owned grocery stores, using social workers instead of police to handle people who appear to be mentally ill, and blocking ICE deportations, would be a humane revolution in American morality. But his proposals require lots of money. As for redeploying the police, there is a reason Cuomo carried a majority of the black vote in the Democratic primary. Unlike most of Mamdani’s supporters, who are well-heeled millennials and Zoomers living in exclusive Manhattan and Brooklyn enclaves, materially struggling black people suffer more than other groups in New York from crime, just as they suffer more from police brutality.
Mamdani understands the funds his reforms require. What Bill Ackman frantically calls Mamdani’s “communism” consists of Mamdani’s intention to raise taxes by 2 per cent on New Yorkers making over $1m per year (2 per cent of $1m is $20,000; Ackman’s Patek Philippe is probably worth over $800,000.) The revenue would liberate a city that Michael Bloomberg, when mayor, made unaffordable to all but the wealthiest by means of carefully engineered housing and tax policies. But it is New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, who has the only authority to raise taxes. She is not going to alienate the monied classes. At the same time, if Mamdani were to somehow force a showdown with her and win, that could be just the victory a true left-populism would need to fill the void created by Trump’s populism for fools.
Young and exciting enough to be mayor of New York, Mamdani is, for now, too young and too parochial in some of his politics – he needs to stick to his economic vision – to be a national figure. Still, with his quiet, radiantly defiant smile, he is a golden spot in the zombie world of American public life, ruled by sclerotic old men, their spineless enablers, and bloviating billionaire mediocrities like Ackman, Thiel and Musk who think their every word rings with profundity and who could care less about the public good. The gathering forces of American darkness want Zohran Mamdani as dead as they are. If he triumphs, it will be in part simply because the very worst people want him to stop.
[See also: Inside Robert Jenrick’s New Right revolution]
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