A Grand Mamdani Coalition?

 IN THE RUN-UP to the 2009 General Election, many of us working on the campaign for the defeated side were quite irritated when just too many of the young professionals making a pitch for the promotional account invoked the experience of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. They seemed to feel that the “Yes We Can” slogan and the euphoria around the man who had successfully built a rainbow coalition that was marked by a touchy-feely euphoria could somehow be replicated in India. Only one of the good souls who were trying to replicate their American dream in the heat and dust of Bharat had the good sense to tell us bluntly that the Obama story would be a non-starter in an Indian election where both sides were led by octogenarians. He was, of course, making a premature pitch for Narendra Modi as the face of our campaign—a worthy suggestion that was outside both his and our pay grade.

I have been constantly reminded of this earlier experience witnessing the ecstatic reactions to the emphatic victory of 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election on November 4. Just as Obama wrote a new chapter in the social history of the US by becoming the first Black man to reach the White House, the ever-so-smooth son of our very own Mira Nair managed the seemingly impossible on several counts.

For many, his real achievement was in becoming mayor of New York City without downplaying his nominal religious identity as a Muslim. While that is of importance to those who either loath Muslims or dream of Muslim solidarity, I don’t think Mamdani promoted his Muslim-ness aggressively. At the same time, he refused to be defensive about his non-Christian background. While there is a significant Muslim vote in New York City that came his way because he was a co-religionist, his natural constituency was those who were moved by his aggressive anti- Zionism which in many ways is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Let us not forget that Mamdani was like a breath of fresh air in the murky world of City Hall politics. He was young, good looking, extremely smart and completely untainted in his personal life, unlike his main Democratic opponent. On top of that, he had a natural connect with voters—an attribute that was magnified by his very skilful social media campaign.

To my mind, what made Mamdani unique is that he was a self-professed socialist—that it was prefaced by the term democratic is quite incidental— in a country where left politics has traditionally been an anathema. There were those during the anti-Vietnam protests of the late-1960s who came precariously close to embracing the Marxist Left, but other distractions such as spiritualism, Black Power, Third World-ism and free sex prevailed over the rigidities of socialism. In the US atleast, Che Guevara became transformed into a pop symbol, adorning the walls at student accommodation in the campuses. Politically, the misplaced Democratic Party faith in Senator George McGovern (a more tepid version of Senator Bernie Sanders) gave President Richard Nixon one of history’s most emphatic election victories in 1972.

It is apparent that things have changed quite dramatically to facilitate the mainstreaming of someone who emerged from the radical fringes. First, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Marxism became a cause without a habitat. It soon found one in the campuses of the capitalist West, but particularly in the American universities that were generously endowed. There was always an undercurrent of dissent which the likes of William Buckley tried to weed out during the Cold War, but it would be worth a piece of serious research to find out how the penetration of academia by those who are, in effect, Marxist in their orientation happened. The students they influenced and who naturally gravitated to the big cities and inveigled themselves into media, publishing and, increasingly, the law, are now the faces that will be evident in the Mamdani administration.

Add to this the other causes that have been in search of worthwhile political umbrellas. They go by the generic description ‘Woke’ but actually cover everything from militant feminism, the different shades of the LGBTQ+ movement, the multiculturalists who dispute the dominant Judaeo-Christian identity of the US and, naturally, the fashionable champions of Palestinian terrorism. All these came together in a grand Mamdani coalition under the cover of ‘affordability’.

I await an intelligent, non-bigoted rightwing response to this complete political travesty in New York City.