Zohran Mamdani and His (Our) Enemies
Well, the latest of these incessant polls concerning the Nov. 4 election for the mayoralty of New York are in, having arrived Thursday, Oct. 30, and if the story has changed it is only for the better. A new Emerson College survey puts Zohran Mamdani, front runner from the start, 25 percentage points ahead of Andrew Cuomo, his nearest challenger. This is a gain of 7 percentage points since the previous Emerson poll, conducted in September.
The other survey, run by Marist University, has Mamdani leading by 16 percentage points in a race against Cuomo and, yet farther back on the track, the beret-sporting Curtis Sliwa. If the latter drops and his voters migrate as expected, Cuomo stands to narrow Mamdani’s lead to 7 points. But a margin of this size looks good only against Mamdani’s gaping lead over many months. These polls were published, to finish the point, six days before the election, early voting having already begun. Good night and good luck, you have to say to the politically shopworn Cuomo, who chose to run as an independent once it was clear there was no point contesting Mamdani to head the Democratic ticket.
We all remember the shock when, nine Novembers ago, Donald Trump triumphed and the Clinton campaign had to send all the Champagne back to the liquor store. For those of a certain age, there is the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline the Chicago Tribune ran the morning after Harry Truman upset Thomas Dewey to be elected, 77 Novembers ago, America’s 33rd president. These things happen.
But I haven’t heard of anyone who does not expect Mamdani to be declared New York’s newest mayor come next week.
Democratic Socialist, “progressive” par excellence, conscientious Muslim, exclusively educated offspring of a scholar noted for his anticolonial, anti-imperialist writings (under whom I briefly studied decades ago), altogether an intellectual in a nation what don’t like them intellectuals: You would not think such a figure would do well on the hustings, especially amid the gritty cut-and-thrust of New York City politics. And it has indeed been a slog, at times not short of brutal, since this 34–year old state assemblyman serving a working-class district in Queens began his run for City Hall a year ago last month on Oct. 23, 2024.
Altogether properly, Mamdani’s essential platform rests on those issues any serious candidate owes it to voters to address. In his case these have to do in large part — no surprise here — with how New Yorkers might still afford to live in a city, theirs, whose character and survivability have been transformed for the worse by real estate, financial and corporate interests. In this respect the 2025 race for the mayor’s office comes to a confrontation. There are a lot of ways this election has never been about New York’s five boroughs alone, and this, the sharpening contradiction between capital and society you find all over the country, is one of them.
Free bus lines, city-run grocery stores, free childcare, an ambitious housing program, a $30 minimum wage by the end of the decade: These are the prominent planks in Mamdani’s platform, and they, a menu of “progressive” causes, account for much of his appeal. And this alone was enough to get the capitalist class out of their seats from the very start of Mamdani’s campaign.
But there were, also from the beginning, larger matters on Mamdani’s mind, mentioned often in his speeches and interviews. He is vigorously supportive of the Palestinian cause. Lately he has spoken forcefully against the Islamophobia still abroad among us. “Genocide” is a term he uses often and without hesitation. Early on he said that, when he made it to City Hall, New York would arrest Bibi Netanyahu were the Israeli prime minister to set foot inside the city limits. Mamdani’s reasoning is significant on this last question. “This is a city that believes in international law,” he said while the U.N. General Assembly was in session last August. There is a largeness in this we ought not miss.
This side of Mamdani also drew voters to his side, especially but not only young ones. Max Blumenthal put it this way in an interesting interview with Nima Alkhorshid’s Dialogue Works program the other day: “New York is a magnet for young people who see Palestine as the moral test of our time. You have this new class, along with many native New Yorkers, who are rejecting the Zionist politics of the past, which have predominated in New York for decades.”
Mamdani’s mildly social democratic plans for the city and his position on what a lot of us consider, but precisely, the moral test of our time have got him two things. He has earned a ferociously loyal following, with campaign volunteers numbering in the tens of thousands, that has used social media and ordinary doorstepping to nickel-plate his lead. And he has precipitated what I count the most shamelessly debased smear campaign in New York politics in my (somewhat lengthy) lifetime.
Raw racism, Red-baiting — believe it, President Trump calls Mamdani a communist and says he should be deported — are by now common fare among Mamdani’s evidently desperate adversaries. Yet more so is the egregiously Islamophobic propaganda — offensive and risible in roughly equal measure but also (see the above numbers) hopelessly ineffective. American Zionists, Israeli Zionists, American–Israeli Zionists and Zionist symps of all sorts have been especially panicked, given New York has more Jews than any other city in the world and as such serves as the epicenter of the Zionist presence in the United States (unless we count AIPAC’s offices in Washington).
There are two patterns here worth noting.
One, and as others have remarked, the Zionist lobbies appear to have given up urging the world to like Israel and so have turned four-square to urging the world to hate Muslims. The Islamophobic campaign against Mamdani — more vicious, I would say, than anything we saw after the 9.11 attacks — reflects this.
Two, as the election day draws near, the freak-out in that dreadful nexus of Zionist fanatics and capitalist greedheads has reached a point of near-incoherence — Mamdani will impose Sharia law on New York; Mamdani would welcome another 9/11 attack; the antisemitic Mamdani’s victory will imperil Jews everywhere: It is all out there. The New York Post is a cesspit of this stuff. Its headline slang for Mamdani, true to right-wing tabloid style, are “Zo” and “Mam.” Better get used to it.
