An Immigrant Mayor for an Immigrant City
Mayor on a hill.
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Zohran Mamdani’s election is a sign—a sign that Democratic socialism has legs, that endorsements no longer determine elections, that big money doesn’t rule everything, that a hatred of genocide is greater than a fear of Muslims, and that multiculturalism trumps xenophobia. At least in New York City.
It may be just one city, but it’s an important city—the biggest city in the country, the media center of the U.S., and the financial capital of the world. It’s also home to the biggest immigrant population in the United States (and the third largest in the world).
To put that into perspective, the city’s foreign-born residents, 3.1 million people, would form the third-largest city in the U.S., ahead of Chicago. As a sanctuary city, New York falls squarely within the crosshairs of Trump’s War on Immigrants. At the helm soon will be an immigrant, Mayor-elect Mamdani.
As popular as Mr. Mamdani is, the opposition to his mayorship has been unhinged. If you’re to believe Mamdani’s critics, he is a communist Muslim terrorist who is hellbent on the destruction of New York City, the U.S., and Jewish people. Just look at the New York Post’s cover:
Yes, that’s a Soviet sickle and hammer, but worse than the breathless, raving fearmongering about — tun tun tun! —SOCIALISM (gasp!) is the unapologetic Islamophobia directed at Mr. Mamdani.
On Sid & Friends in the Morning, Cuomo mused,
“God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”
Shock jock Sid Rosenberg did not hesitate. “Yeah, I could. He’d be cheering.”
“That’s another problem,” Cuomo agreed.
Saint Charlie Kirk lamented the prospect of a Muslim becoming mayor of New York City because, you know, Muslims attacked New York City, ergo all Muslims must be terrorists.
“24 years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.”
Professional troll Laura Loomer took it a step further.
“New York City will be destroyed. He is literally supported by terrorists. NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”
Mamdani grew up in New York. His family moved there when he was seven. He’s a New York City assemblyman. The dude waxes rhapsodic about kebab in Astoria and used to rap, for crying out loud. He’s a New Yorker. This is his home. Why would he want to destroy it? There’s no rationalizing these comments. It’s rank Islamophobia.
If you want to ding the guy for having a utopian economic philosophy that fails to think through all the costs and market implications, have at it. At least then we’d be debating his policies. Unfortunately, that isn’t the world we live in. Our world calls him a terrorist.
The terrorist attack on 9/11 wasn’t the birth of Islamophobia—I grew up watching movies like True Lies in which Muslims were routinely depicted as terrorists—but it fanned the flame. Post-9/11 Islamophobia justified wars and demonized Muslims in the United States and around the world.
Islamophobia is a form of xenophobia, so it should come as no surprise that the former paved the way for a militant iteration of the latter. Islamophobia laid the groundwork for this administration’s extrajudicial detention and deportation of immigrants via the establishment of a surveillance state and the creation of DHS, ICE, CBP, etc.
The Patriot Act effectively allowed warrantless searches (section 215) and permitted surveillance without probable cause of criminal activity (section 218). Sound familiar? It should. It’s the modus operandi of ICE, Trump’s gestapo, an agency created 18 months after 9/11.
As always, powerful people harness fear of “the other” to consolidate power further. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law ostensibly to give federal authorities the latitude needed to ferret out terrorists, but its application went far beyond counterterrorism—and we’re still living through the consequences of that overreach.
New York is a city of contradictions. It’s a blue stronghold that provokes loathing among conservatives, but it’s also the altar of capitalism, that which conservatives hold most dear. It’s home to the most billionaires in the world, but a quarter of its residents live in poverty. It’s one of the most diverse cities in the world, but the tide of gentrification remorselessly displaces diverse communities. The city is beautiful, but it’s disgusting. Its residents are fascinating, but they can be a pain in the ass. The city attracts idealistic artists, but it also draws cynical exponents of commercialism. It’s socially permissive, but it retains the largest police force in the country. You will never run out of things to do in New York, but you will run out of patience. The city is the result of our most grotesque excesses, but it’s also the inspiration for our most wide-eyed dreams. New York created both Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani.
New York isn’t the only way Mamdani and Trump overlap: They’re both products of immigration. Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents, while Trump’s mother was an immigrant from Scotland and his grandfather on his father’s side was an immigrant from Germany. It makes sense. New York City is a city of immigrants. It always has been.
Mamdani arrives at a time when his own perceived contradictions dovetail with the widening fissures of New York’s contradictions. He will be an immigrant mayor amidst the most draconian crackdown on immigrants in modern American history. He will be the first Muslim New York City mayor in a city still lousy with Islamic terrorist PTSD. He will be a Democratic socialist mayor during a time of worsening income inequality.
I don’t know yet if Mamdani will be an effective mayor, but he is the right mayor for this moment. Just as Trump’s win in 2016 represented a rejection of establishment politics, Mamdani’s win also represents a rejection of the establishment, albeit a different manifestation.
New York may look different than the rest of the country, but in many ways it’s a microcosm of the United States, with its widening income inequality and its growing number of billionaires wielding more and more influence. Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, which hinges on increasing taxes on large corporations and the super-rich—a promise that compelled a parade of billionaires that includes Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman to dump millions of dollars into the doomed campaign of the re-disgraced and twice-defeated Cuomo. The billionaires are mad. So is Trump, who threatened to cut federal funding to New York if Mamdani won.
Mamdani’s win is a repudiation of the class war waged by billionaires against the rest of us and of Trump’s war on immigrants. New York City, home to the most billionaires, is an incongruous battleground for a challenge against the surging plutocracy, but as the home of millions of immigrants (and millions of children of immigrants and transplants from other parts of the country), it is the most fitting battleground for the defense of immigrants against the fascistic tactics and goose-stepping theatrics of ICE.
Mamdani walks onstage as the mayor on a hill, the poster boy for Democratic socialism, a shot in the arm of a simpering, flaccid Democratic party, and as a dimpled symbol of hope for the ballyhooed resistance.
Maybe he’s too young. Maybe he’s too experienced. Maybe he’s too impractical. Maybe he’s too idealistic. Maybe he’ll die on that hill. Maybe. But at least he’s on it.