why zohran matters
the empathetic margin of effort
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A lot has happened this past week but the only thing on my mind right now is that Zohran Mamdani won the democratic primary for mayor of new york city, somehow upsetting legacy/austerity shoe-in Andrew Cuomo, and very likely kicking off a ripple of change across American electoral politics, how local and national campaigns can be run (and won) going forward.
I've been following his campaign ever since I came across this video back in January but I never would have imagined Mamdani would actually, you know, pull it off.
why zohran matters
A virtual unknown, polling at little more than 0% when he first entered the race, polling at 1% only four months ago, has done the impossible.
Zohran Mamdani somehow pulled it off. He may be a generational talent. The votes are still being counted — the primary was held only yesterday — but Mamdani has almost certainly secured the Democratic nomination for the most widely-broadcast local office in the country (and perhaps the world). No unabashedly socialist candidate has ever won an election like this in the United States.
And Zohran being a Muslim Democratic Socialist in his early thirties running on a platform of taxing the rich to pour funding into public programs to support the working class in a city that’s been gradually swallowed by global finance, real estate interests, and Wall Street, that lukewarm feathery shaft of American Empire, represents something greater than New York: it represents a brand new trajectory for American politics, it represents a referendum held on the key precepts on how campaigns can be run, should be run, and on the consent-securing strategies of the Empire at large.
Every decade or so, as per the United States' antiquated electoral system, a pie-in-the-sky chance reveals itself that might just allow us to finally cast off the oligarchs determined to crush the normal, working people living in this country into mere liquid assets to be corralled, sheered for wool, and extracted from via an increasingly elaborate system of fees and rents.
Through Mamdani, though, the dream of liberating ourselves from the rich breathes another breath after having spent years murmuring quietly in the dark; here's another window revealing itself in the distance: a new blueprint, a new door to be opened. And it's not just Zohran but rather what it's he represents that's significant: his neighborly, strange progressive politics of empathy, utilizing social media in a way I've never imagined, signals the dawn of new sort of Democratic politics in America, pushing aside the bland, lazy "empty vessel" style of the Clintons and Obama. The margin of error has been eclipsed by an empathetic margin of effort. And Zohran's certainly been putting in that effort, a seemingly herculean amount of it, over the past six months.
Mamdani matters, even if you live outside the city: his campaign has resurrected an old-school sort of neighborly campaign brought into the social media age. He's showing that genuine empathy and curiosity in a candidate's constituents does, in fact, win elections. I wouldn't be surprised if this campaign becomes the new playbook. And it’s a playbook that can win. It’s a playbook that could potentially wrest control back from the oligarchs who’ve controlled our country since the McCarthyist purges of the 1950s. Mamdani's seemingly spent the last six months outside, on the streets of New York City, almost every single day embodying (or attempting, rather successfully I would say, to embody) the prototypical "man of the people" politician. The weekend before the election, he walked from the top to the bottom of Manhattan, from the Bronx to Staten island, shaking hands and hugging the people who gathered around him, dozens of people followed along in this makeshift parade, what could have merely been a campaign stunt became a celebration of the city he's hoping to run. He did all of this despite having received vile, racist assassination threats against him, his wife, and his team only a few days before.
His campaign videos, well-commented upon by this point, show well a natural charisma that's been more-or-less vacant from American politics for years; and while the charisma comes across as effortless, the polyglot nature of his campaign reads as anything but. He's learned these dozens of languages, by his reasoning, as a way to understand and maintain a curiosity about and a conversation with the cultures that make up the real New York underneath the extreme wealth of the financial markets. He's explicitly not running for those financial markets but for the people living underneath their shadows, and they don't happen to all speak English at home. For instance, he learned how to speak Bengali so he could speak to New York’s 100,000 Bengali speakers (0.01 of the population of the city). This wasn't necessary for the campaign. They did it anyway. With the rise of AI video "enhancements", this isn't even necessary for actors; he didn't need to do this. He did it anyways. The effort is remarkable (especially as someone who's struggled to learn spanish now for years). It's a novel approach to empathetic politics I've never seen before. What got Zohran past the margin of error in the polls predicting a neck-and-neck fight between him and Cuomo on Tuesday was an Empathetic Margin of Effort.