The taker of the cake for my money is an AI–generated video the Cuomo campaign put out Oct. 22, featuring a collection of the crudest imaginable racist caricatures labeled “criminals for Zohran Mamdani” — a drug dealer, a black shoplifter in a keffiyeh, a pimp, and so on — all minorities or underclass white “deplorables,” of course, all delighted that Mamdani will be their mayor. Cuomo’s people quickly deleted the video, but it’s the thought that counts, as they say. It seems to have been captured numerous times and continues to circulate. So it should: This guy is unadulterated gutter grime; Cuomo’s father, the mostly honorable Mario, must be spinning.
But never mind my money. A Fortune magazine article dated Oct. 28 listed 26 billionaires who have sunk more than $22 million into the pot to bring Mamdani down. A few of the names and numbers: Michael Bloomberg, $8.3 million; the Lauder family, $2.6 million; Bill Ackman, $1.75 million, and so on. Why, you have to wonder, do these people drop this kind of dough on a cause that has virtually no hope of success? (And I can live without my “virtually” if you insist.)
■
I see various explanations.
Straight off the top, Mamdani’s social programs threaten the long-entrenched control of capital — finance capital, industrial capital, technological capital — over New York politics. Beyond this things get more political. Mamdani is in no wise an antisemite of any kind, not remotely, but to have a bright, articulate Muslim as mayor of America’s biggest Jewish city, and especially with Mamdani’s views on Palestine and the Israeli terror regime, would further weaken the Zionists’ influence in American public life. Mamdani has already exposed the shocking relationship between the NYPD and the Israeli military, the former taking training and tactics from the latter, as Max Blumenthal outlined in the interview noted earlier.
The Bloombergs and Ackmans among us, let us not forget, are not very good at accepting they cannot get done whatever they want to get done by means of their wealth. And they, the billionaire class, are yet further from accepting they cannot control a political process for which they have little to no respect, and, so, think nothing of subverting when it suits them to do so.
Mamdani, to draw a line under this, represents a generational change in American politics, just as, say, Graham Platner, the out-of-the-box oysterman running for a Senate seat, does in Maine. And the power elites who have long controlled the United States demonstrate repeatedly — in these two cases and various others — they have no intention of surrendering to any reconstitution of the American polity in the name of anything resembling authentic democracy.
■
I do not see that the forces lined up against Mamdani will succeed in sinking his ship before election day. But his slog will not end when he takes City Hall, assuming (safely) he does. No, the wars he has so far waged effectively and with dignity will in all likelihood grow more intense and dirtier. Mamdani already moves around with a large security detail; we now read that Muslim New Yorkers are a mix of pleased and fearful at the prospect of his victory.
It is more or less certain Mamdani’s major social initiatives will meet resistance — political, administrative, financial — such that he may fail to implement any of them. It is reasonable to speculate, reading into the record in various other cases, that the New York public will be treated to all manner of staged antisemitic incidents. Let us not forget the infamous Cointelpro operations of the 1960s and early 1970s, or the FBI’s too-numerous-to-count provocations over many more years. I do not like the thought that this man of integrity may be subverted in any such way. It will speak very badly of America’s capacity for the kind of change its own people and the rest of the world desperately need to see.
As widely reported, Mamdani has already begun to step back from some of the positions he earlier stated with fresh vigor. He has appeared to duck lately when asked whether he still plans to arrest Netanyahu should Bibi come to New York. He states he will have Zionists in his administration (presumably on the basis of merit, not identity) and reportedly plans to keep Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner. Tisch comes from a prominent Jewish family, stridently pro–Israel, that is on the list of 26 billionaires spending big to defeat Mamdani. The Tisches have put $1.2 million toward the cause.
OK, Mamdani hasn’t voted for arms to Israel as have “progressives” such as the odious Alexandria Ocazio–Cortez, and one cannot imagine he would were he in a similar position. But the instances of rhetorical retrenchment raise good questions. Where is this man headed? What’s the trajectory after Nov. 4? Mamdani is the candidate of unity, Cuomo — to put this mildly — the candidate of division. Does unity extend only to one’s kind? Is Mamdani supposed to be in the business of dehumanizing his others as the Zionists dehumanize theirs — “becoming his enemy in the instant he preaches,” to bend the famous Dylan lyric?
What makes this election especially interesting to me, my years in Manhattan long over, are the still-larger questions a runaway victory for Mamdani would raise. How much can any rising political figure get done, however bright the flame within, in a bourgeois democracy as corrupted as ours? There are the billionaires free to dump money into elections, the myriad lobbies — banks, property developers et al. — and then the Zionist lobbies, these last having grown into a grotesque goiter on our body politic. If the Zionists cannot buy our politicians they destroy them. You watch Mamdani and wonder whether “futility” will not prove your missing word.
My mind wanders to old Emma Goldman as I await the Nov. 4 results: “If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal.” And I wish it did not go there.
https://www.unz.com/plawrence/zohran-mamdani-and-his-our-enemies