Zohran Mamdani: a victory for the global left

In an age of resurgent fascism, the left can fight back and win

Zohran Mamdani’s triumph in the contest for the New York mayoralty is a historic moment. He has crushed Andrew Cuomo - but more importantly, the brand of politics that the Democratic Party establishment represents.

He now has the opportunity to ensure that it is the US left which assumes the leadership of the movement against Trumpism.

He has won over half the vote, defying the opinion polls, and he is the first mayoral candidate to win over a million votes since John Lindsay in 1969.

The socialist left - the authentic, real deal, unapologetic, loud and proud socialist left - will now take power in New York City, the biggest and important city in the United States. In age of darkness, one of the great centres of the Western world has elected a socialist who stands against capitalism, against racism, against genocide.

This is a historic moment - and the consequences will reverberate not just around the United States, but across the Western world and indeed beyond. There are so many lessons that we must now learn so that what is today triumphed in New York will tomorrow take power at national level across the West - and drive back the rising tide of fascism.

It’s important to note what Zohran Mamdani’s movement was up against. They suffered the mother of all racist smear campaigns. His opponents portrayed him as a jihadist. His principled opposition to Israeli genocide and apartheid - and defence of the Palestinian people - was relentlessly demonised.

Billionaires and plutocrats threw vast sums of money at destroying Mamdani and his movement. That included Michael Bloomberg, himself a former mayor who is worth $110 billion, billionaire Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, who serves under Donald Trump and smears Mamdani as a “terrorist”, Texan Walmart heir Alice Walton, obsessive anti-Mamdani hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, the delivery firm Doordash - we could go on.

Donald Trump threatened the people of New York - telling them that he would financially strangle their city if they voted for Mamdani.

A mass movement which mobilised the previously unheard, the disengaged, the disempowered disillusioned was the only hope of facing all of that down. And in the end, campaign of hatred and fear was crushed by a movement of hope and optimism.

There was much to note in his victory speech.

This is how it began:

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.”

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 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.

Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life, but let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.

A speech for the ages. A speech which put at its centre working people - the people who create the wealth, but who see so little of it, the exhausted, exploited, the overworked - finally, in the United States, a movement takes power which puts their lives and experiences at its heart.

Note this about his charisma. Since Barack Obama there has been no shortage of Democratic wannabe leaders who adopt the tone and cadence of the leaders of the civil rights movements of the fifties and sixties - but whose speeches contain nothing of meaningful substance, just platitudes, homilies, empty meaningless rhetoric.

They have the tone of a politician taking on power - while in practise kowtowing to Wall Street and corporate America.

What powers the charisma of Zohran Mamdani is a passionate, unbending belief in actually transforming society and taking on the elites on behalf of the majority.

And note how he began his speech by quoting Eugene Debs - the pioneer of American socialism - because Mamdani and his movement know they are the latest expression of the historic tradition of the left. It is the likes of Debs - rather than Franklin Roosevelt - that the Mamdani movement sees itself as the modern incarnation of.

I don’t want to dwell too much on Andrew Cuomo, but there’s a final thing to be said.

This serial sexual harasser represents the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party establishment - servility to money and to power. He indulged racist Islamophobic attacks on his opponent.

And disgracefully, too, he tried to use Trump’s blackmail to bolster his campaign. Two days ago he posted:

“If you want President Trump to try to take over the city - national guard on streets, choking federal funding - vote for @ZohranKMamdani because Trump just said he will be coming and this poser @ZohranKMamdani won’t be able to stop him.

That is a fact. The next Mayor has to be able to get us more, not ensure our demise. I am the only person in this race who can do that.”

He conspired with the far-right demagogue occupying the White House to subvert democracy with threats. On to the scrapheap of history for the eternally disgraced Andrew Cuomo.

In his speech Mamdani said:

Now I know that many have heard our message only through the prism of misinformation. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long-broken system. We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game anymore. They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

This is so important. Ever since the banks plunged the West into an economic crisis in 2008 from which we never recovered, the right has tried to turn struggling people against each other - to make people feel that they’re forced to fight with each other for scarce resources, that they should treat each other as competition to be driven out, rather than uniting all of those who are struggling against the common enemy - the elites who profit at the expense of the majority.

Indeed, he went on:

In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. 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.

What the far right have tried to do is use so-called culture wars to divide people. Some have concluded that we need to somehow give in to this - to surrender ground, to throw minorities under a bus. But we don’t need to do this! We just need to centre a vision of economic justice that united people regardless of their ethnicity, their religion, their gender, their sexuality, their sexual orientation.

It’s liberals who offer nothing except empty checkbox identity politics - that is, politics which seems to champion diversity, but doesn’t offer anything meaningful to minorities. At the same time, they don’t have a vision of economic justice directed at the majority, whatever their personal characteristics.

