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View all search resultsMamdani's American dream
One should heed Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that a text attacked by both sides is probably on the right track.
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts on Jan. 1, 2025, as confetti falls during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, the United States. (Reuters/Jeenah Moon)
F
rancis Fukuyama’s 1990s end-of-history thesis was the last big narrative that united the liberal-democratic West. Western liberal-democratic welfare-state capitalism, he argued, was the best possible social system. The only remaining question was empirical: Precisely when and how would other parts of the world arrive at the same model?
This narrative disintegrated after 2001, and we gradually entered the era of brutal pragmatism. The only consistent narrative was provided by Trumpian and European racist nationalists: The developed Christian West is an historical exception, a wealthy, freedom-loving civilization whose survival is under permanent threat from immigrants, “cultural Marxists”, LGBT+ partisans and self-blaming Europeans.
Of course, the “woke” narrative that nationalists reject is even narrower in its appeal than their own. It focuses on a single racist/sexist enemy and doesn’t even try to mobilize the majority, because it is concerned with elevating select groups, like trans people, to the exemplary status of the oppressed. Since most people are not trans, this narrative offers the majority only guilt, rather than a broadly appealing positive vision.
But something new has emerged with the rise of so-called democratic socialists in the United States. In an address marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, one of their leading exponents, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, offered a radically different narrative about what the US is and could be. Mamdani won his office not by promoting academic woke purism but by focusing on local issues and the underprivileged, with calls for free childcare and buses, rent control and accessible health services. And in his July 4 address, he translated his politics into a global vision:
“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else […] The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place. The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, my friends, and it belongs to us all. It belongs too to our newest Americans, those standing here with me today, all of whom were recently naturalized. Nearly a decade ago, I too felt what you feel, the joy of no longer being just a New Yorker, but an American too. You each hold a special power. The power to determine what America means.”
Mamdani’s vision is, of course, ideological. It presents a simplified picture, not the unvarnished truth. What matters most is that it challenges the populist narrative head-on, as evidenced by the right’s hysterical attacks on Mamdani. In his own July 4 address, US President Donald Trump was obviously thinking of the New York mayor when, making a hash of history, he claimed that: “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”
But equally notable is that Mamdani has also drawn fire from some radical leftists. In response to his praise of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, Jacobin published a commentary with the headline: “Burn the Constitution Once Again.” As the tagline explained, “The Constitution didn’t stop Trump, it made his reign possible.”
