Online you can hear about Zohran Mamdani’s “angry, far-left, rage-filled victory speech.” I missed out and had to settle for the speech he really gave. If you’re scared of immigrants, you could say it was an immigrant-triumphalist speech (“My brother, we are in City Hall now”). If you’re not, you say good for them and that’s America. But an angry speech? Show me that part.
On the night New York City elected Zohran Mamdani its mayor, he was loud, defiant, and joyful. He dismissed Andrew Cuomo and he laid down a challenge to Donald Trump—good! He didn’t fulminate, assail, or malign. Billionaires and ICE didn’t get mentioned. He talked about what he wanted to do (“freeze the rents for more than two million rent-stabilized tenants, make buses fast and free, and deliver universal child care across our city”) and who he was fighting for. This last group turned out to be everybody: “To every New Yorker—whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents, or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all—thank you for the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your trust.”
He gloried in his victory for the city’s “more than one million Muslims,” but first he reached out to the city’s Jews (“we will build a City Hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism”). He even backdoored some praise for his opponent’s father by citing “a great New Yorker” and then repeating Mario Cuomo’s famous remark about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. I expect the crowd would’ve booed on hearing the name itself. But Mamdani got the gesture in there.
Not being a socialist, and knowing that many of New York City’s policy choices can be shot down by state government, I find Mamdani’s policy agenda to be a bit of a magic carpet—sounds appealing but I don’t see how it gets in the air. (No smirk’s intended here about the mayor-elect’s religion; the comparison suits my point, that’s all.) I think he’s going to hit some hard bumps, but he seems like the kind of person who can cope. In four years he may be a socialist just in patches. But by then America will have a good deal more socialists than it did when he started out.
In the Reagan age pundits said his secret was to sell extreme views without being scary. Liberals were scared of him and tried hard to get everyone else to see why. It didn’t work. Turn on a TV and you saw Ronald Reagan smiling and twinkling, a relaxed man who had his views and was willing to share them but didn’t act like some kind of nut. Mamdani pulls that off too. Reagan could get angry (“I paid for this microphone”), but when he did he sounded like a man who was standing up, not having a meltdown. The same for Mamdani, who became volcanic against Cuomo in the June primary debate but sounded all the better for it. Pundits talk about how handy Zohran will be as a Republican bogeyman, and somebody swarthy and bearded is certainly useful for waving at the suckers. He’ll scare the older GOP voters, but I think some of the young men will start listening and find they like the guy. Some people have it, some don’t; Mamdani’s got so much he could start a mint.
“Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice,” Zohran told the crowd. “Hope is alive.” Jesse Jackson said much the same thing in 1988. Barack Obama told us about hope and change. Now somebody dark and charismatic is talking about hope again and that’s fine by me.