This moment, Zohran! | The Express Tribune

By this time you must have encountered countless commentaries on the irrepressible victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race, ranging from doting tributes to freaking out Islamophobic and socialismphobic diatribes. So, why write another piece on it? Because this piece is not about him per se. It is about this moment, which is much bigger than you, I, or him. In fact, if I were him, I would try to steer clear of writings like these because they are meant to be sobering and pressure-inducing. But then he is not me. He has shown he and his supporters can handle anything.

The regular readers of this space will remember that I hardly mentioned him in my works until the race was on. One reason is aging. While this David versus Goliath fight would have excited me to no end only until a decade ago, nothing political seems to excite me anymore. Then there is the issue of heartbreaks. From Tony Blair, who once called Jesus a socialist before defecting to the other side, to Barack Obama, we have seen many individuals promising miracles and then failing badly. The heart goes out to the men and women who went out of their way in support of these leaders only to witness their promises result in what the late Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future”.

But how to interpret this moment? Should we believe in what the media is selling? That it is a repudiation of Trump? Or ask why the media is selling that narrative? Is it because it is easy or it is because it is right? I think it is the former coupled with lobbyist-addled, craven desire for agenda setting. Trump and Mamdani and his platform are two approaches to solving the same problem. Of public distress. And do not forget the similarities in their methods while their directions differ.

High energy deployment of social media and personal campaigning after establishing credibility and originality. When Trump came down the escalator to announce his run and did not hold back his views on immigrants and when Mamdani publicly embraced all his identities, Muslim, South Asian, African American, immigrant and socialist, they were invoking the same muse. The muse of originality.

People are tired of politicians who are notorious for saying one thing and doing the other. Both these men proved themselves genuine. And they used their respective counter-cultural ideologies (Trump’s economic nationalism and Mamdani’s democratic socialism) as battering rams to knock down the status quo.

So, Mamdani’s win is a repudiation not of Trump but of three forces that are hiding in plain sight. The first is the Islamophobic coalition sponsored by the likes of Netanyahu and Modi. The second is the uncontrollable corporate greed. And the third, the Democratic Party’s establishment and elites. Remember, when President Trump first tapped into the Republican version of populism, corollary to that was a Democratic populist moment too. Led by indefatigable Bernie Sanders, this populism was also an approach to relieving the suffering masses of their pain. The Democratic elite did what it could to bypass him twice. Now he is eighty-four. But his movement has spread far and wide. Mamdani very effectively tapped into that sentiment.

It gets better. But we need to take a moment to admire the beauty of the American political system, the heart of a city like New York, which could have chosen to stay frozen in the post-9/11 dystopia but did not, and the Jewish and the Hindu communities of the city who rejected Islamophobia sponsored by India and Israel’s ruling elite. They are all simply brilliant.

Now, the troubling parts. Zohran Mamdani has promised many things, most of them very difficult to deliver. Freezing rents, running free fast buses, expanding affordable housing, raising the minimum wage and city-run grocery stores all must be music to an average New Yorker’s ears. But they all need money. Governments usually have three options to raise money. Borrow, obtain grants or tax their citizens. New York is already a highly taxed place.

Borrowing is the quickest way to create more poverty. Grants cannot be relied upon due to President Trump’s warnings. And the taxation solution Mr Mamdani proposes has its own ramifications. You can tax the rich but today’s rich do not want to play ball. They can pack up and leave. While Wall Street won’t shift to Dallas or Florida due to the tyranny of geography, the billionaires you intend to tax can.

I am not a socialist. I am a libertarian. But as a student of history I am aware of the exigencies of this moment and the need for a dialectical balance. So, it is in everyone’s interest to preserve a working model of democratic socialism. If Mamdani fails to deliver, the cost to his movement will be immense. Since he is not a natural born citizen he cannot run for president but there are many from his movement like AOC who can. His failure will impact their chances too.

So what is the antidote? Three things. Honesty. Flexibility. And what Raghuram Rajan promotes in his brilliant book, The Third Pillar: community. Honesty to level with his constituents and manage expectations. Flexibility to negotiate with Albany, Washington, DC, and the billionaires he intends to tax. And community because he has effectively mobilised the New York community through a common dream.

This is crucial because jobs are about to come under huge pressure in the age of AI. While billionaires have shifted the regulatory debate towards AI rather than their behaviour, they are the ones who will decide which job is replaced by AI and which stays. Democrats dropped the ball in 2024 by refusing to commit to retaining the services of FTC chair Lina Khan. She had built bipartisan consensus on the best ways to regulate the billionaires’ behaviour. This cost them the support of powerful unions like the Teamsters. As Acemoglu and Johnson prove in their timely book, Power and Progress, when technological progress is not regulated it leads to inequality. You can read Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to see the sheer scale of inequality today. But they show with evidence that when technological progress is regulated it can lead to widespread prosperity.

Today’s tech billionaires are only getting richer and more powerful. Tesla’s shareholders just approved a one-trillion-dollar worth of salary package for Elon Musk. You need to read Atif Mian and Amir Sufi’s book House of Debt to see where unregulated corporate greed can take you. There has to be a good regulatory framework to preserve the rights of ordinary citizens. This is a national, if not international, project. And all of this is tied to Mr Mamdani’s success in New York. No pressure!