During the campaign, Mamdani liked to remind his audience that New York was the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world, and that its government could do more for the people who live here. While his opponents described New York as bankrupt, dysfunctional, and crime-ridden, Mamdani spoke of the city as a beautiful, if chaotic, place, full of turmoil and injustice, yes, but also of life and possibility. Mamdani’s cinematic universe is a place where you can take the subway to the city clerk’s office to marry the girl you met on Hinge, where you can practice tai chi and salsa with the old people of the Lower East Side, where you can go polar diving off Coney Island on New Year’s Day and walk the length of Manhattan on a hot summer night.
The feel-good content complemented his edgy politics. The feature most similar to Mamdani is the obvious pleasure he takes in public political combat.my dearHe mocked the former governor about a shadowy legal consulting practice that brought him about $5 million last year. Release your client list. When Mamdani was pressured to tone down his criticism of Israel, he barely relented. These qualities have convinced many young voters, in particular, that he may have what it takes to deliver on his promises. They voted for him because they imagined a city with free buses; Because they thought the idea of freezing rents in the city’s million or so apartments seemed fair, even if they didn’t live in rent-stabilized apartments; Because they liked the idea of New York being a place that offered comprehensive care for babies as young as six weeks old, the alternative offered by Cuomo — ideas and calls for higher rents, more arcane games and machinations at City Hall, and Democratic officials rallying around the bloodshed in Gaza — was simply too bleak.
Since the primary, prominent figures in New York’s Democratic establishment have continued to alienate Mamdani. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed his endorsement for so long that he embarrassed himself. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (the latter of whom was forced to apologize after suggesting on public radio that Mamdani supports “global jihad”) never came. But former President Barack Obama saw something in Mamdani — he had been called to check on the young man twice since June — as did the moderate New York governor, Kathy Hochul. And at a rally in the closing days of the campaign at Forest Hills Stadium, in Queens, Hochul warmed up the crowd for Mamdani — or tried to. “Tax the rich!” The crowd jeered her. The timid, tax-averse ruler struggled to maintain her composure. “I can hear you!” She said. Mamdani appeared on stage, walked toward Hochul, and raised one hand in the air. The teasing turned into roars of approval.
When I first spoke with Mamdani, two years ago, he was an Albany legislator with few allies in the Legislature. He called me a few days after October 7, concerned about the anti-Islamic backlash in the city. Shortly after, he was arrested while protesting the ceasefire outside Schumer’s apartment building. He was, at that moment, as far from the fringes of power as an elected official could be. In the past few months, Mamdani has seemed more comfortable dealing with the compromises and contradictions that being mayor will impose on him. He has expressed new appreciation for the role played by private real estate developers, and has promised to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a favorite of the city’s wealthy establishment, to remain on his administration. “If he becomes mayor, so be it,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said recently. Mamdani is untested, his network of longtime allies is small, and he lacks the connections and history in the city power structure that even an ambitious progressive like Bill de Blasio has relied on to get things done. But that’s the point. The New Yorkers didn’t want an insider with decades of experience. They wanted Zahran Mamdani.
“Do we Americans really want good government?” Scandals Lincoln Stevens wrote in McClure magazine in 1903. “Do we know it when we see it?” Stevens spent months investigating the strange restrictions and abuses of bureaucracy in Tammany Hall-era New York City. It wasn’t that New Yorkers didn’t know the machine was corrupt; The reason was that they rarely bothered with care. “Tamany is corruption by consent,” Stevens wrote. “It is a bad government founded on the votes of the people.” Sometimes, when machine abuses become rampant, people move to oust bosses. An outside candidate for mayor was running in person, pledging to conduct a “clean election campaign,” organize the city’s various factions of the political opposition, and galvanize the city with a “hot campaign.” But it didn’t end well. Inevitably, the leaders were voted back into power. Stevens called this frustrating pattern “the standard course of municipal reform.”
With the exception of Fiorello LaGuardia, every reform-minded liberal mayor since the late nineteenth century has faced a dismal version of the “standard path.” Seth Law, the wonky former Columbia University president who was mayor when Stevens was writing, was rejected for a second term by George P. McClellan, Jr., a favorite of Tammany President Richard Crocker. In the 1960s, John Lindsay took office riding a wave of charisma and good feelings, leaving frustrations and disastrous city books in his wake when he left eight years later. David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor (and also the first mayor who was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America), saw his administration held back by racial violence and concerns about crime, and was beaten by Rudy Giuliani when he ran for a second term. De Blasio, whom Mamdani considers the best mayor of his lifetime, has accomplished much of the agenda he ran on in 2013, but New Yorkers are tired of him anyway. “A good mayor turns out to be weak, foolish, or no good,” Stevens wrote. “Or disgusts people.”