On the Recent Election of Zohran Mamdani as the Mayor of New York City

The recent election of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City caused mixed and reactions from the public. The centre-left-leaning liberals show great enthusiasm and anticipation for what they feel to be a significant social change in the making, in the very heart of American capitalism, while the more conservative centre-right factions express their discontent and disappointment for the outcome. In my opinion, this result is really what we needed in the polarized world of politics today- the fact that it happened in the United States rises its significance for the western world.

 In the Left-Right debate, on one hand, it can be noticed that the Left reduced itself to the academic environment, to ideas and desiderates argued for, but never really implemented in policy decisions. This is not only the case for the United States, but for Europe too. On the other hand, the American Right, with no academic back-up, excelled in gaining power and implementing policies. While the Left with its reasonable arguments remained detached from the actual public life, failing to attract the very people which should vote for them- the average working-class Americans, the Right with its raw and straightforward rhetoric managed to focus the anger of the population, with causes that could make the subject of a whole thesis, towards the “elites”, the system in power (what Curtis Yarvin designates as the “Cathedral”), towards the Left, which never really set foot in power in the first place ( here I am referring to the economic Left, which never got to have legislative power; most Democrats are centre to centre-right on the European scale on economic issues). The real economic Left, which tries to counter neoliberalism and the hegemony of free markets, has been mostly unrepresented in the United States since the Reagan Revolution. Zohran Mamdani is not a socialist in the European sense, but clearly more left than most Democrats. The fact that now there is someone with openly and self-assumed economically left-winged views in a place of authority opens up a new space of analysis and debate, unprecedented in recent memory.

The figure of Donald Trump is one of the reasons the MAGA movement achieved so much popularity. Every successful ideology needs a personification, a human “face” that targets your feelings. One of the reasons the Left remained limited only to scholarly debates is the very fact that it did not have a “face”- Who should people think about when they hear “Left” ? With nobody to be represented by, the Left was helpless from attacks by the MAGA representatives and so easy to be undermined. Now, with Zohran Mamdani, the Left received a “face”. With these two figures- Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump, the confrontation between the Left and the Right has come to more equal grounds. There is a real chance to see if Mamdani’s policies can deliver and more importantly whether they can create a social movement that could in the long-run change the political mindset of working-class Americans towards a left-shift. What is going on now is a natural political experiment in progress.

 With the addition of Zohran Mamdani to the American political life, there is the chance of witnessing a race between the Left and the Right, which the American society has not been part of for a long time. With plans similar to those of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Mamdani is an “alien” even for the Democratic Party. The Left-Right debate goes beyond the Democratic and Republican parties, it is a battle that transcends the traditional divisions laid down by the 2-party system. It is an ideological battle with the purpose of winning people’s trust on one side and can become a matter beyond conventional elections, the race is systemic and can set a trend which extends beyond the geographical borders of the United States.