The Brooklyn Rail

The importance of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral primary in New York should not be underestimated. He got 545, 334 votes in three rounds of ranked choice voting, to beat the Andrew Cuomo machine by 12 points. That means he got more votes than 27 current US senators received in their respective state elections. Yes, New York City is not like the rest of the US, but this may still be one of the most impressive wins for a leftist candidate in US history.

How did he win? He talked with people, and he listened to what they said. He organized people to help him—40,000 of them—and ran a positive, high-energy campaign. He had actual ideas for things to do to make things better. And he made people think that was possible again. If you do those things, people will vote for you. Any Democrat who still has a pulse had better pull up a chair and watch and listen. This is the future.

People are talking about socialist Mayor LaGuardia (1934–45), Mayor Lindsay (1966–74), who defeated Abe Beame and William F. Buckley Jr., and Democratic Socialists of America member Mayor Dinkins (1990–93) as precedents. The right desperately wanted Obama to be a Muslim socialist, but he wasn’t. Mamdani actually is. And he represents a real left economic populism against the fake right economic populism of Trumpism, which is borne out by Trump’s horrendous spending bill that was just made law and that will grievously hurt the very people that voted for him.

The establishment is going to throw everything they’ve got at Mamdani, and the right already has: Trump says he’s going to arrest and deport him. Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an image of the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a burqa. And Laura Loomer predicted on X: “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and Zohran Mamdani will be to blame.”

But the people voted for him, and so far, in New York, the people still decide. The video that turned things around for me was one that showed Mamdani standing on Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens after the 2016 election in a suit, with a microphone, asking people if they had voted, and if so, for whom. Many of them, in these working-class neighborhoods, told him they had voted for Trump. Mamdani was clearly actually interested in what these people had to say. The video is a study in what real listening does, politically. All politicians say they listen to voters, but very few of them actually do, face to face. The random people Mamdani interviewed on the street were very direct and articulate about why they voted for Trump, and Mamdani heard them. Then he asked them, if a candidate for mayor of New York said they would do this and this and this, to confront the crisis of affordability in the city, would you vote for them? And the resounding answer was, “All day long.”

This mayoral campaign exposed The New York Times’ political bias against leftist candidates, when they said in a June 16 editorial, “We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots,” and it further exposed the Times’ utter inability to admit and understand what has happened and is happening in Gaza and how anyone with a conscience is enraged by Israel’s actions there, and that this has nothing to do with antisemitism. Columnist Ezra Klein endorsed Brad Lander while dismissing Mamdani as “a showman.” And the Mamdani campaign exposed the entire Democratic establishment (Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Kirsten Gillibrand, Eric Swalwell . . . ) for the things they said against Mamdani that just proved how out of touch they are.

With Brad Lander at his side, maybe Mamdani can make good things happen again in New York City. And if he does that, against all odds, it may help us to begin the long climb out of the hole Trump and Trumpism has dug us all into. Maybe the recovery has to begin in New York City because Trump started here. Mainstream Democrats have no clue how to respond to the deadly threat of Trumpism because they stopped listening to their constituents. Newt Gingrich has said Trump is the most successful anti-liberal of all time, and he’s right. Not a conservative, an anti-liberal, and he has been successful because liberals have squandered the goodwill from all the liberal gains of the past sixty years and become complacent. Maybe this idealistic young man from Uganda does know how to respond to the clear and present danger of Trumpism. In a riveting speech Mamdani gave at the National Action Network’s House of Justice in Harlem on June 28, after his stunning primary win, he said,

As I look across this city today, I am reminded that freedom is only worth as much as our ability to exercise it. We hear politicians of the past come on stages across this city, including this one, saying that they believe this is the greatest city in the world. But they do not answer the question that Dr. King posed decades ago: What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger? What good is being the greatest city in the world if New Yorkers can’t afford to live here? What good is it if our own people cannot afford their rent, their child care, their groceries, even $2.90 for their MetroCard? What good is that but making a museum of what once was in this city that we love? 

Speaking about the Trump spending bill that was just signed into law by Trump, JD Vance announced that all the static over Medicaid and Medicare cuts, and food aid cuts, and cuts to veterans’ services, and the ballooning of the national debt by $5 trillion, were “immaterial,” compared to the ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) provisions of the bill. ICE’s 2026 Budget Request was for $11.3 billion, but Trump’s bill gives ICE $138.8 billion, which will make ICE one of the largest, most well-funded, militaries in the world.

“Immigration enforcement” is a pretext for the building of a private army, with a new paramilitary police force backed up by active duty military troops and answerable only to the president, with a nationwide network of concentration camps to incarcerate immigrants now, and other undesirables later.

At the opening of the “Alligator Alcatraz” concentration camp in the Florida Everglades on July 1, Trump said of this kind of facility, “We’d like to see them in many states. And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” Once these camps are part of an extensive permanent system, they will likely become sources of inexpensive or free labor for businesses. Tim Snyder says that detainees will likely “be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it ‘owner responsibility.’”¹

Trump’s truly catastrophic spending bill, signed into law on the Fourth of July, does tremendous damage to what the Declaration of Independence established on July 4, 1776. As historian Heather Cox Richardson put it today, “America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal. . . . But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.”²