This margin of effort is important to remember here. To see an American politican actually try in the way Zohran has feels all-too rare. It's no secret that Mamdani's strengths also lie in his charisma and his video team.
Speaking of videos, the campaign put together one from the aforementioned walk across the city, full of surprised, star-struck Millennial and Gen-Z new yorkers — so often accused of being ambivalent to politics — and one sweaty man who runs out from a restaurant screaming "ZOHRAANN", but there's one frame in particular that's stuck in my head. It was a hug. Here it is below.
With his face away from the camera, the viewer can only see Mamdani's back; the cynic in me says he was hugging this man for the camera, for the campaign, but it's hard for me to shake the feeling that he wouldn't have done it otherwise. He wants to be mayor of the city; the first requirement for such a position ought to be being a good neighbor, right? To have love for the people of that city, right?
As Mamdani's star began to rise these past few months, he was oftentimes accused of being foolish and naïve when it comes to his abilities to accomplish his goals he's set out — rent freezes, free busses, free childcare, and the creation of public grocery stores in the food deserts around the city, and he wants to put a 2% tax on New Yorkers making over a million a year to fund these projects, something that he would have to fight Albany for, and to be fair to this critique, Albany's consistently proved very difficult to convince — but it's been a difficult case for his detractors to make that Mamdani's not fully himself when he expresses such passion and care as seen above. The line has mostly been shades of "he cares too much and is too inexperienced," which is probably more damning of the American political machine as a whole than it is of Mamdani's campaign specifically.
Besides the obvious islamaphobic fear-mongering done by the New York Post, Mamdani’s center-left detractors in reactionary Centrist outlets such the New York Times or The Atlantic have tried to spell out the claim (without explicitly endorsing) that while Andrew Cuomo is a complicated man, he knows how the work within the system unlike the dangerously optimistic Mamdani. But if a series of sexual assault scandals, real connections to Jeffery Epstein, and the burying of Covid-19 deaths makes Cuomo “complicated” but still worthy of office, how can these same publications claim any moral superiority to the Republicans? Wouldn’t Trump be “complicated” in a similar way? There wasn't much enthusiasm around Cuomo's candidacy anyways, and it shows in the results of Tuesday's primary. With the money pouring in from Cuomo's donors, for instance, his campaign has taken to hiring people to canvas for him for $25 an hour (some of whom are supposedly voting for Mamdani).
NYC is a unique case in all this. Eric Adam's current Mayoral administration has actively sold the city for parts since he was elected into office (Nate Silver once tweeted that he should be considered as the national face of the Democratic Party after Biden lol), often in astonishingly ridiculous fashion with frequent trips to Turkey, quotes like "I am real estate," and Cuomo's candidacy (also fairly unpopular) promises a return to the "austerity centrist democrat" that Adams's "wildcard centrist democrat" broke away from. Cuomo's not going to change, of course, but this promise is a return to a more quiet, behind-closed-doors dismantling of the city's public goods for real estate interests and global finance is much less scary to the wealthy of New York than Mamdani's complete aversion to the project and his claim to want to instead reinstate the public programs that have been stripped away. This dismantling of the city for the sake of financial and real estate interests has been ongoing for decades now. "Since Trump's successful comeback in 2024," writes Ed Kilgore for New York magazine's Intelligencer section, "we are definitely seeing the second coming of a breed of centrist Democrat politician who is interested in 'pushing off the left' almost to the exclusion of any other purpose." And there's Cuomo's campaign in a nutshell. But it seems, based on Mamdani's incredible rise to political stardom, that the left can (and will) push back.
