Zohran’s Promise

Zohran’s Promise

The Mamdani campaign extended the arena of political participation to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward will be sustaining faith in the idea that the city is ours to make.

Zohran Mamdani first became visible to me and many others almost one year ago, when he posted a video where he spoke to working-class New Yorkers in the Bronx and Queens about why some of them voted for Donald Trump. In that video, which subsequently went viral, Mamdani swept aside the superficial argument about whether support for Trump was motivated by racial and xenophobic animus or economic anxiety. He simply asked people and listened to what they said. Since then, he has advanced his mayoral candidacy on a few clear propositions demonstrated that day. Ordinary people are worried about their material and social standing as they try to build their lives in one of the most unequal and expensive cities in the world. “Affordability” has been Mamdani’s watchword ever since; he used it to ground a winning campaign. The essence of that campaign, however, grew from a more fundamental democratic insight: that politics begins by meeting people where they are, convincing them that you will listen to them, and building trust that you will stand for them and lead them to a better future.

Much has been made of Mamdani’s exceptional qualities as a communicator and campaigner, his use of video and social media, and his ability to disarm ideological opponents with humor, conviviality, and, when necessary, a cutting riposte, delivered with a smile. He has been described as a generational political talent, uniquely perceptive and skilled in his ability to combine populism, pragmatism, and principle. Many across the political spectrum are studying his campaign to try and distill the secrets of its success. While some on the left see Mamdani’s rise as a straightforward confirmation of the winning appeal of bread-and-butter issues and class-first politics, others, usually in defense of Democratic Party centrism, downplay its significance, emphasizing the peculiarities of New York progressivism, the charisma of the messenger, and the weakness of his opponents. Both views ignore what may be Mamdani’s most important contribution in the current moment: he has resurrected a universalist, redistributive, civic-egalitarian politics that had practically vanished from the national and international scene.

Inspiring the biggest turnout in a mayoral contest since the 1960s, Mamdani won a majority of votes yesterday and a convincing mandate. In the Democratic primary, he was aided by ranked-choice voting. In both the primary and general election, he benefited from the public financing of New York City’s elections, which levels the playing field by blunting the power of big donors. Still, Mamdani’s path to victory as a young and relatively inexperienced outsider, a socialist running to the left of most of the field, an immigrant, and a Muslim to boot, was a long shot a year ago. His win showcases his evident political skill. But it also demonstrates a larger point: how resisting poll-tested pandering can capture attention, galvanize wider interest in politics, and overcome chronically low expectations. Rather than pursuing fruitless competition for a finite pool of median voters and narrow margins, Mamdani thus offers an admittedly limited, local test of an idea that has to be at the center of any left electoral strategy: existing partisan allegiances are weak, non-voters can be stirred, no votes can be taken for granted, and all votes are up for grabs.

Mamdani shows how new constituencies are born from taking political risks and made through probing investigation and performative interaction. Maybe this is what it means to read the room. Mamdani, for example, had to carefully navigate some of his prior statements, which were hostile to the police, in response to a political environment focused on public safety. He did so while also retaining substantive proposals, including delegating responses to crises of mental health and homelessness to a new Department of Community Safety instead of the police. He distilled his affordability agenda into a series of memorable, small-bore proposals on freezing rent increases for the limited number of rent-stabilized apartments, providing free buses, and piloting a few lower-cost, city-owned grocery stores, but he set them within a far more ambitious agenda to fund universal child care via higher corporate taxes and a new millionaire wealth tax—a transformative policy that will require broad political leverage and skill to win. Last, he reclaimed the language of efficiency and deliverables from the Department of Government Efficiency’s punitive austerity and right-wing branding, while also pushing against the neoliberal reflex to means test and muddy every proposal to improve public welfare.

If a well-articulated set of policies served as the campaign’s operating system, it ran on the hardware of strong relationships with the younger, pro-Palestine left from the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and from organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace (which endorsed him from the start), and with South Asian and Muslim communities across the city. Among his most important insights, Mamdani recognized that in a post-9/11 world shaped by bigoted security fears, compounded by MAGA’s animosity toward immigrants, decades of local organizing among neglected first- and second-generation Middle Eastern and South Asian New Yorkers made them a powerful constituency. Accused of antisemitism and facing unrelenting attacks for his longstanding opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, and war, Mamdani built alliances with Jewish progressives (most notably his primary opponent Brad Lander), while also foreseeing that stale orthodoxies of pro-Israel fealty within the Democratic Party were not likely to stand in a world scarred by a new genocide. Against nativist contempt, he showed how ethnic succession in American cities arises from a healthy pluralism attached to common dreams and pleasures (such as his emphasis on the culinary richness of New York City). Sticking to his long-held support for justice for Palestine, he demonstrated, against the moral abdication of the national Democratic Party, that principled leadership on a seemingly unpopular cause can inspire committed volunteer action and engender trust and respect across a widening base of support.

Mamdani clearly succeeded by prioritizing injustices and inequalities that he believes impact the greatest number of people and cut across our differences. An underappreciated aspect of his success, however, is how he also reframed contentious differences as common cause, and in doing so broadened the appeal of the left’s project. In recent years, the left has been trapped in a sterile, internecine debate where one faction wishfully assumes that different kinds of so-called identity-based oppression—expressed on the basis of “lived experience” and in the name of “equity”—align and coalesce, while another faction argues, often in highly abstract terms, that only by prioritizing a common set of “working-class interests” can we create the solidarity required to win elections. Both tendencies ironically base politics on appeals to what are understood to be given interests and static social conditions, and in doing so narrow the aperture of political vision needed to construct new majorities in a world of plural antagonisms.

