The Mamdani Era Begins | The New Yorker

During the campaign, Mamdani liked to remind his audience that New York is the richest city in the richest country in the history of the world and that his government could do more for the people who live there. While his opponents portrayed New York as a broke, dysfunctional, crime-ridden city, Mamdani spoke of the city as a charming, if chaotic, place, full of tumult and injustice, yes, but also life and possibility. The Mamdani Cinematic Universe is a place where you can take the subway to the city clerk’s office to marry the girl you met on Hinge, where you can do Tai Chi and salsa with old guys from the Lower East Side, where you can polar dive off Coney Island on New Year’s Day and roam all of Manhattan on a hot summer night.

The feel-good content complemented his neck-and-neck policy. Mamdani’s most Cuomo-esque quality is the obvious pleasure he takes in public political combat—”Habibi“Publish your client list,” he taunted the former governor, about the mysterious legal consulting practice that earned him about five million dollars last year. When forced to tone down his criticism of Israel, Mamdani barely flinched. These qualities convinced many young voters, in particular, that he might have what it took to deliver on his promises. They voted for him because they could imagine a city with free buses; because they thought the idea of ​​freezing rents in the city of about one million rent-stabilized apartments seemed right, even though they didn’t live in rent-stabilized apartments themselves; and because they liked the idea of ​​New York being a place that provides universal child care for children as young as six weeks old, the alternative offered by Cuomo — thoughts and prayers for high rents, more games and opaque machinations at City Hall, Democratic officials skirting the bloodshed in Gaza — was just too dark.

Since the primaries, senior figures in New York’s Democratic establishment have continued to keep Mamdani at arm’s length. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries delayed his support for so long that he embarrassed himself. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (the latter having to apologize after implying on public radio that Mamdani supported “global jihad”) never showed up. But former President Barack Obama saw something in Mamdani – he was called twice to check on the young man since June – as was moderate New York Governor Kathy Hochul. At a rally in the final days of the campaign at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, Hochul warmed up the crowd for Mamdani — or tried to. “Tax the rich!” » the crowd laughed at her. The shy, tax-averse governor struggled to keep her cool. “I can hear you!” she said. Mamdani appeared on stage, walked towards Hochul and raised one of her hands in the air. The ruckus turned into a roar of approval.

When I first spoke to Mamdani two years ago, he was a backbencher from Albany with few allies in the Legislature. He called me a few days after October 7, worried about the Islamophobic reactions in the city. Shortly after, he was arrested while demonstrating for a ceasefire in front of Schumer’s building. He found himself, at that moment, as far on the fringes of power as an elected official can be. In recent months, Mamdani has seemed more comfortable with the compromises and contradictions that being mayor would impose on him. He expressed a new appreciation for the role of private real estate development and promised to ask Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a favorite of the city’s wealthy establishment, to stay in his administration. “If he becomes mayor, so be it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said recently. Mamdani is unproven, his network of longtime allies is small, and he lacks the connections and history in the city’s power structure that even an ambitious progressive like Bill de Blasio has relied on to get things done. But that’s the point. New Yorkers didn’t want an insider with decades of experience. They wanted Zohran Mamdani.

“Do we Americans really want good government? muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in McClure magazine in 1903. “Do we know it when we see it?” Steffens had spent months investigating the limitations and particular outrages of the New York bureaucracy of the Tammany Hall era. It wasn’t that New Yorkers didn’t know the machine was corrupt; it was that they rarely bothered to worry about it. “Tammany is corruption by consent,” Steffens wrote. “It’s a bad government based on the suffrage of the people.” Sometimes, when the excesses of the machine became “endemic,” people were encouraged to drive out the bosses. A foreign mayoral candidate would run, pledging to wipe the slate clean, organize the city’s various factions of political opposition, and galvanize the city with a “hot campaign.” But it never ended well. Inevitably, the bosses were returned to power. Steffens called this frustrating pattern “the standard course of municipal reform.”

With the exception of Fiorello LaGuardia, every liberal and reform mayor since the late 19th century has encountered a dismal version of the “standard way.” Seth Low, the former president of Columbia University who was mayor when Steffens was writing, was denied a second term by George B. McClellan, Jr., a favorite of Tammany boss Richard Croker. In the 1960s, John Lindsay rose to power on a wave of charisma and good feelings, and left behind frustrations and disastrous town books when he left eight years later. David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor (and also the first mayor to serve as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America), saw his administration destroyed by racial violence and concerns about crime, and was defeated by Rudy Giuliani when he ran for a second term. De Blasio, whom Mamdani considers the best mayor of his life, achieved much of the agenda he laid out in 2013, but New Yorkers still grew tired of him. “The good mayor turns out to be weak or foolish or ‘not so good,’” Steffens wrote. “Or people get disgusted.”