Is Zohran Mamdani good for the Democrats? It’s the wrong question — he’s good for the world
No doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that many powerful figures in the Democratic Party are more alarmed by Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral primary than by Donald Trump’s systematic shredding of the Constitution, his paramilitary force of masked deportation goons, or the Supreme Court’s piecemeal construction of a coup-d’état. But it’s a whole lot less of an exaggeration than it should be.
To be fair, prominent Cuomo-centric Democrats like Bill Clinton and James Carville and Rep. Jim Clyburn and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — the last of whom appeared on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show” two days after Mamdani’s victory and strongly implied that he was a supporter of Hamas terrorism and “global jihad” — are not literally calling for him to be “denaturalized” as a U.S. citizen and deported to some foreign gulag, as a few right-wing Republicans have done. (Mamdani was born in Uganda to parents of South Asian ancestry, and has lived in New York since he was 7.)
Such Democrats, along with the longer list of those who have, so far, tiptoed around the question of whether to endorse their own party’s nominee in the nation’s most visible mayoral election — we’re looking at you, fellow New Yorkers Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries — might steeple their fingers together in that special politician-on-TV way and tell you that of course they are concerned about many things at once, and reject “extremism” of all kinds. They might suggest, as some already have, that for America’s largest city to elect a 33-year-old Muslim democratic socialist who wants to tax the rich, make bus rides free and fund wider social services is a gift-wrapped package of millennial wokeness that will only fuel MAGA paranoia and further tarnish the Democratic brand. If they claim, as Jeffries did this weekend, that Mamdani has used the phrase “globalize the intifada” and therefore needs to apologize for it, they are either mistaken or lying.
That anxiety was visible in an unsigned profile published Friday in The Economist — in effect, the house organ of global capitalism — and headlined “Zohran Mamdani, Trump’s ‘worst nightmare,’ may really be a gift to him.” But the first and most important thing to notice about that article is not what it says, but that it exists. I feel confident that The Economist did not publish a feature article about current Mayor Eric Adams when he won the 2021 Democratic primary. If Adams’ name has appeared in the publication since then, it was almost certainly because of his federal indictment on corruption charges and his birds-of-a-feather alliance with Trump. (Adams is admittedly a fascinating character; read this marvelous Salon profile by Bob Hennessy, who has known him for many years.)
Mamdani, in other news, has become world news virtually overnight. While his win is highly specific to New York in some ways, it also represents a symbolic challenge to the perceived global centrist renaissance, or what could be called the “neo-neoliberal consensus.” I don’t mean that as scare-quote name-calling: Trump’s return to power this year, as I’ve previously discussed, seemed to inject new life into struggling center-left and center-right parties in various liberal democracies. In Germany, Canada and Australia, for instance, along with a number of smaller countries, mainstream parties have staged comeback victories and fended off the insurgent far right, at least for now.