And, as it turns out, pushing back against a centrism that has no more interest in empathetic policy than it does in correctly positioning itself squarely in the center of polling data isn't all that hard. They're as hollow as their policies are. A strong breeze could knock them over. And Mamdani is nothing if not a strong breeze. What is hard, though, is pushing against political and economic headwinds that have been blowing steadily one way for thirty years as they have in NYC.
As Ross Barkan points out in one of his recent Substack posts on Mamdani, no New York City mayoral candidate has won the mayor’s seat without the financial help of the city’s real estate interests. Even Bill De Blasio, considered the furthest left Mayor the city has ever had, received tremendous funding from their SuperPACS. Mamdani, if he wins the general (which is very likely considering NYC tends to always elect whoever's on the Democratic Party's ticket) will be the first Mayor to not run with their money and this has spun this election cycle into an existential crisis for the owners of a city which has, over the last thirty years, become a playground for real estate interests testing just how expensive they can make a city.
But an existential crisis for one political force is often caused by another force asserting itself. Everything is relative to the rest of the picture. As is seemingly constantly forgotten when New York city's local politics are discussed, the city isn’t only Wall Street; people have grown up, raised families, worked middle-class or working-class jobs for generation in the city. Mamdani is very clearly a chance for the people to push back if they're going to stop the city from being transformed fully into the East Coast's take on Dubai.
Since Mamdani's polling data began to gradually approach Cuomo's lead a couple weeks ago, a cast of familiar names from the sleazy world of the incredibly rich have begun throwing money everywhere in an attempt to stop Mamdani — from Bill Ackman to Michael Bloomberg to DoorDash (for some reason) — and it hasn’t put nearly as much of a dent in Mamdani's campaign as they would hope. Mamdani's primary upswell here isn't just a referendum on the Democratic party and its priorities, but also, more notably in context of the current genocide against the Palestinian people, a referendum on whether Antisemitism and criticisms of the Israeli government are synonymous. The answer, it seems, from a city with the second largest population of Jewish citizens on Earth, is no.
Like what happened to Corbyn in the UK, when his political career was more-or-less ended by his criticism of the Israeli government, Mamdani's criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians was used as a blunt-force cudgel against his reputation. This is hard to buy, though, based on his cross endorsement with Brad Lander, a jewish New Yorker, and it's hard to buy hearing Mamdani respond to Stephen Colbert's intense questioning of him on the subject on Monday night. The islamaphobia is also clearly very present. For example, on Tuesday, The Atlantic posted an article accusing Zohran of being a dangerous jihadist (without saying it explicitly) while using a picture in which he looks somewhat like Jafar from Aladdin — villain and middle eastern stereotype wrapped in one — a comparison which was pointed out all over twitter on Tuesday afternoon as deeply racist while the election was ongoing.
Beyond that, what does Zorhan's win mean for politics nationwide?
Well, first of all, it means that progressive candidates can actually win. But it means more than that. The shifting of political emphasis onto national federal politics has led to a decline in the local, and this isn’t anything newsworthy — I'm not the first person to make this point — but local politicians have since given into the new machines of citizens united and a lazy sort of populism. What zohran represents is a new way to run local campaigns on a national level, through effective and well done video clips and through letting the city speak for itself through campaign ads. His videos are also just fun. For instance, in one of his videos with 4.6 million views on Tiktok, filmed early in his campaign, Mamdani stands on a New York beach in January, says “I’m freezing!… Your rent,” and dives into the icy water fully clad in a suit. He sloshes out, shivering and talking about the policy in question.
