Zohran Mamdani is not the mayor of New York yet, but he’s well on his way there, and he’s won half the battle already.
This is the most consequential Mayoral Election that New York, or for that matter the US, has seen in recent years. The Democratic Party establishment is still coming to terms with his victory, while the Republican Right is furious. Influential donor and financier Bill Ackman, for one, has vowed to defeat Mamdani at all costs and has publicly invited anyone to take on the battle against him.
Local and global ramifications
This election matters to American politics, for obvious reasons, but there are deeper ramifications for global politics and geopolitics as well.
Mamdani’s victory has forced a vast cohort of the Democratic Party to side with him. In a post on X characteristic of such a petulant man, US President Donald Trump has raged against his victory. The old-timers of the Democratic Party, who would doubtless have preferred an establishment figure like Andrew Cuomo to win the race, have reluctantly endorsed Mamdani’s victory.
If there’s any lesson to be derived here, it’s that principled politics will ultimately prevail. Throughout the campaign, Mamdani had to endure one smear job after another. Two points weighed in his favour: his youthful demeanour, which put him at odds with the old-timers who were competing with him, and his balanced perspective, which made it possible for him to both denounce antisemitism and Israel’s activities in Palestine.
More than anything, he believed in what he said and said what he believed and came up with perhaps the most creative campaign anyone could have. While his competitors focused on him, he focused not on them but on the things that needed to be addressed.
The results of the election put to rest any thought that New York City was not ready for someone like him. Jewish and Muslim communities both voted, overwhelmingly, for Mamdani. A Jewish candidate, Brad Lander, cross-endorsed him.
Sure, white nationalists are up in arms, with some bemoaning what New York has supposedly turned into – a hub for Third World immigrants – and others calling for New Yorkers to leave the city. Their ‘weltanschauung’ has become more and more narrow over the years, so it’s not a surprise that some of them would constantly pinpoint Mamdani’s ethnicity.
As conspicuous as the white nationalist backlash has been the desi and expat Asian reaction to his victory. South Asians, specifically Indians, make up what is called a model minority in the US, and they are the most affluent expat community in the country.
More often than not, this crowd veers to the Right. The Hindu Right, predictably, has gone up in arms against Mamdani, even as progressive Indian-Americans have celebrated his victory. Dinesh D’Souza, as Right-wing as any Indian American can get, has cast aspersions on his identity, calling him a “Muslim Obama.” The irony there, of course, is that when Barack Obama campaigned for office in 2008, his detractors on the nationalist Right did nothing but call him Muslim.
Global North’s ruptured hegemony
The US political mainstream has normalised Islamophobia, even as it claims to be critical of antisemitism. The political Right also seems to be more defensive of the Israeli Government than the things that need to be done on the ground. Mamdani has tried to address all this, with a programme that can broadly be called progressive and radical, and the Right-wing press is having a field day describing him as a socialist and, worse, communist.
The US is and should be known for many positive things, but political literacy is perhaps not one of them: pundits on the Right call every radical progressive economic proposal socialist or communist. In their scheme of things, Bernie Sanders would probably be a Stalinist.
And perhaps that’s just as well. The US is home to lawmakers who justify bombings on other countries by quoting Biblical passages. Washington frequently lectures other countries on separation of powers and political literacy, on democracy and accountability, but if the posts on X and statements of its politicians are anything to go by, those lectures should begin at home.
The US fancies itself a democracy, and in many ways it is, but the rise of oligarchy over the last five to six years does not exactly make it a model country in this department, especially not when you have tourists deported for no rhyme or reason other than because they had saved memes of the Vice President on their phones.
I am saying all this, as a foreign policy analyst and a member of the Global South, because the last three years have seen an unprecedented rupture in the Global North’s hegemony over political legitimacy, world order, moral suasion, and much else. There is nothing the Global North can do now to save its face, especially not with the pathetically inadequate remarks it is making about Gaza.
Trump’s ascent gave Western countries a grand opportunity to delink themselves and become more independent. But if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) rapprochement with Trump at its recent summit – what Martin Kettle, in The Guardian, brilliantly calls “an orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump” – should tell us anything, it is that Europe and the Global North will forever be content being vassals of Washington.
A glimmer of hope
It is against this backdrop that we should welcome Mamdani. He is a member of a model minority but has gone against the grain in many ways. I am not sure whether he will win the mayoralty – especially with the Democratic and Republican establishment both pitting themselves against him – but if he does, I will not be surprised.
There is a scene in ‘Mississippi Masala’ – directed by Mamdani’s mother, the brilliant Mira Nair – where Denzel Washington and Roshan Seth spar over which of their communities have struggled harder in the US.
“Ain’t a damn thing you can tell me about struggle,” Washington tells Seth. “I’m a Black man born and raised in Mississippi.” His rage hardens. “I know you and your folks can come down here from God knows where,” he declares, “and be ’bout as black as the ace of spades, and as soon as you get here, you start acting white.”
I think there’s a lot of wisdom and profundity in this exchange, and it reflects a little on the present moment, when, to quote Frantz Fanon – on whom Mamdani’s father has written extensively – the black skins among us are eagerly becoming white masks.
The responses to Mamdani’s victory, disparate as they are, offer a glimmer of hope in this regard, revealing to us the possibilities of principled politics – and of a better world. That alone has been worth all the struggles we have been putting up with for the past so many decades.
(The writer is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific-focused foreign policy think tank based in Colombo and accessible via www.factum.lk. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk)