Salaam, New York!
There are some troubling aspects to Zohran Mamdani. But the city - and the country - needs a fighter.
Though it may have come as a shock to some in the political press that a telegenic 33 year-old member of the New York State Assembly with an easy-to-comprehend (and very relevant) message beat a 67 year-old career politican who resiged his previous job as New York’s governor after a slew of credible sexual harassment allegations against him, I must confess it did not surprise me.
Before the rise of Zohran Mamdani in the contest for mayor of America’s largest city, the contest was a dolorous affair. Its front runner status was occupied by Andrew Cuomo - who began his political career by engaging in base homophobic slurs during his father Mario’s unsuccessful 1977 mayoral campaign against Ed Koch - squaring of against current mayor Eric Adams, who was charged last year with bribery and campaign finance offenses before having the case dismissed once Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, a move that led to mass resignations by federal prosecutors in protest. Adams, who bailed on the Democratic primary to run as an independent in the general election, has grown noticeably chummy with Trump after the latter’s reelection, with the Trump’s Justice Department arguing that the case into Adams' alleged criminality would impact his ability to enact Trump's immigration agenda. Trump has also been publicly supportive of Adams’ reelection bid. The thoroughly decent and accomplished Brad Lander - currently serving as New York City’s Comptroller and getting manhandled and detained by Trump's cowardly United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs for his trouble - seemed to have no chance of winning. For their part, the Republican Party, which held the mayorship from 1994 to 2007 (when Mike Bloomberg went back to being an independent) opted to back 1980s curiosity Curtis Sliwa as their candidate in an apparent effort to show how very unserious they are in the city these days.
Enter Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Born in Kampala, Uganda and raised there and in South Africa until his family moved to New York when he was 7, Mamdani’s story was similar in background to that of many first-generation New Yorkers, albeit much more materially comfortable than most as his mother is the highly successful filmmaker Mira Nair and his father is Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, the latter a fairly problematic figure, as we will see in a bit.
Mamdani had by all accounts a fairly normal upbringing for a child of the city’s well-heeled intellectual class, attending both the Bank Street School for Children and Bronx High School of Science, fairly elite institutions by New York standards, before going Bowdoin College where he graduated with a major in African Studies. Maybe the most eyebrow-raising aspect of his early life is that he co-founded the Bowdoin chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has a long record of anti-semitic - not just anti-Israeli government - rhetoric and which praised the perpetrators of the 7 October 2023 massacre in Israel as “martyrs” who had brought about a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” [I have found nothing, either then or later, to suggest Mamdani himself holds any anti-semitic views and, indeed, he has been endorsed by many notable Jewish politicians, including Bernie Sanders, Jerry Nadler and the aforementioned Brad Lander.]
Mamdani then moved back to New York, working as a foreclosure prevention counselor and experimenting with a hip-hop alter ego before successfully unseating Aravella Simotas in the Democratic primary for New York's 36th State Assembly district and going on to win the general election. Representing a swathe of Queens, the 36th encompasses Astoria, a neighborhood where, as it happens, I used to live at one point during my decade-long stint in the Big Apple.
During the election, Mamdani was supported by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which he is a member. It is important to point out here, that, far from the understanding of what “democratic socialist” means to most parties in Europe, for example the DSA is, in fact, a far left, deeply sectarian and campist entity that has a long record of supporting atrociously repressive regimes all around the world as long as said regimes spout the correct “anti-imperialist” dogma. The DSA refused to endorse Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump and, when it comes to Vladmir Putin’s genocidal, imperialist invasion of Ukraine, the DSA has called, by way of a solution, on the United States “to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” this despite the fact that Putin himself has said plainly that “all of Ukraine is ours.”
In a bit of morally bankrupt revolutionary tourism that was alternately hilarious and pathetic, DSA members flew to Caracas, Venezuela in June 2021 on a propaganda trip to raid the mini bar and stuff their faces at the Meliá Caracas while praising the supposed socialist utopia that dictator Nicolás Maduro - the capo di tutti i capi of an octopus-like criminal network - had created there. DSA members lauded a regime that United Nations investigators found had committed crimes against humanity and whose actions, testimony submitted to the International Crimianl Court affirmed, included the most horrific kinds of sexual violence. If Mamdani was bothered by this, I can find no record of him denouncing it. [And, to be clear, this wasn’t some rogue operation but a trip sanctioned and supported by the DSA’s National Political Committee.]
