Zohran Mamdani is a force of nature. Denying that simple fact is the first wrong move anyone can make when considering his historical win. He is the youngest mayor of New York in over a century. He’s the first Muslim mayor of New York. He came out of nowhere and won the election in a landslide. Mamdani mobilized the youth and managed to convince many Donald Trump voters to support him. All of these achievements have led to many questions about how he managed to achieve these things.
The first place people like to point to is his claims of socialism as the overarching success mechanism. These people come in two main camps: those who think he’s a socialist and that’s bad, and people who think he’s a bad socialist. Camp one is a group of people who need to be convinced of socialism’s wondrous solution. Their opinions can be ignored. Group two is technically right, but are completely misunderstanding the purpose of language and optics. Mamdani is a real socialist, at least to the extent to which one can analyze the internal beliefs of another person. He is also aware of the fact that if he were to attempt to institute “true socialism” on day one as mayor, he would be immediately impeached and possibly imprisoned. Today is not the day of the revolution. Instead, Mamdani is making the best choice he can; he is instituting social-democratic policies, something which is good for people, and calling it socialism, so people associate good things with socialism. If he were to refer to his childcare and transportation efforts as social democracy, then the good press that comes from these actions is given to social democrats.
The mainstream media and corporate Democrats have mostly ignored Mamdani’s socialist declarations when discussing why he won. It appears to many that Mamdani’s win is not a signal of greater societal shifts towards socialism; instead, they point to his social media presence, youth and message of affordability. While these were definitely important parts of how Mamdani built himself into such an appealing candidate, they don’t define his success. Many candidates have tried and failed to create similar social media presences, such as Andrew Cuomo. There are many less favored politicians around the same age as Zohran Mamdani. Trump has used the same calls for affordability in his messaging, and while some, like MAGA for Mamdani, might have been convinced by this rhetoric, the majority of Mamdani voters didn’t vote for Trump in the last election. These are smaller strategies that have proven to be effective in some cases and not in others.
What Mamdani has that other politicians mostly lack is threefold. One, Mamdani has a concrete platform with goals supported by achievable steps. This sounds like a stupid thing to say, at first. However, the majority of Democratic campaigns have very few concrete campaign policies; both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran on campaigns that were focused on the fact that they weren’t Trump and little else.
Two, Mamdani is a socialist. I know, I said it wasn’t because it’s not the fact that he was a socialist that got him support from the general public. It is because being a moderate Democrat doesn’t get you money from grass-roots sources. Moderate Democrats are mostly supported by PACs and corporate donors. If Mamdani had run as a moderate Democrat with little party support, he wouldn’t have gained enough money to even run a proper campaign. On the other hand, running as a socialist comes with a lot of grassroots groups who have been created to support progressive campaigns, as well as the energy that comes from preaching change.
Third and most importantly, Mamdani is a magnetic person who demands your attention. I know that sounds stupid. Politicians should succeed based on their ideas and policies alone, you cry. Sadly, that isn’t the world we live in, and Democrats and leftists have forgotten that fact. As much as I support the idea of reducing hierarchy in society to its least possible level, I understand that one needs a head for a movement to succeed. Recent movements have moved away from the somewhat strict hierarchies and structures of groups in past movements. People such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were both figureheads for the Civil Rights Movement. Both of these figures were so important within their movement that their names have become synonymous with it. Similar things can be said about figures such as Susan B. Anthony and Harvey Milk for suffrage and Queer Liberation, respectively. In addition to being rallying figures, King and Parks taught people resistance tactics and helped organize sustained protests and efforts.
Now is a moment in which we must rally behind figureheads and create more. Run for a local office or join an organization which is supporting socialist candidates. Praise every success Mamdani can attribute to socialism and support the people who you see as possible movement leaders. The revolution will not happen in Twitter comments.