Sure there's some chasing of virality in bits of these videos, but the virality-chasing is never the essential component of the videos. In the content his campaign makes, the policies and the authentic interactions with people in the community, those who make the community what it is, shines through the brightest. Following Zohran’s toolkit of well-done, authentic interaction with the people living in the district, showcasing the state they love, could progressive/socialist gubernatorial candidates win in “flyover” states, attracting a national audience through such a youtuber’s toolkit? / What we see in zohran is a positive consequence of the Millennial generation’s toolkit, grown into a potential political boon: a new avenue for affirmative and good-willed populism, something which the Bernie Sanders campaign stumbled, almost unknowingly, into in 2016 but now something which is tactfully understood by the candidate who’s running for office. Mamdani's good-willed politics could be read as a parody of a Mr. Rodgers style, "good neighbor" politics of the past, but wouldn't it make sense for a Positive Parody to be able to defeat the Negative Parody of, say, a Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis?
Zohran calls his campaign style as the “politics of no translation”. Here’s his description of what that means:
“It’s when you speak directly to the crises that people are facing, with no intermediaries in between. We need a politics that is direct, that speaks to people’s own lives. If I tell you that I’m going to freeze your rent, you know exactly what I mean.”
He understands perfectly well the political implications of social media in a way the austerity democrats, and the more belligerent democratic centrists (who are attempting to have their moment right now), don’t understand, namely that social media allows direct communication back and forth with voters as individuals instead of direction communication aimed towards entire blocs. Zohran's campaign is built on an idea that lecturing is outmoded for the current world, and that conversations are tremendously more productive. There's unlimited space to promote and define what a candidacy is, so why not speak honestly, authentically, and let the community surrounding respond and become an integral part of said campaign?
Almost certainly history will remember Mamdani’s campaign in a similar light to JFK’s upset over Nixon in 1960, when JFK spoke directly through the televisions nationwide to millions of voters, or Obama's sudden and rapid emergence in the 2008 primary. Certainly Obama and Mamdani have much in common with their sudden flights to the national spotlight. Both have evoked a searing hope for leftists. Obama understood 2000s internet but Zohran's campaign understands the current internet perfectly; Mamdani's campaign understands well that political campaigns ought to focus on the community surrounding the politician rather than the politician as its only subject.
The MAGA freakout over mamdani has grown since he became the frontrunner. They've been frustrated since the Trump II administration pushed them to the side. No longer are Alex Jones, Mike Lindell, or even Laura Loomer as significant as they were even last year. And Mamdani's political win here signals that the winds of popular sentiment in the United States are blowing even further away from them. Left-wing populism and left-wing materialist politics still has juice while MAGA loses political relevance. How embarrassing for them. They have nothing else. A part of the brilliance of the Mamdani campaign's media strategy is that he only lays out his policy proposals in well-edited and confident videos that will autoplay underneath MAGA types's retweets of the videos, declaring him a radical communist or jihadist is tough when the video autoplays and the person they're accusing is a cheerful, charming, very normal seeming person talking to the camera as if it's a personal friend.
Mamdani also happens to have a rap career, under the name Mr. Cardamom. This is important to understanding his political achievement here. No I'm serious.
The fact that he has a rap career shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who knows any millennial DSA members — I have yet to meet any who doesn’t hold an undying love for Run The Jewels in their hearts — but the way that such a hobby threads together with his political maneuvering is important. Mamdani’s incredibly successful run for Mayor so far has also been a consequence of the “yeah freestyle rapping is kind of fun actually” mindset held among inner-city Millennials. I can’t help but imagine that the instincts that come out during his debates, during his speeches, during his interactions in the street don't stem somewhat from a rapper’s instinct. To practice rapping is to practice thinking quickly and talking quickly, getting a point across, and avoiding getting trapped by verbal missteps. Every DSA branch nationwide needs to start hosting rap battles to figure out who should run for local offices.
What we’re seeing most of all through all this, though, is the millennial bloc coming into its own and actively casting off the baby boomers and gen-x austerity candidates who have been openly corrupt, openly vile, but holding on for dear life to theirs claims on public office based on how much they believe in nothing. This is a major political realignment. The headwinds have changed.