That can then be so easily be demonised by the right, who say to working class people who happen to be white: ‘Look, they don’t care about people like you - they only care about X Y or Z minority’! That’s the same right who stand up for the oligarchs and elites and who want to screw over working people. Mamdani shows us how to fight back - build unity without throwing any minority under a bus.

There was another crucial passage in Mamdani’s speech:

Together, we will usher in a generation of change. And if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.

He underlines that fighting the rise of authoritarianism doesn’t mean being weak and cowardly - but strong, defiant and unapologetic. Don’t give an inch!

What we’re seeing here, in part, are the political consequences of the Iraq war, the financial crash and, more recently, Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

The invasion of Iraq and the financial crash helped forge the political consciousness of so many millennials in particular.

And in the United States, the first major political expression of that came in the form of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Bernie Sanders did not win - but he was only supposed to get 1%. He was, after all, a little-known septuagenarian Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. Instead he secured 46% of the vote against what was then the most formidable political machine in the United States. But crucially that campaign revitalised and rebuilt the US left. In fact the US left became stronger than at any point in its history as a result.

One expression of that was the emergence of the so-called Squad - the leftists elected to Congress like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar. The Democratic Socialists of America surged to over 80,000 members. At the local level, too, a new generation of leftists have secured power.

The Mamdani phenomenon owes everything to that Bernie Sanders campaign.

And then there are the political consequences of Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people. This crime has politicised so many people, it has opened so many eyes - and not just to the horrors inflicted against the Palestinian people.

We saw political and media elites facilitate a genocide. And many concluded if they can do that - and if they can lie to us so shamelessly about it - what else are they doing, and what else are they lying about?

Yes, the injustices spawned by a broken economic system were at the core of his mayoral campaign. But without the politicisation driven by Israel’s genocide, I don’t believe for one second that Mamdani would have secured the Democratic Party nomination.

The political consequences of the genocide are going to be felt for generations to come.

Mamdani also said the following:

And we must chart a new path as bold as the one we have already traveled. After all, the conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate. I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.

This is an age in which Islamophobia is rampant - acceptable, mainstream, respectable, normalised. And for a Muslim candidate to face that down in one of the major cities of the West matters - a lot.

And he’s right - he’s a socialist and a Muslim who refused to apologise for being either. We need to learn from him - don’t give an inch, don’t apologise, stand our ground.

That doesn’t mean there are not big challenges ahead. Both Donald Trump’s Republican Right and the Democratic establishment want Mamdani’s movement to fail. And they will do all they can to destroy him and his movement - and that includes Trump trying to economically suffocate New York and even, yes, send in the troops. He may even try and remove Mamdani from office. Republicans have pushed to deport him. Whether the US survives as some form of democracy is an open question - and Mamdani is right at the top of the list for right wing authoritarianism.

That movement Mamdani’s campaign has mobilised will be so important in fighting back.

But if this campaign owes everything to the Bernie Sanders phenomenon - the Mamdani movement will surely have an even bigger impact.

On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, some interesting figures, let’s put it that way, are celebrating.

Paul Mason is a formerly left-wing journalist who abandoned the left, who has spent the last few years demonising and attacking the left while uncritically idolising Keir Starmer. He tweeted:

“Democrats Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger all swept to victory tonight - Trump is doomed - I’m delighted esp for the NYC win over greed and racism”

What an utterly shameless man he is. Why are you celebrating, Paul! If Mamdani was a British politician, you would be demonising him. He would be fighting against the Starmer administration you laud. Mamdani shows how to crush the sort of politics you now represent.

There’s an even more grotesque example.

Wes Streeting, the ultra-Blairite Health Secretary who was nearly defeated by British-Palestinian candidate Leanne Mohamed in the last election, posted:

“Inspirational campaign and victory for @ZohranKMamdani in NYC. Lessons for progressives the world over.”

What to even say? If Mamdani was a Labour candidate he’d have been purged and smeared by the Labour leadership. The politics of people like Wes Streeting approximates to the likes of Andrew Cuomo.

What Mamdani shows isn’t just to take on the right - but the so-called ‘centre’ - the politically and morally bankrupt centre.

Indeed the Greens are now surging under their new leader Zack Polanski, who is standing on an unapologetic platform of taking on the elites in the interests of the majority.

Polanski already shows huge promise: the Greens are surging in the polls and have 150,000 members. Meanwhile, despite ‘Your Party’ being an almighty mess, they’ve now announced 50,000 members. How they work together is crucial to what happens next.

Here’s what I think. In the mid-2010s, there was the first wave of a new left - Corbynism, Bernie Sanders, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and so on. But with the left having been nowhere for so long before their emergence, we didn’t have the infrastructure - whether that be the people or ideas. And that first wave crashed.

But a second wave is now building. And as Mamdani triumphs - let’s make this the wave that sweeps away both the rise of fascism - and the broken economic system that produced it.