Mamdani at the Crossroads

On election night on Tuesday, as the talk of percentage points and reporting precincts updated on my screens in minute-by-minute increments, I was ready to go to bed early, as I’d done last November, once those election results started rolling in. This time, I hadn’t allowed myself to prepare to celebrate. My nervous system could only take so much. Like Bill Clinton, I wouldn’t inhale.

Then the Associated Press made the call, announcing Zohran Mamdani as the winner of the New York City mayoral race. My partner videocalled me from Steinway Street, a main thoroughfare of Astoria, where Mamdani lives and which he has represented as an assemblyman in the state legislature since 2020. A group of people spilling out of Moka & Co cheered and embraced each other.

Soon enough, the percolating instrumentation of ‘New York’, Ja Rule’s piercing 2004 posse cut, was playing on my TV, and Mamdani strolled out to deliver a rousing victory speech: ‘New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.’ It sounded as if he was talking directly to me. ‘We have held it in anticipation of defeat. Held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count. Held it because we can not afford to exhale.’

Later that night, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post shared its next day’s front page, which depicted the mayor-elect wearing an all-red outfit, clutching a hammer and sickle overhead. ‘The Red Apple’, was the headline. The subhead: ‘On your Marx, get set, Zo! Socialist Mamdani wins race for mayor.’ Mamdani, used to being misrepresented by his detractors, anticipated the caricature, opening his speech by quoting the onetime leader of the Socialist Party of America: ‘The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”’

Van Jones, the centrist CNN political commentator, tone-policing the speech, described Mamdani’s onstage persona as evincing a ‘character switch’ and said he was ‘almost yelling’. But I heard someone projecting his voice to be audible over a roaring crowd, managing what sounded like slight nerves and unabashed happiness. And by the time he told Donald Trump to ‘turn up the volume,’ I was used to his own rising tone.

The speech was both sweeping and precise, by turns tender and truculent. Mamdani positioned himself once again as both an equity-minded reformer and an anti-establishment crusader. There were invocations of ‘hope’, and it was hard not to hear the echo of one of the slogans for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. ‘Tonight we have spoken in a clear voice: hope is alive,’ Mamdani said. ‘While we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible.’

He stayed on message, and repeated once again his three campaign promises of fast and free buses, universal childcare, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilised apartments. He called this triptych of initiatives ‘the most ambitious agenda to tackle the cost-of-living crisis that this city has seen since the days of Fiorello La Guardia’ – the pathbreaking leftist politician who governed the city from 1934 to 1946, in Mamdani’s view the best mayor New York has ever had.

The speech was full of shout-outs, as victory speeches tend to be: to the more than 100,000 volunteers who helped him to get elected, to his campaign team, to his parents (the filmmaker Mira Nair and the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani), to his wife, the artist Rama Duwaji.

Mamdani once released a hip-hop song under the moniker Young Cardamom, and his campaign – which came out of nowhere, and seemingly required him to be everywhere, hitting every stop, from SubwayTakes to TikTok to The View to local news – at times resembled that of a rapper on a mixtape run in the early 2000s, surprising everyone but himself. His victory speech wasn’t a diss track, though he mentioned Trump eight times and of his main opponent said: ‘I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name.’ He also referred (without naming him) to Cuomo’s father, Mario, governor of New York from 1983 to 1994: ‘A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme, and let us build a shining city for all’ – alluding to Cuomo’s 1984 ‘Tale of Two Cities’ rebuke to Ronald Reagan.

But the most interesting portions of Mamdani’s speech, to me, were the impressionistic lists, which conjured in more detail ‘every New Yorker, whether you voted for me, for one of my opponents, or felt too disappointed by politics to vote at all’:

For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery-bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns. These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet over the last twelve months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.

And then he moved from this cinematic montage of labouring hands to a series of medium shots of city residents, and added in a very tiny borough check:

I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, ‘aunties’. To every New Yorker in Kensington and Midwood and Hunts Point, know that this city is your city, and this democracy is yours, too.

