At Zohran Mamdani’s block party, I observed a simple truth: people want more politics, not less | Samuel Earle

OhOn January 1, to mark his inauguration as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani organized a block party. As he took the oath of office in front of City Hall in front of a crowd of a few thousand of us, a nearby Manhattan street was closed to traffic so tens of thousands more could gather to watch this historic moment live on huge screens. The weather – cloudless blue skies and arctic winds – seemed somehow appropriate: a license to dream and a warning against complacency.

Mayors do not usually take office in such a celebratory atmosphere. A smaller, more exclusive event is normally sufficient. But a key element of Mamdani’s rise has been the desire for mass participation in politics. There was no way this day would go by without an open invitation party.

Throughout his mayoral campaign, Mamdani found new ways to include people in his movement. It began in November 2024 with a viral video taking to the streets to interview people in parts of Queens and the Bronx who had swung heavily toward Donald Trump in the election. As his popularity grew, he inspired an army of volunteers for canvassing and door-to-door canvassing that he praised in his speeches. In August last year, he organized a citywide scavenger hunt in which thousands of people participated. Shortly after, a football tournament took place. After his victory in November, he immediately opened a job portal where people could submit their resumes and areas of interest, which attracted 74,000 applications. In mid-December, he invited New Yorkers to speak to him about their issues and concerns in 15-minute slots, spread over 12 hours. Politics is no longer “something that is done to us,” he said in his victory speech. “Now it’s something we do.”

These forms of participation are not trivial publicity stunts: they are as much a part of Mamdani’s rejection of the old neoliberal consensus as are his universalist social policies. For decades, major Western political parties adhered to a negative image of politics, in which the government’s stated role was to distance itself from private enterprise and grudgingly help people. In this context, receiving welfare could be seen as a sign of individual failure and participating in electoral politics as a waste of time. Political leaders themselves have fueled disillusionment and suspicion with their power. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from government, and I’m here to help,'” said President Ronald Reagan. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair felt compelled to say in 2000: “Even today I don’t feel like a politician.” » As voter turnout fell or stopped and political parties abandoned their partisan focus and membership, a widespread sense of depoliticization and apathy took hold. In 2006, political scientist Peter Mair could rightly describe the governance of Western democracies as “governing in a vacuum.”

Mamdani’s remarkable achievement is to have seen that this “void” is filled with interesting voices, overlapping interests and shared aspirations – and to have unashamedly declared that the government should be there to help them. His project is, in this sense, to transform the role that politics plays in people’s lives.. Implementing his universalist welfare reforms – free childcare, free buses for all, and rent freezes for all rent-stable apartments, without stigmatizing who “needs” it – is part of the challenge. The other part is to continually explore ways to include people in politics. It’s a much more difficult task when governing than when campaigning, but Mamdani and his team see that clearly. “I don’t think the campaign can end,” Mamdani said in a recent interview. “The same people that got us to this point, we want to continue moving forward with them.”

The inauguration event was both a triumphant culmination and a symbolic continuation of the campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders provided the supporting cast, as they did at different points during the mayoral election. There were chants of “tax the rich,” the unofficial soundtrack of the campaign. Most of the seats were allocated to volunteer leaders and each participant received a leaflet containing “a message from the mayor” paying exclusive tribute to their efforts. “We can only come together because more than 104,000 of our friends and neighbors…have given their time and energy to this movement,” it reads. For the finale, Mamdani’s closing speech was both a love letter to New York and an ode to the power of collective action, heralding “a new era” of “big government.” “If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this administration foster it,” he said.

Mamdani is far from the first politician to seek to fulfill this aspiration. Since the financial crash of 2008, stimulated by social networks and disillusionment with the major parties, various movements have emerged to respond to this emerging desire for participation, this appetite for alternatives, across the entire political spectrum. Even figures like Trump and Nigel Farage – with their mass rallies and social media savvy – give their supporters a sense of inclusion and the appearance of an alternative. But the negative image of politics, which aspires to rule over a vacuum, persists. Keir Starmer’s widespread unpopularity serves as a warning about the possible consequences of this approach.

Unlike Mamdani, Starmer assumes that people want less politics. As he explained in January 2024, after 14 years of conservative bad governance, people wanted “politics that weigh a little more heavily on all of our lives” because “the problem with populism” is that it “needs all your attention…and that’s exhausting, isn’t it?” In this vision, the best prime minister is the one who lets us go about our business again with complete peace of mind. But the desired calm did not last long, and soon all sorts of noisy actors rushed to fill this silent void.

The assumption that people want less politics confirms the conflation of politics, disappointment, scandal and underhanded leadership, giving in to the disillusionment of decades past. Mamdani showed that the opposite could be the case. Many people expect more from politics, and more: a movement in which to believe, work, mobilize and socialize – stimulated by the dream of a collective and not a quiet life. “It will be loud, it will be different,” Mamdani told the crowd. As the block party broadcast his speech a few blocks away, it seemed as if his words echoed throughout the city. Even the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan stood to attention.