ESSAY: The radical dignity of Zohran Mamdani

A dispatch from his rally in Queens

Last night in Queens, which is to New York what New York is to America, and what America is to the world — a place dedicated to the pursuit of new beginnings — Zohran Mamdani gathered a reported 13,000 people eager to cast off an era of greed and cruelty and draft a new compact rooted in a big idea: dignity as freedom.

Arriving at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, you had to remind yourself that this was merely — “merely” feeling like the wrong word here — a mayoral election rally. Because it was a presidential crowd. Thousands and thousands of people pouring in to fill a stadium that is more often used for performers like Mumford & Sons, Chappell Roan, and Shawn Mendes. Something is happening in New York, something some very wealthy and powerful people don’t want to be happening, and their Hamptony panic is making it happen more and more.

Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, has done many interesting and notable things in this race, but chief among them, perhaps, is his reversal of the gradient of fear. Ever since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, he has been on the offense, a fount of sweeping, often unlawful visions of change. And Democrats have all too often been left in the position of harping on how scary he is and somehow seeming to talk up a pre-Trump status quo that everyone hates. So consuming is this anti-ness that many Democrats seem to have forgotten to propose things of their own. Finally, in Mamdani, there is a Democrat defined by his proposals, by what he wants to build, by his idea of tomorrow, and only secondarily by what he is against. And claiming this mantle of bold change in an era of disaffection with the status quo has turned his opponents into the new Cassandras. It is now they who play the role Democrats have often gotten stuck in: all fear and no vision, gambling everything on being Not Zohran.

I wish the billionaires spending millions to try to defeat Mamdani would lower themselves and deign to come to a rally, even though such a thing would be the political equivalent of flying commercial and a total no-no, status-wise. Because what the rallies feel like is people rejecting rejection and asserting the right to transcend survival and maybe even live. We are animals, but our species has the unique capacity to be more than survivors. In places that deprive people of the basic things they need to survive, life becomes only that — the sustaining of itself, the struggle to extend access to food and shelter another day. Where human beings live so tightly tethered to the business of surviving, the hammer of rent or grocery bills or health costs threatening to come down on them any minute now, the very feeling of life, the very purpose of it, the very meaning of it, changes. The billionaires can extract and extract and hope for the best. But even for them, at some point, it will cease to be fun to live in a place where so many people have so little life force left. It is this trajectory Mamdani voters refuse. They are drunk on the radical proposition that, in a very rich country, survival should be the floor, not the ceiling, of human possibility.

One of the opening speakers at the rally, a labor leader, tried to situate Mamdani in a tradition of “radical imagination.” A tradition that threads through the fight to abolish slavery and the battle for women’s suffrage. She spoke of radical imagination as a “legacy” and an “inheritance.” And this felt important, because it defanged those who would cast Mamdani’s vision as dangerous and untested. People who call people “radical” often have no idea where the word comes from. It comes from “the root.” The fight to have dignity, to live and not just survive, is very old. To be radical, therefore, is to step into an august tradition.

Another impression, before the headliners — Mamdani himself, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders — came on: perhaps the loudest and most sustained applause of the night, made louder by the stomping of feet throughout the amphitheater-like stadium, came after a call to end the genocide in Gaza. The call came from Mamdani’s rival in the Democratic primary, and now his ally, Brad Lander. And this salience of Gaza continues to be mystifying to the American political establishment. The other day, when I asked former Governor Andrew Cuomo what he had missed so as to fall so badly behind a political upstart like Mamdani, he said, “I didn’t think people would vote for mayor based on opposition to Israel. Last I checked, the mayor doesn’t do foreign policy.” Which is only more evidence of his, and many other establishmentarians’, obliviousness.

