Mayor Mamdani’s bigger we
Zohran Mamdani seizes the moment with pragmatism, progressivism, and community. Can that vision win over America?
How is it that the city that gave rise to Donald John Trump could also give rise to Zohran Kwame Mamdani? Anand took that question to the Morning Joe panel today.
Is yesterday’s overwhelming Democratic victory not just, as Joe Scarborough put it, a “repudiation of the politics of hate and rage” and the logical follow-up to the No Kings demonstrations, but also a sign that, in America, politics still works? And that Democrats, for all of their disarray, are figuring out how to do it? And that Zohran Mamdani has led the way in pulling together progressive goals and kitchen-table arguments in a way that’s compelling enough to turn the tables on Trumpism?
Can Mamdani be not a copy-paste-ready model but rather a great synthesizer of threads within the Democratic Party — a leader parallel, as Scarborough mused, to Ronald Reagan? That remains to be seen.
But Mamdani is already doing something important that has eluded Democrats so far — he’s helping to make meaning for people.
As Anand put it in a Substack note earlier:
The profound insight of the Zohran Mamdani campaign was that people want to be summoned to do more, not less; they want to get together, not lurk on screens alone; they want to belong in hope, not just commiserate in anger; they want to organize, not agonize.
The campaign had 100,000 volunteers. It had about 1 million voters. One out of 10 of its voters were volunteers. Is there any precedent for this in modern political history?
This is not “Don’t boo. Vote.” This is “Don’t boo. Join.”
A lot of other prominent progressive campaigns have been extremely online, even at their best. This was an incredibly physical, meat-space campaign.
I would not be surprised if there are dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of relationships that eventually come out of that volunteer corps. There are going to be Zohran volunteer marriages and children, five, ten, twenty years from now. People want to be part, as Emma Goldberg reported for The New York Times.
Volunteering for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign became a salve for members of a generation diagnosed by psychologists with anxiety and by the surgeon general with loneliness, whose religious affiliation is often “unaffiliated” and who also apparently killed drinking and having sex.
“It’s honestly what I would prescribe for the loneliness epidemic,” said Tal Frieden, 28, at a rally in Sunset Park the Sunday before Election Day.
We’ve heard from a lot of smart people — like former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Senator Chris Murphy — over the past couple of years about the epidemic of loneliness, and they have suggested that solving for loneliness is a big part of fixing American democracy. Mayor Mamdani appears to be on the case.
Some critics have raised red flags about Mamdani’s leadership inexperience. If job one of an executive is hiring, he seems to be off to a pretty solid start with an impressive transition team featuring a very familiar face:
Looking for more? Here at The Ink, we’ve been covering the Mamdani campaign since it began, maybe even before it was cool, and we invite you to look back with us.
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This is genuinely the most hopeful I've felt since November 2016.
I watched every Dem victory speech (those of NJ, VA and NYC) last night. None came even close to Mamdani's in recognizing (1) the plight of the working class (2) people power and (3) waking up that power to affect real change. Other Dems need to capture the way that Mamdani highlights inclusivity in a way that feels completely genuine. It was as true to the "us, not me" vibe that one can actually articulate. Mamdani's win and his speech filled me with such hope. However, I realize there will be many attempts to kneecap him at all costs and not just by Republicans--but by corporate Dems, as well. Hopefully, the power of the people in huge numbers--his supporters, constituents and his administration--will help quell/stall the opposition.