I’ve been cynical for so, so long. Ever since the first Bernie Sanders campaign was pushed out of the Democratic primary — I was only seventeen but well aware of the spark for the future Bernie had brought and I was well aware of how deftly it had been snuffed out for more of the same — I’ve been rather down on electoral politics as a whole.
Mamdani’s campaign makes me feel foolish for being so cynical for so long. No matter what happens in the primary, — and just to make clear, it’s very, very rare for a Republican canidate for Mayor to win in New York City — Mamdani’s campaign gave me reason to hope for the first time in many many years; his campaign has even given me reason to rethink my nihilism. Isn’t that worth something? Even if it fails, isn’t this fire worth relighting whenever possible? If ranked-choice voting works in New York, couldn't it work here in Chicago? Couldn't it work on a national level? Ranked choice voting allows for alternatives to emerge. We need alternatives. We need alternatives to all this we live underneath. We need alternatives to the wealthy.
Hope may be a salve, sure, but life’s too short not to feel something like a salve every once in a while. This past Sunday I went to a donation concert for legal fees for those harrased by ICE in Chicago. The concert was packed. The kids are still alright and those too old now to be considered kids anymore are still alright. The dream is still alive. We will see whether or not Albany completely crushes Mamdani and turns him into a lame duck Mayor. But maybe we can vote through that. All I'm saying is there’s a lot of work to do and it starts with us. We can all play a part.
To close this out, here’s a fascinating excerpt from the New Yorker in 2000, a profile of Mamdani’s mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, in which then 9-year-old Zohran comes up as if to inadvertently predict the future:
"Nonstop Mamdani”, indeed.
the html review (website)
I found this wonderful little project through Kristen Merrilees’s Phone Time Substack, which, I might add, is woefully undersubscribed to on this website (this is me telling you that you should check out her work). The HTML review was started in 2022 as a literary magazine designed for the web, to make use of the medium of the website properly instead of simply trying to use the internet to force the square peg of paper literary magazines into the round hole of the internet. Needless to say, the project’s bloomed into a very cool, groundbreaking project that subverts the parts of traditional poetry and fiction which don’t translate as well to the internet, developing a project that points shockingly to a poetry of the future. Pieces such as “Pure Information” and “I feel so much shame” grant an aesthetic navigation that works alongside the content to create a fascinating emotional effect on the reader, combining a new sort of “hyperlink literature” that pushes out from the blogosphere boundaries that I imagine when I think about “internet literature” as such, boundaries which fiction such as Honor Levy’s My First Book, for instance, occasionally falls into. "Spoilia", one of my favorite pieces from Issue 4 of the HTML Review, involves a lengthy text in which the text itself is obscured by great white blocks which the reader must pick up and move out of the way using their mouse — when reading I had to remove the blocks to read the quote “all objects are stubborn; being inert, they resist our attempts to ‘(in)form’ them.” — and once the story begins, the reader must fight these blocks, vaguely reminiscent of the way our attention and focus feels increasingly magnetized away from written words, to be able to read the text itself. The effect of such a struggle is vaguely haunting, as if the world is flooding with a blank abyss before I get a chance to understand it or see what it seeks to show me. The name “Spoilia” comes from the architecutral term “spolia”, using architectural components designed for one thing for another, different thing, and “to spoil”, according to the authors of the piece, “to ruin.” It’s a wonderful little experiment, and the HTML review is chock full of such experiments to be explored as such. Check it out if you have the time! It certainly beats scrolling idly on X/Twitter or Instagram.
this publication, the briffin glue huffer, is what i would describe as a product of a “three coffees no lunch” process. this is either a really great thing or a really terrible and annoying thing, depending mostly on how well you liked the above.
there’s no AI used in the creation of any of this, so if you like what you’ve read and want me to continue writing these well into the future, feel free to throw $5 my way and you’ll receive more of these words every week in your inbox, not to mention with a certain amount of these $5 subscriptions i can both convince my family that this online-sort-of writing is a real and valid career move and feel comfortable putting more time into these posts every week. it’s a win-win, i think.
