Mamdani's success
The hunger for a present, activist state, meeting the liberal tradition's interventionist inclinations.
Zohran Mamdani took office amidst an unusually close New York City mayoral election. For as much as the city’s denizens’ bitter attitudes towards each other, the city and themselves characterise much of the public idea of NYC, mayoral elections in New York have not been truly competitive post-Bloomberg. The defection of the media and finance mogul to the Democrats captured the death of the New York Republican Party, which could once confidently compete against chaotic mayoralties like those of Abraham Beame or David Dinkins. However, the long moribund forces of wealth in NYC, happy to let the mayoralty struggle against the structural forces defending their privileged, were terrified when Zohran Mamdani defeated disgraced former Governor, pest and granny-killer Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
His shock victory led to Cuomo being supported into an ‘independent’ campaign that represented little more than the unsavoury elements of the Democratic coalition banding with the Republicans and NYC resident slumlord Donald Trump to attempt to block him. The bid of official Republican candidate and part-time Ninja Turtle Curtis Sliwa, parodied to death, was quickly relegated to a vocal curiosity candidate, as Cuomo relative quiet online led to his being drowned out by Mamdani and, surprisingly, Sliwa, whose mental heritage New York City stories made him a smash hit on short-form content sites. On election day however, all the money in the world failed to stop Zohran Mamdani, despite all the stereotypical hysteria about an Indian-American Muslim man being mayor, from winning. As well as marking the final political death of the Cuomo brand, whose progenitor, Mario, had been one of the lions of New Deal liberalism in the 1990s, it also marked the arrival of a new, activist tendency in governing Democratic politics.
For all the phenomenal changes of the Obama administration, and the good that was accomplished amongst the mixed records of Biden, Clinton and Carter, the last great activist president was Lyndon Baines Johnson. For as much as his reputation has suffered in the decades since due to his disastrous decision to intervene, escalate and Americanise the Vietnam War, his domestic record has been the subject of a liberal revisionist tendency arguing it against the neoconservative populism of Reagan and his ilk. Unlike his British counterpart of the same era, Harold Wilson, LBJ’s record truly does deserve a fair look. From the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to the foundation of the departments for Housing and Urban Development, his liberalisation and relaxation of US migration laws particularly towards non-European countries, the establishment of Head Start and greater funding for secondary and college education throughout the US, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Housing Rights Act of 1965, plus the watered down 1968 Civil Rights Act and its focus on housing, PBS and funding for the arts, the Clean Air Act and major environmentalist legislation, the funding of public transport, places Johnson firmly in the rung of the most domestically active Presidents of the modern era.
The sweeping scale of his reform holds only one competitor, that of the New Deal under FDR, and like his patron, the major initiatives were passed in a brief flurry of legislative activity before being followed by powerful conservative backlash. So traumatised were the Democrats from the experience of being flung from power for decades, only winning one election from 1968-1988, they embraced the quiet centrist ‘New Democrat’ politics to avoid being penalised by the electorate.
Mamdani is a proud rejection of this trait and a return to active, engaged government that is present in people’s lives. Centrist Democrats, like Pete Buttgieg and Elisa Slotkin, argue that the Democratic Party must eschew vision and focus on the everyday problems that matter to people, whether that be potholes or security. They often mix in audibly-forced cursing to make themselves sound approachable, and ape the language of ‘pragmatism’ and ‘consensus’ to justify their visionless politics. If the travails and disasters of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, with it’s bland promise of ‘Change’ and active hostility to any notion of ideology demonstrates one thing to their trans-Atlantic counterparts, it’s that a vision is necessary for the government to succeed. As the euphoric response to Mamdani indicates, he is combining this vision with present, active government.
Despite being less popular than former Mayor, friend of Turkiye and new-found Albanian Eric Adams was at this time in his term, he has accomplished far more. Rather than merely projecting good vibes, he is converting the optimistic promise around his election into a programme of democratic socialism in a country that is historically hostile to it. NYC is an anomaly in this respect - it has elected radical mayors like Fiorello LaGuardia. Yet it is also the centre of a huge amount of financial power, and as one of America’s foremost cities, such that it is often mistaken as the capital of both the US and New York state by the uninitiated. Such a sprawling metropolis, a central part of the Acela Corridor, has elected liberals in the past only to turf them out, with the city’s left remembering with flinches the collapse of David Dinkins’ mayoralty.
But whether it be his focus on infrastructure improvements – fixing a pothole on a cycle path now affectionately termed the Zohramp - or his efforts to roll out universal pre-k and correct the calamitous financial course Adams left the city in, Mamdani is following in the footsteps of LaGuardia, and the titanic domestic policy of Roosevelt and Johnson. As the unrest in Trump’s working class supporters indicates, there has been a hunger for an interventionist government for years in the United States. Whatever the actual consequences of NAFTA, globalisation and the US’ post-1990s economic liberalisation and failure to hold the banking sector to account in 2008 anywhere close to the level reached after the 1929 crash, the American people have become disenchanted with the narrow libertarian idea of government advanced by Reagan. The failure of the war on drugs and global war on terror have left Americans poorer, less secure, less free and overall worse off; there is little surprise that the left seeks an alternative.
Because there is no point in a modern government incapable of providing economic rights to its citizens, particularly as it already struggles to ensure all its citizens’ civil rights are always respected. This was the crux of Martin Luther King’s arguments in the late 1960s, and which Lyndon Johnson imperfectly and lately recognised in the weak 1968 Civil Rights Act’s provisions on Housing; an individual receives no value from the freedom to speak if they are too hungry to stand, too cold to sleep or too ill to work. The importance of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice to the modern American left is a clear indication of this; whilst Rawls himself does not claim that either a liberal or socialist programme would be best to achieve his goals, his goals are the same; a positive programme of freedoms, giving the population the economic and social freedom to live, and live well.
Mayor Mamdani succeeds by meeting this hunger. There is no guarantee that the rest of his mayoralty will go as well as its start has; but it is vital that this principle, of ambitious government that refuses to accept that society will simply work in isolation. No one is truly free as long as there are scores who cannot eat, who are homeless, who work in poor conditions or who struggle to get by through no fault of their own. That is the mission of the modern progressive movement.