I doubt anyone in that stadium thinks any mayor of New York can end any war anywhere. But what everyone in that stadium has lived through is an era in which inspiring-sounding politicians say all the right things and don’t help. They promise change and don’t help. They say they’ll help with costs and don’t help. They say they feel your pain and don’t help. Not feeling helped is the defining political emotion for most people today. The nicer the talk, the more you get fooled. So people have begun to be drawn to more reliable sources of evidence that you care. It’s why they like a Bernie Sanders, who has said the same thing when it was convenient and not, when it was popular and not, for 163 years. It’s why they like Ocasio-Cortez, who comes from the working class she pledges to help and seems unpained by infuriating her haters. And it’s why Mamdani’s moral clarity on Gaza, which is not convenient in any conventional political analysis, which has caused him many headaches and turned him into an object of the worst hatemongering, resonates. Maybe, people think to themselves, someone willing to be so inconvenienced by conviction means it. He may not end a war as a mayor — he won’t — but maybe his instinctual gravitation to those on the wrong end of power offers some evidence of how he will view and help others.

Mamdani invited New York Governor Kathy Hochul to his rally, which is like inviting your step-grandmother who doesn’t like you but misses being young to your 21st birthday. It was a shrewd political move on Mamdani’s part, because he will need her to achieve many of his political visions, the state having great sway over the city’s spending. And it was savvy of Hochul to attend, even if she knew she would be subjecting herself to more jeers than cheers, and fervent Mamdani stans imploring her, against her own preferences, to “tax the rich.” She told them that she heard them, even if she didn’t agree. And while some in the crowd thought it awkward to have her there, I thought it was perfect. Normally, it’s progressives who have to fall in line and play good soldier with moderates who win out. This time, it was a normie moderate giving in to a leftist candidate who has a resonance she never will. The awkward and necessary alliance called to mind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s apocryphal plea to A. Philip Randolph, the great Black labor organizer: “Make me do it.” In other words, you the radical create the conditions out there that give square old me no choice but to give people what they want.

Ocasio-Cortez was in fine, fiery form. What struck me was that, more than I have heard in the past, she is finding language to be her visionary, radical self while claiming the vital moral center of American life. Too many progressives fail at this, their commitments causing them to sound too much like college and too little like Kansas, their worry for the least among us somehow becoming elitist in the way it sounds and the heads it goes over. She didn’t do that. Instead, she spoke of Queens, and New York City more generally, as the “jewel of America.” The role that America plays in the world is the role that New York plays in America, is the role that Queens plays in New York. Therefore, she insisted, she and the people she represents cannot be dismissed as exceptions to the rule. They are the rule. What is America? A nation of immigrants? A place of hustle? A place of freeing oneself from the chains of the past? A place of dream catching? She is right that it’s high time we who live in cities stop apologizing for being us and claim the power of living in places where people navigate difference with ease and make things new and have each other’s backs.

By the time Mamdani came on, the crowd fired up from the exhortations of Sanders, he argued against complacency in the mayoral race. But he seemed to me to be reaching for a theme as he makes his closing argument to voters. That theme, it seemed to me, was “dignity,” a word he said over and over. “They do not think you deserve the beauty of a dignified life,” he said. In another moment, he said, “Dignity is another way of saying freedom.” This, too, struck me as being of a piece with Ocasio-Cortez’s words. There is an effort being made here to de-silo the progressive cause, to refuse to let it be marginalized as a fractious federation of grievances, to anchor it in a universalist story about dignity and those who would threaten it. Democrats in recent years have struggled to juggle all of their commitments to all of the groups that make up their base while speaking to the heart of American life. All too often, they end up sounding like foreigners in many places, babbling in inscrutable jargon. This was not that. This was very foundational and basic. People who work hard deserve to more than survive; they deserve to actually live, to dream and dare and love and build.

It recalled what Mamdani told me earlier this year: “We’re on the brink of losing what makes New York special. If it becomes a city of symbolism instead of substance — an artifact rather than a living, breathing testament to what’s possible — we’ll have lost its soul.” New York can only run on the reputational steam of “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” so long. At some point, you need to help people actually make it.

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