The DSA has also frequently spoken out in support of the ossifying, reactionary, lily-white Communist military dictatorship that has squatted over Cuba for more than six decades, a regime that currently holds some of the island’s greatest musicians, artists, writers and activists in its gulag as political prisoners, prompting PEN International to write last year that “for six decades, the Cuban authorities have systematically sought new ways to suppress any and all dissent, particularly targeting freedom of expression.” The DSA, meanwhile, has fulminated against a non-existent “blockade” and - based on single, regime-managed trips - praised the “sense of solidarity that still pulsed through the country’s veins” and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the regime entities that Human Rights Watch has correctly characterized as “neighborhood surveillance groups [who] monitor and report on Cubans at home, at work and at school.”
On this score, Mamdani has more to answer for. In June of last year, in a tweet shared by New York state senator Jabari Brisport (another DSA member), Mamdani was pictured grinning broadly with the delegation of Cuba’s dictatorship to the United Nations as Brisport inveighed against the (again, non-existent) “US blockade against Cuba” and that he was “So honored the Cuban Delegation to the United Nations was able to meet with us [emphasis mine] today”
When he met with representatives of the Cuban government, did Mamdani press them on the cases of political prisoners like artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara & rapper Maykel "Osorbo" Castillo Pérez, who have been unjustly imprisoned for nearly four years? As someone who sought, unsuccessfully, to mimic black culture in a hip-hop setting, one would think Mamdani might be especially sensitive to the Cuban regime’s well-known hostility to any independent expressions of Afro-Cuban culture in its streets, such as Otero and Castillo represent . Did Mamdani bring up the case of imprisoned influencer Sulmira Martínez Pérez, aka Salem or author María Cristina Garrido? If not, why not? This is a question some journalist should ask him.
I have wondered how much of what I can decode of Mamdani’s somewhat blinkered and simplistic world view might have been inherited from his university-professor father, Mahmood, who has written, to put it mildly, some problematic things.
In his 2009 book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, which I reviewed for the Social Science Research Council when it came out, the review of which can be read here now (it appears to have disappeared from the Council’s site), Mahmood Mamdani makes a number of false claims, including writing that none of the charges laid against Sudan’s genocidal then-president Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC) “can bear historical scrutiny.” In the book, Mamdani also declares that the Sudanese president’s guilt or innocence is less important to Africa than “the relationship between law and politics” and goes on to claim - again, falsely - that the Janjaweed - the pro-government militia out of which grew the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) armed group now terrorizing Sudan - “was not an ideological force nor the fighting arm of an ideologically driven movement.” This is clearly false as, along with the testimony of thousands of civilians, documents obtained from the Sudanese government in 2004 by Human Rights Watch demonstrate conclusively to any reasonable observer the involvement of the then-Isalmist supremacist Sudanese state in the recruiting and arming of Janjaweed to carry out violence on an ethnic basis. The elder Mamdani’s tone when writing about the Sudanese themselves can often be jarring in its arrogance, with non-combatant Sudanese who called for an international military mission in Darfur guilty of a “meager knowledge of developments” in their own country, while those issuing the same calls from within Darfur itself suffer from “naiveté.”
[To see Mamdani confronted by survivors of the violence of Sudan's government in Darfur and elsewhere - and his response to them - I encourage readers to watch this discussion he had with John Prendergast at Columbia in April 2009. The exchanges begin around the 1 hour 41 minute mark.]
Zohran Mamdani’s middle name - Kwame - was bestowed upon him by Mahmood in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana, beloved by some as an anti-colonial hero but who also set up a one-party state and cult of personality as he made himself president for life before being deposed in a 1966 coup d'état.
Children are not responsible for the political views of their parents, of course, but I mention all of this because well, let me say it plainly: Rich kids trying to work through their issues while claiming solidarity with working people have been responsible for a great amount of misery throughout human history. Just look at the histories of Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara or Donald Trump, for that matter, if you don’t believe me.
