Red Menace on the Hudson?

Zohran Mamdani is not the revolutionary New York needs but the symptom of its political exhaustion.

When New York’s Democratic voters handed Zohran Mamdani a victory over Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary, they sent the city (and perhaps, the globe) into a convulsion of polarised delirium from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

The son of acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan political theorist Mahmood Mamdani (author of ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim’), both known for their unflinching ideological commitments, Zohran’s ‘radicalism’ seems less a political awakening than a family heirloom. If his father’s academic work has long critiqued the Janus-facedness of Western liberalism and his mother’s cinema has flirted with postcolonial romanticism, their progeny now seeks to turn the five boroughs into a laboratory for leftist utopia.

Mamdani’s platform has been a cocktail of charisma, radical economics and anti-establishment theatrics. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist, he has built his campaign on calls to defund the police, freeze rents, nationalise grocery stores and offer free public buses. His critics claim his utopian housing plan alone would cost $100 billion - just shy of the entire city budget. But this pamphleteering has clearly worked.

The response from the American right has been expectedly febrile. President Donald Trump, with characteristic subtlety, dubbed him a “100% Communist Lunatic.” Laura Loomer, the far-right’s resident agent provocateur, declared that Mamdani’s victory could “lead to another 9/11.” Charlie Kirk called him a “Muslim Socialist” in the same breath as he recalled the terrorist attacks of 2001. Others called him a terrorist sympathiser and demanded Jewish New Yorkers flee the city en masse, given Mamdani’s shrill advocacy for Palestinian rights.

Mamdani’s admirers hail his idealism. They see him as a bold truth-to-power teller, who has been unfairly maligned as an extreme fundamentalist by the frothing fringes of the MAGA right. Perhaps. Yet, there is a fine line between boldness and belligerence that Mamdani crosses with ease. His refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” – a phrase that emerged in radical pro-Palestinian activist circles in the early 2000s, particularly after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, has been censured not as some edgy progressive posturing but as a moral abomination.

The phrase has long been a rallying cry for anti-Semitic violence, deployed with glee by terrorists and their apologists. Despite being asked repeatedly to distance himself from it, Mamdani has done nothing of the sort till date, though there are some in New York’s Jewish circles who are hopeful he will soften his extremist views. While his rhetoric about Israel - calling it an apartheid state - has obviously alarmed Jewish New Yorkers, the feverish MAGA response, too, does more to polarise and inflame than to persuade.

New York has a tradition of absorbing noisy outsiders and translating their fury into policy marginalia. But Mamdani’s victory marks the mainstreaming of a politics that disdains institutions, derides capitalism and is conspicuously selective in its moral outrage. His detractors feel that his contempt for the NYPD, his economic illiteracy and his allergy to moderation all make him an unfit steward for a city that relies on pragmatism and pluralism to function.

Yet part of what makes Mamdani’s success so perplexing is the sheer weakness of the opposition. Andrew Cuomo, who once bestrode Albany like a colossus, was brought low by scandal and tone-deafness. His campaign against Mamdani reeked of entitlement and nostalgia. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, now running as an independent is embattled and uninspiring. Republican Curtis Sliwa, a beret-wearing relic from the city’s tabloid era, offers little more than theatricality. In such a vacuum, Mamdani’s polished radicalism, dangerously naïve or politically shrewd (take your pick), resembles something akin to clarity.

The larger problem is not that Mamdani is too far left or that his critics are too far right. It is that both sides appear committed to turning New York into a caricature - either as a socialist haven or as a cautionary tale of Islamist takeover. Both are corrosive.

It also speaks to a shift within New York’s Democratic base, a drift from pragmatic governance to ideological performance art.

In November, voters will have the chance to sober up and choose governance over grandstanding. Mamdani is not the revolutionary the city needs but the symptom of its political exhaustion. But unless the centre can reassert itself, and unless New Yorkers can resist the pull of ideological theatre, the city may well get the chaos it now seems to crave.