This book appeared in September. How the world around Mamdani has changed since then! This book lays out how it all happened, who was Zohran Mamdani, how he became an activist, how he was drawn to Bernie Sanders and DSA, how Zohran became Zohran...
Run Zohran Run! - Inside Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign to Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor, O/R Books
The subtitle reads, “Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Sensational Campaign To Become New York City’s First Democratic Socialist Mayor.” The book also anticipated the shift in the race with the sudden withdrawal of the incumbent. The Establishment sought, of course, to make the race about “socialism,” while Mamdani’s insistence upon affordability and inclusion kept his campaign rolling. As the New York Times recorded, young people in particular found that getting involved, reaching out, gave them a world of new friends and comrades.
Let’s start somewhere else, with a bit of background. Author Theodore Hamm is the Chair of Journalism in Clinton Hill, home to Brooklyn’s own St. Joseph University. More to the point, he wrote Bernie’s Brooklyn: How Growing Up in New York City Shaped Bernie Sanders. Hamm knows his (Greater) New York and the world of the Left, within and beyond.
Hamm is a convincingly clear writer, with a keen sense of history. Back in 2019, as he recalls, Biden debated Bernie, and MSNBC host Chris Matthews followed with a warning that under President Bernie, “executions in Central Park” would probably follow. Months later, also after lots of Democratic Party resistance including many millions of dollars, Bernie’s second presidential campaign ended in disappointment. But this is far from the whole story. In Greater New York, a dozen candidates for state and local offices backed by Democratic Socialists of America won or made strong showings. Something had already happened.Not that Opinion Leaders would (much) care to notice. The current Mamdani Campaign met initially with derision and raw hatred. Expectably, the New York Post called the promise of free buses “something out of the Politburo,” while Andrew Cuomo warned ominously that his beloved Democratic Party was now in mortal danger. The Times, looking down its collective nose, warned that any (democratic) socialist, even this very appealing one, “often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance.” (All quotes, p.32) How could voters be so foolish as to put him into office?
Even before the first Bernie Sanders campaign, Nation journalist John Nichols published a remarkable book, The ’S’ Word: the History of an American Tradition…Socialism (2012,) to remind readers of all the social improvements in American life actually proposed by the Left, with their origins conveniently forgotten. Now a popular and avowed socialist has made a claim on the legacy. What Hamm calls the “twin pillars” of the Manhattan elite’s worldview, “capitalism is sacrosanct, and Israel must never be criticized,” (p.34) have been badly shaken. Not shattered, mind you, but shaken.Many readers will be familiar with as well as sympathetic to large parts of the Mamdani biography laid out here, including his days in Bronx Science, tutored by future Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan. New to me was the rising effects of Islamophobia in Greater New York during Mamdani’s teen years, including his being detained by security agents at JFK after a family trip to Uganda, pressed whether he had attended a terrorist (!) training camp. Turned down by Columbia after high school graduation, he traveled to Bowdoin College, a liberal encampment, where studied Fanon, launched a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and became a bit of a rapper. Going pro as a rapper, in Kampala shortly after graduation, Mamdani had already become as multilingual as no Manhattan mayor since La Guardia, who famously read the Sunday Funnies over the radio but not in musical tones.
So much of the rest of the Young Person Story becomes complicated, it may be best to focus on the Socialist Conversion. The 2019 election campaign of Khader El-Yateem, a Lutheran minister seeking to represent Bay Ridge, ended in defeat, but it gave activist-supporter Zohran an inspiration. He returned to run the senate campaign by progressive journalist Ross Barkan, a Jewish critic of Israeli misbehavior.
These details and others, fascinating for close reading, are already getting too much, so let’s jump ahead to Mamdani’s 2020 campaign against a state assembly incumbent in Astoria, Northwest Queens. DSA had already made inroads here, and Zohran had been a volunteer in a hotly-contested race for Queens District Attorney. Tiffany Caban, a young public defender, appealed strongly to the public school teachers and employees of nonprofits who had already aligned themselves with DSA. She lost, very narrowly. But Mamdani’s activism and his avowed commitments drew real attention in progressive circles.
Astoria had changed dramatically since the presence of German-American immigrant socialists, likely craft workers, reported during the 1870s-90s. But somehow, it had retained or renewed some of the socialistic spirit. Zohran followed the advice of those who urged him to challenge the incumbent, whose Greek heritage counted less and less with demographic shifts. Besides, incumbent Aravella Simotas had supported machine candidate Joe Crowley against AOC in 2018.
Old fashioned Dems could not comprehend why this young guy signaled his Indian-Ugandan heritage. Sporting his African middle name and wearing Kurtas, a South Asian choice of pants wear, he came on proudly as a rapper, and in his posters, added something to the DSA red rose with a depiction of roti. He won by less than 500 votes, but he was on his way. He had the courage to lead a rally across the street from Chuck Schumer’s apartment near the Grand Army Plaza and proclaim, as a proud member of Jewish Voice for Peace, that “in the anti-Zionism I believe in, there is NO ROOM for antisemitism.” (p.53).
