Why Zohran Mamdani fights for the underdog in New York

Last Sunday night at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, where Frank Sinatra once played, a packed crowd of 13,000 came out to see the man leading the race to be the next mayor of New York.

Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic state assemblyman and Democratic mayoral nominee, was joined by dozens of people, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in a demonstration of his ascent to the pinnacle of New York politics.

The cheers for the 34-year-old Mamdani exceeded those for AOC and Bernie, two New York natives who are among the most popular politicians in America.

True New Yorker

Mamdani has been vilified by Trump and other MAGA right-wingers as a radical Marxist who is allegedly plotting a communist revolution in New York City, and as a self-destructive and dangerous choice for the Democratic Party by those in the centre.

However, Mamdani has captivated the New York masses with his aspirational vision for a government that is morally conscious, protective of multiracial and multireligious democracy, and hyper focused on the issues of greatest resonance to local residents. This last point is key: Despite making waves nationally, the way his campaign embodies the essential spirit — and the core concerns — of New Yorkers is indispensable for analysing Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy.

Born in Uganda to parents of Indian descent — a Punjabi Hindu mother, Mira Nair, who is a celebrated, Oscar-nominated director, and a Muslim father, Mahmud Mamdani, a highly regarded professor of international politics at Columbia University — Zohran is committed to a tolerant, pluralist society. He studied at Bowdoin College, where he founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and after college worked as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor. His background as a religious and ethnic minority in every country he has lived in and his experience working on community issues deeply inform his politics and he has not shied away from expressing that.

On the contrary, Mamdani affirmatively leans into his experiences and influences. In an age when authenticity is prized, this has worked well for him — the mainstream Democratic strategist David Axelrod called him “a powerfully articulate, authentic exponent of change.” He parries attacks on his age and inexperience, religion and ethnicity, and alleged naivete with a warm smile and affable wit. But he can also address his identity more head-on when faced with Islamophobic attacks by his rivals, as his viral speech on his experience as a Muslim in New York City showed.

The cause that has presented Mamdani with perhaps his greatest political challenge is his passionate advocacy of Palestinian rights, especially in the face of the massive suffering in Gaza. Mamdani’s perceived anti-Israel stance, including his initial refusal to disavow the phrase “globalise the intifada” — that, contrary to popular perception, he has not personally used — has alienated many New York Jews and called into question his message of inclusion. Mamdani has countered by aggressive outreach the city’s Jewish community, the largest in the world. He gathered business leaders and assured them he would discourage the use of that phrase going forward. Although Cuomo is still the clear favorite among New York Jews, Mamdani might have gained some ground, according to some polls.

But Mamdani continues to fuse a religious moral language with secular liberal institutionalism, an idealistic concern for the marginalised and the economic underdogs with a commitment to empirical governance and outcome-based goals. And he channels the love of New Yorkers for their city — which makes him hyper-focused on local conditions. (As an assemblyman in 2021, he went on a 15-day hunger strike to give debt relief to taxi medallion holders, whose exorbitant debts had resulted in multiple suicides.) But he also has an international sensibility that befits a city where nearly 40% of the population is foreign born.

Friend of abundance

Likewise, Mamdani’s democratic socialism is not the kind that seeks government control of the means of production. He is fond of arrangements like housing co-ops and community land trusts — akin to a kibbutz —which are collectively owned and managed; however, these entities still must compete in the overall marketplace and respond to market dynamics, not seek public subsidies. It is about keeping markets honest, not eliminating them.

Consider his efforts on behalf of food vendors. His campaign’s first viral video featured Mamdani eating from a halal cart and talking to street vendors about inflation. He discussed the high cost of renting licences, related that to the price of the food, and then placed on the screen the Street Vendor Reform Package, an excellent and vital set of reforms, currently sitting on the City Council’s desk.

More controversial is Mamdani’s freeze-the-rent policy to deal with the city’s notoriously high-priced rental market. Freezing rents for four years, even on a small subset of units as Mamdani is proposing, while their expenses increase thanks to inflation, would cause about 200,000 or 20% of rent stabilised units to go bankrupt.

Mamdani also supports one city-owned grocery store in each borough that would either have to compete with the private market or operate at a loss. Such stores are supposed to ameliorate fresh food scarcity in areas where the market has failed. In practice, such policies have no effect on public health, and the savings that he postulates don’t exist, so Mamdani would be wise to rethink this plan.

Mamdani no doubt sees elected office as an extension of social movements — and activism as a supplement to democracy — which is why he comes across as a radical. But the scope of his bad proposals is modest.

If elected, which is likely, Mamdani could certainly crash and burn. But it won’t be because he is a radical determined to foist an ideological agenda on the city. It’ll be because he is young and has no executive experience, or insufficiently relies on technocratic solutions. That would be a mistake in a complex city that is notoriously difficult to govern, partly because entrenched interests thwart rational reforms of its many lopsided laws.

Time will tell whether Mamdani is as competent as he is likable and able to rise to the occasion.

Courtesy : Excerpted from ‘The Unpopulist’