a cure for individualism (aeon)
to write an online critique of the culture of individualism in the united states (and the western world, by extension) is to write a copy of a copy of a handful of tweets from 2020 —having been copied, in their turn, from a handful of tweets in 2016 — thrown into a blender and regurgitated. What else is there to say, really, when everything imaginable has been said? Almost every issue in the world today, both domestically and abroad, seems to have something (sometimes shadowy) to do with the politics of individualism as they’re held by the rural and suburban consumption classes of the United States and yet where’s the change? it’s not enough to critique, it seems, because there’s nothing actionable; but what on Earth is there to do about this? All of this stems from the UK as do many of the stodgy and outdated tenants of the modern world, namely from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and their theories on societies being, more-or-less, accumulations of individual actors with selfish desires. Thus came liberalism, the free market hypothesis, modern strains of centralized power, and most of the United States’ system; seeing as the founding fathers were reading Leviathan and John Locke’s writings, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. To counter the growing threat of global communism in the 20th century, the western, U.S.-adjacent side of the cold war had to define itself in opposition to whatever the USSR was cooking up in Russia and so the emphasis became the individual actor: Ayn Rand’s Objectivism and Reagan/Clinton type neoliberalism became the dominant strain. Back in the UK, Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society, that there was no use worrying about your neighbors when instead you ought to worry almost exclusively about your own well being. If we all do that, the logic goes, all ships must rise. What was the tradeoff? Consumer goods, of course. To become gradually less and less well off (with less and less of a social safety network) over the course of 40+ years felt less like a decline when consumer goods became cheaper at the same time. And there’s the tradeoff which brought us to this moment: as the people, we agree to less care and compassion from our government, less care from and to our neighbors in exchange for cheaper and cheaper toys, gadgets, gizmos, streaming services, videos, music, distractions, and prescribed painkillers, less of a “common good” so we can make more purchases to tell ourselves as an individual we must be doing pretty good if we can afford a PS5 or whatever it is we buy – yet we can’t seem to escape the “we”, and there’s the contradiction. This programming of the masses, this manufacturing of consent for capital’s exploitation and hegemony over the population of the world has spiraled out of control since the Pandemic in part, I think, because (1) a government-led lockdown “for the sake of your neighbors’ health” is such a contradiction in the terms of the neoliberal machine of selfish atomization which we’re individually beholden to, and (2) the internet of entertainment and distraction has given us so much meaningless bullshit that the tradeoff we had agreed to under neoliberalism of “more stuff = less social rights” (social rights being universal healthcare, guaranteed parental leave, housing for the homeless, etc.) goes completely haywire, becomes, by its own terms, “∞ stuff = 1/∞ social rights”, an equation that doesn’t rub me in at all a good way. This article’s alright, it presents a look at Confucianistic individualism that is more grounded in the collective but adheres to a “filial piety” towards the individual’s family line and family name which may or may not be another branding on a similar enough individualism that it could be also coopted by the powers of a globalized consumerist society. Even if it would be, I suppose, at least the net is a small bit wider. There might genuinely not be an answer to the question. I don't know. If you have any good reading recs on the topic please comment them below. If you comment The 48 Rules of Power, though, you're getting banned. Anyways, it seems like top-down governments of all political ranks don’t tend to lend themselves well to the problems of the individuals in their communities, and perhaps the only way is Anarchism. Genuinely. No government. Maybe this is a sign that I need to read more David Graeber.
and finally,
eric adams makes his favorite summer drink (x/twitter)
Enjoyed reading this. What's also interesting is that since Zohran can't run for president, it creates even more of a feeling that he'll be 200% committed to being mayor. With so many people having treated the NYC mayorship as an audition for something bigger, that's a nice change.
fuck yeahhhhh!!!!