Can Mamdani Save America?
The recent winner of the New York City mayorial primary, Zohran Mamdani, is a young socialist Muslim immigrant—in other words, he is the anti-Trump. Running on a platform of freezing rents, and socializing grocery stores, public buses, and childcare by taxing the wealthy, he represents everything Maga is against. If one wanted to write a screenplay opposing two opposite figures, one could do no better than this current political confrontation.
Of course, Mamdani is not running against Trump, yet he does offer a very different political vision for the United States. It is also likely that his biggest opposition is the Democratic Party establishment that fears the policies and principles of his Leftist ideology. Just as Bernie Sanders has had to contend with elite center-Left centrists, his model of democratic socialism will be facing attacks from all sides. My main question is how does he fit into global politics?
If we take climate change as the central global issue, we see how he is trying to address this problem on a local level. Not only does he want to subsidize carbon-neutral buses: He also desires to build energy-efficient housing and educational facilities. In other words, he is attacking climate change through local policies that have global implications.
As a Muslim and an immigrant, he also represents global migration and cultural diversity. In this context, it will be interesting to see how he does in a city with a large Jewish population during a period of heightened antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Being a former New Yorker, I imagine that the Jewish community will be split between progressives who will support him and conservatives who have a phobic fear of Islam (Jewish people make up around 13% of the city’s voters). Of course, the people who will resist him the most are the libertarian capitalists who do not want to pay higher taxes to support welfare programs or to regulate the cost of rent.
Mamdani’s interesting strategy is to focus on the issue of affordability in the city, and this helps him to emphasize what many voters say concerns them. According to a Guardian article, he wants to address climate by presenting policies that are tied to reducing the cost of living for moderate and low-income people. In presenting climate change as a quality of life issue, he is offering a different political approach to this global concern.
As a strong advocate for labor unions and a higher minimum wage, he seeks to combine the reduction of the cost of living with an increase in employees’ income levels. These are clearly ambitious goals that offer a strong alternative to Trump’s efforts to reduce the taxes for the wealthy and eliminate many services for low-income people. He also wants to protect immigrants against ICE and the Trump administration.
One of Mamdani’s biggest strengths is that he is very good with social media and has the ability to think on his feet. It will be interesting to see if he can overcome so many prejudices and obstacles both inside and outside of his own party. By staging a fight between the Left and the center-Left, he may have the effect of clarifying the future of the Democratic Party. As a New York Times editorial statement against him read, the fear is that he does not have the support of the business community and the governor, and while he may be a good campaigner, there is no evidence that he knows how to govern. This notion of the ‘business community” may be a contradiction-in-terms since modern capitalism is often anti-social. Moreover, the conservative fear of change may be in part driving the center-Left’s phobic reaction to his possible policies, which would indeed by a radical departure from the present. It is also interesting that his two likely rivals are compromised politicians (Mayor Adams and former Governor Cuomo) with a proven record of failure, harassment, and corruption. Perhaps what the Democrats need is a real counter-establishment figure who can change business as usual—not only for New York but for the entire country.