Rather than tell his fellow New Yorkers to lower their expectations of what government could do, the city’s new mayor vowed that “the only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.”
I do not mean this as a negative assessment when I say that what Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural address as mayor of New York reminded me most of was Woody Allen’s Manhattan—albeit with a more all-encompassing view of the city. Like Manhattan, Mamdani’s speech was a love-besotted tour of New York—though with a focus on the city’s multiracial working and middle class you can’t find anywhere in the Allen oeuvre.
For Mamdani, this focus was intended to be a means of identification and reassurance (I am one of you, I know you), legitimacy (I represent all of you), and commitment (I will fight for you all). It was a homeboy speech. A local—not an express—was stopping at every other street corner to celebrate the halal carts and the delis.
It was besotted not just with the New York of today but also with some of its history. It came with name checks for de Blasio, Dinkins, and La Guardia (with whoops from the crowd for Fiorello), with a salute to the city “where the language of the New Deal was born.” The ceremony included several very New York songs, most notably two socialist-inspired anthems: “Bread and Roses” and “Over the Rainbow,” the latter with lyrics by lifelong socialist Yip Harburg, who once said, “I’m a New Yorker down to the last capillary.” (I’m sure Yip’s 99-year-old son Ernie, resident of the East Village, found “Rainbow”’s inclusion particularly apropos.)
Mamdani also name-checked DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, though it was one of about a hundred neighborhoods, constituencies, and groups of workers that he acknowledged.