He nodded to an 1199 organiser he met outside Elmhurst Hospital who is forced to commute into the city because rent is too expensive, and a disappointed woman he met on the BX33 bus, and Richard Chow, the taxi driver he joined on a fifteen-day hunger strike outside City Hall in 2021, when cabbies were protesting for debt forgiveness, ‘who still has to drive his cab seven days a week’. ‘My brother,’ he said, ‘we are in City Hall now.’

He promised a new age of ‘relentless improvement’ in which the city ‘will hire thousands more teachers. We will cut waste from a bloated bureaucracy. We will work tirelessly to make lights shine again, in the hallways of NYCHA developments where they have long flickered.’ This busted-windows imagery also managed to evoke damn near every beautifully grimy lyric by a 1990s New York rapper, from Jay-Z to Ghostface Killah to Nas and Mobb Deep, who grew up in the Queensbridge Houses, one of the many public housing projects planned by La Guardia’s administration. Where Nas and the Mobb shot videos at Queensbridge, or referenced its signage on their album covers, Mamdani went for the deep-cut lyrical allusions (perhaps too lyrical; some things are better not romanticised). He continued:

Here, we believe in standing up for those we love, whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall. Your struggle is ours, too.

These moments of parataxis, in which people in a list are positioned on the same plane, are politically suggestive. Where Mikie Sherill, the Democrat who won the New Jersey governor’s race, quoted Emma Lazarus, the author of ‘The New Colossus’, the poem inscribed in the Statue of Liberty, Mamdani’s speech was reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, with its passionate evocations of commuting New Yorkers, or even Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’.

The tableau of workers conjured in Mamdani’s victory speech also brought to mind the mural by Diego Rivera for the ground-floor wall of Rockefeller Center, which was partly installed there in 1933. Man at the Crossroads showed a worker manning machinery at the centre of a scene contrasting capitalism and socialism. Rivera later said he had been given the theme ‘Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future’.

The painting, with its dense imagery and bold colours, was filled with groups of people, each a representative of a different social strata, including: soldiers on the battlefield; girls exercising in a stadium; unemployed labourers protesting on the street, attacked by the police; wealthy New Yorkers playing cards and dancing in a nightclub, oblivious or indifferent to everything else. The Rockefellers approved Rivera’s plans – but in April 1933, a conservative writer complained that the work was anti-capitalist propaganda.

In response, Rivera doubled down, adding a portrait of Lenin holding hands with a multiracial cohort of workers at a May Day parade. Nelson Rockefeller tried to get Rivera to censor the painting. The artist wouldn’t relent, but offered to add a countervailing force on the capitalist side of the painting, either Abraham Lincoln ‘surrounded by John Brown, Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Harriet Beecher Stowe’ or ‘a scientific figure like Cyrus McCormick, whose reaping machine had contributed to the victory of the Union forces by facilitating the harvesting of wheat in the fields depleted of men’. The design consultancy that commissioned the mural on the Rockefellers’ behalf declined, and the mural was destroyed the next year before it could be completed. (Later, Rivera used photos to reproduce a new version of the painting for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, called Man, Controller of the Universe.) E.B. White in the New Yorker described Rivera’s stance as a ‘ballad of artistic integrity’.

Mamdani, like Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, finds himself at a crucial intersection, between his Democratic Socialist beliefs and the world financial capital’s commitment to profit. He made a concession to centrist New Yorkers in the last days before the election, by agreeing to keep Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner. She’s no Abraham Lincoln, but her presence in the administration is evidence of compromise by a man who has said that he would prefer not to hire new police officers and to cut the NYPD’s overtime budget, and that homelessness and mental health crises should be dealt with not by the police but by a new office of community safety. But Mamdani is a politician, not an artist. Who knows what will happen from here on out, but his speech, with its denunciation of corruption and calls for inclusion, sounded something like a ballad of political integrity.