Hope is an overused word in politics, which I tend to regard with suspicion, not only because I have spent a lifetime living with political disappointment, reversals and defeat, but because there are too many politicians and political movements that offer no real possibility of transforming the hopes they claim to offer into realisable outcomes.

In such cases, hope can be downright delusional - the political equivalent of a comforting bedtime story or a soothing balm on our unbearable present. Too often the left - because it tends to be the left that invokes the idea of hope into its political messaging - conflates its own aspirations with those of a wider population that doesn’t necessarily share them.

None of this can be said of Zohran Mamdani and the astounding movement that has brought him to power. This is one of those rare occasions when it becomes possible to appreciate the beauty of politics, and its ability to achieve spectacular outcomes that seem impossible. It’s also – and this is equally rare – when the young enter politics with fire and passion and find a politician who sees them, understands them, and shares their concerns, because he is one of them.

All this has been achieved despite the billions of dollars that have been poured into the coffers of Mamdani’s opponents. The death threats; the racial and Islamophobic slurs; the pathetic rantings in the Murdoch media about Marxism and communism and a possible mass exodus from New York; the sinister mutterings of Mangolini and his fascistic minions; the tepid and clearly reluctant support from Mamdani’s own party leadership - none of it worked.

Thanks for reading Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The serial sex abuser was comprehensively and gloriously beaten, and whatever happens next, this outcome is a something to savour. Finally, the left has learned how to speak to people outside its comfort zone and build wider voting coalitions, without renouncing certain core principles. In the spiritual homeland of capitalism and the big buck, it has elected a Muslim socialist who supports the Palestinian cause, who dances to Kendrick Lamar and Wu Tang Clan to New York City Hall, with an openly socialist agenda

To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there’s somethin’ going on right here, and even though it might not be exactly clear, it has opened up possibilities that were not available at the beginning of last week. For decades now, politicians have been powerless or complicit in maintaining a status quo built on a shrinking public sphere and unlimited acquisition of wealth, in which even the most incompetent and corrupt private institutions are ‘too big to fail’.

The main victims of this dynamic – and not only in New York – are the young. They must navigate their way through our already-existing dystopias, who must get used to a lifetime of debt, declining public services, ever-longer working lives, unaffordable houses and unaffordable rents, precarious labour. They must choose between octogenarian politicians or bloodless technocrats who promise only more ‘tough choices’ or tinker at the edges of a decaying society, while leaving them largely to fend for themselves.

In the US, a moribund Democratic Party establishment could not even summon up the urgency required to fight the gravest threat to the Republic since the Civil War, until it was too late. For two years, that same party leadership facilitated the massacre of Gaza, and largely stood by when students who protested it were detained and deported, or depicted as naïve, antisemitic or extremist.

And now a charismatic, skilled and engaging politician as upended this morbid consensus, and convinced voters who previously spurned politics that a different future is possible. If he succeeds, even in part, then 21st century politics may just stand a chance of getting out of the deadly trajectory that is dragging so many democracies to ruin.

Some will roll their eyes at this ‘leftwing populism’ as if it were another distraction from the supposedly serious politics of the centre. But Mamdani’s victory is a response to the collapse of the centre, represented by so many Democratic Party politicians who unforgivably paved the way for the horror of Trumpism and then went on to normalise it.

Mamdani is not promising the impossible. He is not offering utopia. He is seeking solutions to the social deformations caused by unbridled capitalism and de facto oligarchical rule that ought to be at the heart of any democratic socialist program. Throughout his remarkable campaign, he has demonstrated an ability to win people over, with a willingness to fight his opponents with the weapons that will defeat them.

He called out Andrew Cuomo’s sleazy record of sexual harassment and humiliated him in debate, because 1)unlike the Clintons or Chuck Schumer, say, he clearly believed that such behaviour made Cuomo unfit for office and 2) he knows that when you are fighting with politicians who are contemptible enough to suggest you might support a new 9/11, you do not owe them politeness or decorum.

Mamdani’s acceptance speech was a tour de force of political oratory: eloquent, defiant, brave, indignant, celebratory, compassionate and humane. An immigrant himself, he hailed the immigrants who have made New York City what it is. Quoting from Eugene Debs no less, he hailed the city’s workers, and beautifully and powerfully invoked the physicality of their labour:

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.

How long has it been since a politician spoke like this? Mamdani called some of these workers by name, and made it clear that his administration would fight for them. He talked about exploitation and division, affordability, high rents, and the cost of living

Mamdani’s working class is not the white working class dishonestly invoked by reactionary populists like Maurice Glassman or Matt Goodwin in the service of a (white) nationalist agenda. The immigrants he described are not the dog-eating criminal intruders targeted by Trump and Noem and their ICE hit squads - they are the men and women whose labour built New York and built America.

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. 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 this: this city is your city, and this democracy is yours too.

Once again, a message and a tone conspicuously absent in our desert of the real. Mamdani celebrated the multicultural and multiracial America where it was possible for someone like him to become mayor, and he also criticised that same country for its failings. He called out antisemitism and promised to fight it. He denounced the persecution of trans people and promised Trump that ‘if you come for one of us, you come through all of us.’

No wonder the ridiculous Trump minion Sean Hannity was in tears discussing the result on Fox News. No wonder MAGA commentators were melting down. They haven’t heard language like this for a long time, and they haven’t seen a movement like this for a long time. Both Steve Bannon and Trump have denounced the ‘anger’ of Mamdani’s ‘angry’ speech, like two nuns who stumbled into a brothel.

Subscribe now

The hypocrisy of these bloated moral voids is only matched by their brazen gall. Their entire movement relies on mobilising and weaponising white anger and hatred in order to target marginalised groups. This is what has been happening ever since Trump crawled out of his gilded swamp and proceeded to turn America into one. But when a member of one of those groups speaks defiantly and uncompromisingly of his solidarity with the people they have targeted, they claim to be offended by his tone.

As the world has always known, bullies are always like this.

So Mamdani’s victory – in addition to the other Democrat victories on Tuesday – is a boost for his party, even though his party leaders may not see it that way. But it is also a victory for progressive America, and a victory for progressive forces across the world. It shows that the left can do more than protest – it can actually win.

Of course, being in power is not the same as campaigning, and it remains to be seen whether Mamdani will be able to do what he has promised to do. His enemies will do everything they can to stop him from achieving anything at all. They will use every trick in the book and many that are not yet in the book, because this is who they are, and because they know that if this movement succeeds, even a little, then others will follow.

But whatever happens, right now, this is a time for celebration. And a time to feel hopeful. Because without movements like and moments like this, there would be no hope at all.

Share