The New York City my family first came into contact with in the 1970s was very different from the academic salons on the Upper West Side of Mamdani’s family. After years in Argentina and Puerto Rico, my grandparents moved to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park from Mayagüez in the early 1970s, where my grandfather, a Spanish-speaking Lutheran minister, worked with a local organization called Brotherhood Blocks, a neighborhood association which would soon thereafter sue the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in opposition to its mortgage foreclosure and eviction practices [no doubt Mamdani would approve!]. In short order, my grandfather would open up a little storefront under the name of Obra Hispána Luterana which provided afternoon tutoring for children and mid-week Bible studies. After seven years in Sunset Park, he accepted an appointment as pastor of Advent Church at 93rd and Broadway in Morningside Heights in Manhattan (right near Columbia University, in fact), where he was thrilled at “the most heterogeneous group of Lutherans I ever encountered,” who “all accepted each other,” as he later wrote. I remember visiting my grandparents in New York as a wee kid in the strange, strobe light flashes of memory one has from one’s early years, but even then I remember I liked the vibrant pulse and swirl of the city.
When I myself finally moved to New York City in the spring of 1997, being a relatively impoverished recent college graduate, I roomed with my friend Sebastian Quezada (now departed) at his modest one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Despite what it has now become, Williamsburg at the time was low-slung, gritty and had a distinctly Latin flavour, largely of the Puerto Rican and Dominican variety, with a smattering of Mexican influence, as well as a large and still-remaining population of Yiddish-speaking Satmar Hasidim Jews in rather far-out traditional costumes living along the Southside and a Polish community to the north in Greenpoint. Beyond the main strip of Bedford Avenue, warehouses, many rusting and disused, still stretched on for blocks at a time before halting at the churning expanse of the East River, the Lower East Side of Manhattan visible in the distance. The Domino Sugar refinery, which had been part of Brooklyn's waterfront since the 19th century, was still the neighborhood’s most regular employer and there was a local joint called simply “Pizza Restaurant” where one could get a $5 plate of carne guisada con arroz y habichuelas. [There was also an, ahem, “after hours” establishment called Kokie’s Place, but we won’t get into that, will we?].
It wasn’t easy, but young folks who were actually struggling financially could afford to live in the city, as could its longer-term residents. I bounced around sofas and semi-finished tenement basements until I finally saved up enough so that I could get a one bedroom in Fort Greene, where my neighbors were the Yemeni guys who ran the bodega across the street and where I rapidly become a regular at the now-late and lamented Frank's Cocktail Lounge. A lot of people I knew lived like that. You rarely had much money, but you were in New York following your dream, you were young surrounded by friends you loved and who loved you and that’s what mattered.
And that’s why I think Mamdani’s electoral message resonates so powerfully with people, including me, even though I have some doubts about him. That New York City has been stolen from people. It’s virtually impossible to be a young kid just starting out with limited means, as I was, and simply get yourself a small place to start your life there. All of the young people I know live with roommates, sometimes multiple roommates, and anyone without a secret family trust fund is paying a huge chunk of whatever income they do have just to not be on the street, so when Mamdani promises to “immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent,” I say, yes, do it. The New York City Rent Guidelines board, whose members are appointed by the mayor, this week approved yet another 3% rent increase for rent stabilized apartments, putting an exclamation point, if any were needed, next to one of the Mamdani campaign’s key issues. Mamdani’s call to implement free childcare for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years, meanwhile, is only slightly more expansive than what currently exists in Belgium, Denmark, Lithuania, Norway, and Slovenia, countries that, let’s face it, one would hardly mistake for North Korea. His promise to create “city-owned grocery stores” sounds a bit more far-fetched, but he has since claimed that it would be a pilot plan of one in each borough, bringing the promise a bit back down to earth.
The response to Mamdani’s win from a Republican Party in thrall to the vile Trump have been every bit as tawdry as one would expect. Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles - who repeatedly lied about being an economist and lied about being a cop who “worked in international sex crimes, specifically child trafficking” - attacked Mamdani with Islamophobic slurs and called for him to be deported and denaturalized ahead of the November general election. Prissy Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, a former New York City investment banker who moved to Texas to seek the Republican nomination in the 26th congressional district, went after Mamdani for eating biryani with his fingers, as if he himself eats roadhouse barbecue with a knife and fork. Trump, writing on his Truth Social site this week, claimed that “As President of the United States, I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York. Rest assured, I hold all the levers, and have all the cards. I’ll save New York City, and make it ‘Hot’ and ‘Great’ again, just like I did with the Good Ol’ USA!”