Mamdani took a different approach. He clearly understands that coalitions are the lifeblood of politics—and are by necessity comprised of groups with particularistic, not always wholly compatible interests and concerns. Yet he has repeatedly taken on the challenge of unifying and universalizing these concerns, not only by bringing them back to the tentpole of affordability, but also by effectively articulating their general import and implications for wider publics. This is where the issue of support for Israel and attacks on Mamdani’s own ethnicity and religion have cut most sharply in the campaign. What is the charge of antisemitism in defense of Israel, if not the assertion that one group’s history of oppression must trump all competing political interests and democratic deliberations? Repeatedly pressed on whether he thinks Israel has “a right to exist,” Mamdani has replied it does as a “state with equal rights,” and that he “would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race and religion.” When attacked for his own faith and ethnicity, Mamdani has similarly returned to a universalist predicate: “The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker.” With these simple turns of phrase, he shows fidelity to an aesthetic and political reflex—an injury to one is an injury to all—that resounds in the history of the left’s great victories.

When Mamdani started his campaign, conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party suggested his long track record of support for Palestinian rights was a political liability, if not disqualifying. It is thus instructive to consider how this has actually played out. An Israeli genocide funded by a sclerotic Democratic presidential administration, which acceded to public sanctioning of unruly pro-Palestinian street and campus protest, provided an enabling environment for MAGA’s resurgence, including the spectacle of public hearings under the heavy thumb of billionaire wealth. “Israel first” and “America first,” it seemed, went hand in hand. Mamdani’s main rivals pandered to this fictitious, enforced consensus. When asked where they would go on their first foreign visit as mayor of New York, most of them bowed, including stalwart progressive Adrienne Adams, who set the tone by announcing she would go to “the Holy Land.” Mamdani came near last. “I would stay in New York City,” he said, doing the job of mayor. Call it putting New York first. Mamdani has since noted that there will be no anti-Zionist litmus test for his administration. His questions for the sanitation commissioner will not be “about Israel and Palestine,” but “about garbage.”

Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City. It is unfortunate that there is not more time to savor the accomplishment. The billionaires who fear the threat he poses to their influence and power, even more than to their wealth, will continue to do everything they can to undermine him. Threats from the Trump administration to withhold fiscal support and to unleash chaotic DHS raids on the city will be grave and immediate. Public safety—how it is perceived in relation to what happens on the streets and subways, and how it is balanced against criminal justice reform—will remain a major testing ground. There is already well-founded concern that Mamdani has compromised prematurely in agreeing to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. Tisch is on record opposing reforms such as raising the age of criminal responsibility and dissolving the gang database. While Tisch and Mamdani agree on matters of police corruption, the outcome of potential conflicts between them on a range of issues, such as disbanding the Strategic Response Group and establishing a Department of Community Safety, will be among the most important early signals of the prospects of his mayoralty.

The success of a future left politics built on expanding the voter base, advancing pre-distribution (along with redistribution), eliminating corruption, and delivering higher quality public services will be no small achievement. But winning a single political campaign, even for a position as significant as mayor of New York City, is not yet proof of concept. The not-so-small issue of governing and delivering on bigger, more lasting promises will require reshaping political power in New York State and beyond. Anti-Mamdani critics say he will destroy the city, endanger Jewish New Yorkers, and prompt the wealthy to flee. Brokering discussions with Mamdani following his Democratic primary victory, Kathryn Wylde, respected doyen of New York’s developers and financiers, admitted Mamdani’s rise had made them all “a little hysterical.” Wylde also knows something that every savvy counterinsurgent knows: financial power tends to trump the political power dependent upon its largesse, and cooptation is the surest route to defusing egalitarian enthusiasms. My fear is more pointed: against limitations imposed by the city’s captivity to state taxing authority and the municipal bond market, a teetering economy, and entrenched homelessness and poverty (now encompassing more than one quarter of the city’s children), Mamdani’s affordability agenda, however earnest, faces long odds.

We’ve seen this movie before: disillusion sets in as reformist projects from the left get chewed in the maw of capitalist austerity and its manifest social decay. There is nevertheless cause for optimism. “To be truly radical,” Raymond Williams wrote, “is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” We need that right now. If there is going to be such a thing as democracy in the United States in the twenty-first-century, it is most likely to be generated from a multiplicity of local initiatives that rebuild trust in political action by reestablishing vital and functioning feedback loops between the public, its problems, and political representatives—feedback loops that have completely dissolved at the national and global scales. Free buses, increased access to quality food, less scaffolding, paused rent increases, reducing costly city procurement processes, and limiting police contact with vulnerable people are achievable, modest, and practical proposals—indicative of an orientation aptly called “sewer socialism.” They are a platform on which we can build.

Mamdani has been explicit about demonstrating that a left that criticizes power can be a left that delivers the goods. But bitter inequalities, the degradation of our media and politics by billionaire wealth, and the lingering derangement of pandemic isolation have damaged our society and left us with an aching need for civic renewal. The right has responded to this with a narrowed vision of membership enforced by daily spectacles of civil warfare in our neighborhoods; a shrill, inert center counsels mild improvements to a discredited status quo; and an activist left struggles to broaden politics beyond the already convinced. From its first days out on Fordham Road in the Bronx to its last, visiting night shift workers at LaGuardia Airport and Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, the Mamdani campaign was built on another proposition: we win the future by extending the arena of political participation and engagement to ordinary and unseen people of every place and pursuit. The challenge going forward, no less important than delivering on campaign promises, will be sustaining public faith in the promise that the city is ours to make.

Nikhil Pal Singh is a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University. He is currently working on a book on the twilight of America’s liberal empire.