Enter, Stage Left, Mayor Mamdani
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. It was, withal, a socialist speech, of the particular genre perfected by two socialists who preceded Mamdani to the podium: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders. That genre is centered on demonstrating that, as Sanders said again and again, there’s nothing “radical” about universal child care, affordable housing, and accessible public transit—policies that polling has shown to be exceedingly popular not just with the small number of American socialists but also with the large number of American nonsocialists. The same polling also shows sizable majorities favoring the kind of tax hikes on the super-rich that Sanders and Mamdani advocate.
Fundamentally, the politics of Mamdani’s address was that of repossession, of taking the city away from the wealthiest 1 or 5 percent who’ve claimed it as their bespoke playground, and making the remaining 99 or 95 percent able to claim it as their own, too.
To the extent that Mamdani’s speech had a theoretical focus, it was the resounding rejection of the neoliberalism that characterized the politics of both parties for most of the past half-century. For too long, he said, people had turned to the private sector to solve society’s problems, which the private sector was both ill-equipped and unwilling to do. He made clear that the conceit that “the era of big government is over,” as Bill Clinton once said, was itself over. Rather than tell his fellow New Yorkers to lower their expectations of what government could do, he vowed that “the only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.”
That sentence on expectations was worded in a way to echo the inaugural address of another New Yorker, Franklin Roosevelt, when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And the socialism that Mamdani described sounded much like those New Deal policies that had the government undertake needed tasks at which the private sector had failed abjectly. Sanders has always cited FDR as the model for his social democratic policies and his attacks on those whom FDR called “malefactors of great wealth,” and Mamdani was effectively, if not overtly, claiming the same lineage in his address. (The only reference during the ceremonies to a socialist from abroad came from nonsocialist Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, who mentioned in passing Maurice Bishop, the long-ago prime minister of the small Caribbean island nation of Grenada, from which Williams’s parents immigrated to New York.)
Right-wing editorialists may seize upon Mamdani’s comment that it was time to replace the harshness of “rugged individualism” with “the warmth of collectivism,” but it was clear to anyone who listened to his speech that by “collectivism,” Mamdani meant “community” of the most diverse character imaginable. Knowing that the work of relegitimating government as a force for good requires continual public pressure to make government accomplish needed tasks, the mayor of the city of “biryani and pastrami on rye” asked the movement that had brought him to power not to stand down. “The work,” he concluded, “has only just begun.”
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