Fast forward to October 2023, and the certainty of the Right, City Journal to New York Post, that they had found the club to beat the Left into submission. Far from it. As Eric Adams suggested that DSA members were wearing swastikas, Zohran, fellow DSA elected and supporters, organized and marched for peace. As Hamm says, by this time, Zohran was “battle-tested.” (p.60)
A longer essay would be required to handle the story of Zohran’s attacks on Adams’ so-called Rental Control Board actually giving landlords gift after gift. While the Democratic Party went on insisting, through the 2024 campaign, that the US economy was strong, Zohran pointed to the widespread poverty of New Yorkers. On the day he entered the race for mayor, he called for drastically different urban polities. Put simply: Freeze the rent, make buses free and fast, and provide free childcare. This became the campaign mantra spread by thousands or tens of thousands of his supporters, many of them already socialists or becoming members of DSA.
We have only reached the half-way point in the book, although much of the rest is the sort of Inside Baseball for campaign-watchers and can be summarized, I hope. On the one hand, the billionaires and their lackeys turned on the steam, charging that Mamdani’s proposals would cost far too much money, and that any attempt to control crime with social measures rather than the hard hand of the law was soft-on-crime.
One striking response by Mamdani was to point to the surveillance and persecution of Muslims. Suddenly, social media viewers could see a hundred minute video of Mamdani walking through the streets of Queens in a thigh-length, white Asian shirt and a Palestinians scarf. He was also running….in the New York Marathon (in a 48,000th place finish, not quite winning but outstanding for a politician). He gathered supporters repelled at Adams’ wooing of Trump, and at the anti-Palestinian rhetoric that constantly hinted at Islamophobia, reinforced by the local Hindu Right. He was unafraid to campaign against “halalflation,” that is, for the home folks who loved him more and more, as they got to know him.
Trump’s increasing threats against New Yorkers (and the unwillingness of the mayor to respond) actually helped his followers mobilize nonwhite and Spanish-speaking communities. Finally, someone was speaking for them. A review twice this length would be required to tease out, for instance, his campaign’s links to the group “Desis Rise Up & Moving,” employing a Sanskrit term for an immigrant social movement. Or his attendance at the Durga Pula festival in Ridgewood, Queens, or at Sikh Day in Manhattan. He aided progressive politicians attacked by Israeli hawks, and joined the throng of activists in Chinatown, Brooklyn.
And so on. After the primary, he could boast that having 500 trained leaders and their having knocked on 1.6 million doors. The stories go on and on, so rich and so interesting the readers will need to plumb the depths…and probably enjoy the trip. They will also note the anti-Mamdani sentiment, embedded among the apartment kings and the New York Post, encompassing Netanyahu’s minions and part but not all of the Democratic machine. When the historically progressive (for a long time socialist) Jewish Forward came out for him, insisting the 20% of Jews in New York supported Mamdani, Post editorialists roiled. The Mayor called him a “snake-oil salesman for socialism.” (131)
The book’s last section could be described as a guide for socialists today, across the country and especially in urban areas where demography is changing fast and new generations are coming of age. His campaign showed by example how to organize and how to fight the hate campaigns that inevitably came back to the charge of anti-Semitism. Peter Beinart’s observation, after the victorious primary, was that very large numbers of New Yorkers had become, by any measure, pro-Palestinian. Jewish liberals over 35 who inclined toward Brad Lander, nevertheless made Mamdani their second choice. Even the most drastic and choreographed public attacks against him fell flat.
The anti-Mamdani assaults increasingly looked, by primary election day and in the months after, punch drunk from too many lies. (“Remember, he needs money from me, as President, to fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises. He won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him.…President DJT.”) Notwithstanding Adams’ withdrawal, notwithstanding everything else thrown at him, Mamdani won and won big.
But hold on for a moment. Neither Mamdani himself nor his followers have claimed that his campaign offers a model for the fractured and badly weakened Democratic Party to rebuild itself nationally and sweep elections across the country. And yet the implication of a dynamic youngster (same generation as AOC), exciting even the younger voters who are the most disillusioned with the Dems, reaching ethnic/racial minorities seemingly enticed by Trump, will not be welcomed by all.
A New York Times Op-Ed by political-intellectual historian Timothy Shenk points to a different model closer to the “sagebrush rebellions” that have from time to time promised a leftish alternative in the hinterlands, most notably (although he does not say so) Fred Harris of Oklahoma, eight year Senator who sought the Democratic nomination in 1976 and died in 2024. Dan Osborne, a fifty year old military vet and avowed populist, running for the Senate in Nebraska as an Independent, seems to have reclaimed the mantle. He lost to the same opponent by only seven points last time around and easily convinces supporters that he will make it in 2026.
Osborne is not anybody’s model Democrat. He deeply mistrusts the Chinese and “the swamp” of bureaucracy in Washington. In a bit of bravado, he once offered to help Trump build a wall against illegal migration from the South. He appears nowhere as leftwing as Fred Harris, but these are not the 1960s-70s. Osborne’s attacks on the takeover of the Republican Party by big business and their successful efforts to bar desperately needed benefits to the working poor among other issues epitomize his outreach to ordinary Republican voters. Democratic candidates echoing his views in Red State may present the best hope of overturning the current rush to authoritarianism. To those who complain of his negative attitudes toward today’s Democrats: Bernie Sanders, after all, is also an Independent.
Shenk does not claim to disprove anything about the appeal of Mamdani, and that’s a good thing. The Osborne model (if we may) is its own creature. We have a very different model in the Mamdani campaign, now grandly successful. Let a thousand flowering plants blossom. Progressive gardeners, get to work!