[In Albany this past March, Mamdani had the guts to confront “White House Border Czar” and failed human Tom Homan about the kidnapping of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.]
This is all brings us to what I think is the great question at hand: Do some of the dumb things Mamdani has said and some of his grotesque past and present associates outweigh the value he might have to the country as a counterweight, however local, to a rapacious regime that has been clear about its desire to assume dictatorial power?
Consider the seven months since Trump returned to office.
On his first day in office, as he said he would, Trump pardoned nearly all of those in prison for their part in the 6 January 2021 coup attempt, including many who were sentenced to years in prison for violently attacking law enforcement officers. Dozens had prior convictions for crimes ranging from “rape, sexual abuse of a minor, domestic violence, manslaughter, production of child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking.” Many would go on to re-offend. ICE has effectively become an unaccountable pro-Trump militia, with masked, armed men seizing people off American streets and spiriting them away in unmarked cars becoming routine, as has the government seizing and deporting people without due process and then lying about it. Masked federal agents impede the lawful work of opposition members of Congress, manhandle them and then charge them with crimes that they themselves committed. The government now routinely targets children, arresting a 6-year-old boy with leukemia at immigration court and seeking to deport foster kids and migrant youth for deportations in places like Florida.
Yesterday, Congress passed a bill stripping healthcare away from 17 million Americans (including, probably, me) and giving $29.9 billion towards ICE operations (a threefold increase in ICE’s budget) and $45 billion for building new "immigration" detention centers. The federal government has given the nod to using the National Guard as immigration judges at its new Florida new detention center - that is, having the military exercising judicial control over civilians. The administration's dismantling of USAID will make sure that its legacy will be one of mass death - willful murder, really - both at home and abroad, with people already dying in places like Sudan as a result of it as researchers believe the cuts could lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years.
So, yeah, as much as some of Mamdani’s associations give me pause, you know what he won’t do? He won’t do that.
Joe Biden was one of the most pro-working class and pro-union presidents in U.S. history and progressive on a range of issues he rarely gets credit for. U.S. voters looked at the possibility of continuing a political legacy that saw the cancellation of nearly $153 billion in student loan debt for 4.3 million borrowers, bringing the number of uninsured Americans to all-time low, requiring hiring of unionized workers on federal construction projects, the largest climate investment in the history of the United States and the U.S. rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and decided that, no, the thought of having a woman and, gasp, a women of colour in the White House was just too much so let's bring the criminal back.
It is hard to know how to negotiate with an electorate that broken and delusional, but those opposed to the hideous excesses of the current regime need to unite over what they have in common, not settle scores over who is the most pure at carrying out the vision. The Democrats have some excellent members of Congress, but their leadership is feckless and toothless and the party is in desperate need of more vibrant, youthful figures to rally around.
So, who knows? Zohran Mamdani might turn out to be a latter day Fiorello LaGuardia as a fierce advocate for all the things that make New York wonderful and superlatively American - proudly diverse, proudly multiethnic, proudly immigrant - or he may turn out to be a latter day Michael Manley, the late Jamaican Prime Minister and scion of privilege who, full of his “radical” visions nearly tipped the island over into the abyss in the 1970s (to be clear, he didn’t do it alone).
If Mamdani concentrates on achieving what he ran on - making the lives of those that elected him more bearable and standing up to the criminal in the White House - he could do very well, indeed. If he listens to the lunatics at the DSA telling him he is the Fourth Flame of Marxism bringing Mamdani Thought to the great unwashed, he will crash and burn quickly. People can learn and grow, and Mandani is young enough that I hope he does.
Resist much, obey little, the great New York poet Walt Whitman wrote in his canonical work, Leaves of Grass. That is good advice for this time and for all time. He also wrote Liberty, let others despair of you—I never despair of you.
Good luck, Zohran Mamdani, and welcome to the resistance.
Nicely done. Thank you for putting in writing much of and more than what I've been thinking in regard to Mamdani and his campaign.