The enduring lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s victory is that the moderate Centre is invariably the respectable front for right-wing prejudice.
New York’s mayoral race was clarifying for people everywhere because it staged a series of stark oppositions: idealism vs experience, billionaires vs the rest, Zionist entitlement vs the ravaging of Gaza, an empathetic pluralism vs anti-Muslim bigotry, Andrew Cuomo’s conspicuous indifference to his constituents vs Mamdani’s exuberant bid to hug all of New York, a once-in-a-generation political talent against a puckered-up dynast, a manifesto for working people vs a defence of the unaffordable status quo, the vividness of vertical video vs the gatekeepers of legacy media, and fingers-crossed hope vs knowing cynicism.
The contrast between Mamdani and Cuomo was heightened by how they looked. This was good vs bad with the main protagonists picked by central casting. There
was nothing subtle about the difference. Cuomo didn’t speak, he droned on. He was lethargic, he ran on his resumé (which included sending seniors to their deaths during the pandemic and multiple allegations of sexual harassment), he seemed to treat the mayoral race as a personal bid for redemption, he embodied machine politics in a big city.
Mamdani was unfairly, luminously young and he was everywhere — sodden in the Atlantic, by halal carts, in gay bars, with cab drivers, dancing with aunties, rehearsing his pitch in Bengali, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish — smiling, suited and relentlessly on message. You could dismiss his plans as utopian or impractical but it was impossible for the disinterested spectator to discern malice.
And yet the voices of the liberal Centre, the political ‘moderates’, the Centrist moghuls, the pundits, the newspapers and the magazines who own the liberal discourse responded to Mamdani’s candidacy in a way that was indistinguishable from Donald Trump’s denunciations or the Anti-Defamation League’s slanders.
The two Democratic senators from New York refused to endorse him (Chuck Schumer, the senior senator, is still coy about who he voted for), the Democratic governor of New York reluctantly endorsed Mamdani well after he won the primary and Barack Obama, mindful of his aura, didn’t endorse him but let it be known, late in the day, that he had called Mamdani.
America’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, that arbiter of liberal values, went to remarkable lengths to urge its Democratic readers to exclude Mamdani from the five candidates they could rank in their primary ballots. ‘Anyone but Mamdani’ was the message from the newspaper’s editorial board. Having previously decided not to endorse a candidate, the board produced a tortuous non-endorsement. “We do not believe,” it intoned, “that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots.” And then it told voters to hold their nose and vote for Cuomo: “As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.”
There was no difference between The New York Times’s position on Mamdani and Cuomo and that of Bill Ackman, the fanatically Zionist billionaire who, along with other billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, donated millions to Cuomo’s campaign. And the main reason for this, explicit in the case of Bill Ackman but unmentioned in The New York Times’s editorial, was Mamdani’s steadfast condemnation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the atrocities of its apartheid State.
Mamdani didn’t bring up Israel during his campaign. He was monomaniacally focused on affordability. Israel was relentlessly brought up for him in debates and interviews. Would he visit Israel if he became mayor? Did he condemn ‘globalize the intifada’? Should Hamas disarm? Did he support Israel as a Jewish State?
Ironically, his steadfast, unafraid critique of Israel became the firm ground of principle on which he ran his campaign to make New York affordable. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza was the landscape of Mamdani’s campaign. The images of Gaza’s devastation, of killed and starving children, the explicit threats by Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers to ethnically ‘cleanse’ Gaza made Israel radioactive and rendered the slavish deference expected of politicians towards all things Israel seem obscene. Without Gaza, Israel would have remained an untouchable third rail for mayoral hopefuls in New York.
Mamdani did a remarkable thing: he showed that a politics geared towards improving the material lot of citizens could be embedded in a principled pluralism. That moment during a mayoral debate when, unlike his craven fellows, he said he would stay home and tend to his Jewish constituents in the five boroughs of New York instead of making the mandatory visit to Israel was a turning point; it told the world that he wouldn’t pander and he wouldn’t trim.
Too often, liberal Centrists seem to have no core beliefs, no causes that define them or anchor their politics. Beyond a hostility to Trump, liberal Democrats seem to have no guard rails that differentiate them from, say, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL on the matter of Gaza and Israel. Pundits like Ezra Klein and liberal magazines like The New Yorker were slow to acknowledge Israel’s atrocities in Gaza because their moderation sought not the middle ground but an accommodation with entrenched prejudice. It was a young, cosmopolitan, Muslim politician who tapped into the revulsion of young Jewish voters against the insensate violence of the State that claimed them as its diaspora.
There are lessons for us in Mamdani’s example. The Aam Aadmi Party, the closest cousin India had to Mamdani’s urban politics of welfare and affordability, chose, unlike Mamdani, to betray its principles and its Muslim constituents by stoking majoritarian prejudice during the pandemic and after the Delhi riots. Triangulating towards the Centre as the Centre moves Right isn’t moderation, it’s capitulation. It isn’t surprising that having lost its political identity to self-serving ‘moderation’, it lost the elections as well.
Mamdani made political campaigning feel like endless camaraderie, he made politics an enjoyable, affectionate, gregarious business. Centrist pundits in, for example,
The Economist and CNN are persuaded that progressive politics has no
future outside the five boroughs. These are, of course, the same pundits and pollsters who didn’t think Mamdani’s politics had a chance in New York. If Mamdani as mayor can make half his promises come true, old men across the world will tax their grandchildren with TikTok memories of his epic run.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com