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DEMOCRATIC EXCELLENCE  
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Corey Robin
December 31, 2025
The New York Review of Books
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_ Among Zohran Mamdani’s rhetorical innovations has been his
declaration of war on mediocrity. _

Impression of the New York World’s Fair (mural study,
Communications Building, World’s Fair, Flushing, New York), 1938.,
Illustration by Stuart Davis (Smithsonian American Art
Museum/Wikimedia Commons).

 

Zohran Mamdani has introduced several changes to American
politics—joining ideological maximalism to policy minimalism
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winning political identity as a Muslim socialist, taking a stand on
Palestine, listening to voters
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received the attention it deserves: his pledge
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on election night, to “leave mediocrity in our past” and make
“excellence…the expectation across government.”

Since the French Revolution, professions of excellence and
proscriptions of mediocrity have been mostly the preserve of the
right. “To obey a real superior,” declared the English
conservative (and uncle of Virginia Woolf) James Fitzjames Stephen, is
“a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great
and lasting.” True to form, Mamdani’s conservative opponents have
warned
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that
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socialism
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will send the city slouching toward shabbiness.

Since the 1970s, Democrats have largely ceded this rhetorical ground
to the right. Instead of offering an alternative vision of excellence
or mounting a robust case for different values, they have adopted the
private sector as the gold standard of performance. Like Republicans,
they have promised
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run the government as if it were a business or corporation or bragged
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that they already have.

Mamdani is not the first Democrat to want to toss aside that playbook.
He is the first to act as if it’s already been trashed. As he made
clear on election night and in the composition of his transitional
committees, his perspective is populated by workers, commuters,
tenants, organizers, civil servants, and elected leaders. They are the
people who get things done. All capitalism does is build oligarchy and
crap. The lords of enshittification shouldn’t set the standard of
society. Politics and government must supply the agents and the
actions, the expectations and criteria for the excellence that Mamdani
promises.

Leftists may feel discomfited by, ill-equipped for, this shift in
rhetoric and values. So accustomed are we to standing with victims
that we have forgotten what emancipated and empowered people are
capable of. But there is much in our cupboard to draw from.
Mamdani’s speechwriters already have. When Mamdani declares, “This
new age will be one of relentless improvement,” he echoes Franklin
Roosevelt’s claim
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amid the desolation of the Depression, that “the country demands
bold, persistent experimentation.” When Mamdani says that “our
greatness will be anything but abstract,” he summons the spirit of
Hallie Flanagan, head of the Federal Theatre Project, who was
commemorated [[link removed]]
onscreen by Cherry Jones in _Cradle Will Rock_. In 1939 Flanagan wrote
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bare statistics of Federal Theatre are in themselves a drama: some
nine thousand theater workers employed in forty theaters in twenty
states, playing within three years before audiences totaling
twenty-five million.” Like Mamdani, she measured epic action by the
numbers—the number of people the state helped to see a production of
Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Shaw, on a boat in a lagoon, atop a flatbed
truck, or outside a steel mill in Indiana.

If the New Deal is too tame a reference, the left need look no further
than Marx. Marx and the socialist movement often clashed over whether
to seek a return to the lost world of artisans and small farmers. Marx
thought not. Return was impractical and undesirable. Modern production
techniques and large-scale cooperation among workers created the
possibility for an excellence that previous generations could only
dream of. To “perpetuate” older modes of production, he wrote
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_Capital_, quoting a French economist, would be “to decree universal
mediocrity.”

In a footnote Marx put a finer, Mamdani-like point on it. Where modern
economists see the division of labor as contributing to productivity
and abundance, Marx saw it the way ancient writers did: as improving
the quality of goods and services. Citing Xenophon, he pointed to the
division of labor in big cities and the bustling court of Persia,
where the “food is the most delicious one can find anywhere.”

It’s no accident, as I wrote
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after the election last month, that Mamdani has made the food of
immigrant restaurants the centerpiece of his vision. He understands
that the division of labor among immigrant workers doesn’t bring
greater productivity. It brings greater variety, making for not one
universal excellence but many excellences—democratic excellence.
There’s a lesson there not just about immigrants but about how to
argue for progressive values, not just in New York City but across the
country.

 

_Corey Robin_ [[link removed]]_ is Distinguished
Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY
Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political
Idea, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald
Trump, and, most recently, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. (December
2025)._

 

_The New York Review was launched during the New York City newspaper
strike of 1963, when the magazine’s founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, alongside Jason Epstein, Robert Lowell, and
Elizabeth Hardwick, decided to start a new kind of publication—one
in which the most interesting, lively, and qualified minds of the time
could write about current books and issues in depth. _

_For more than sixty years The New York Review has been guided by
its founding philosophy that criticism is urgent and indispensable. It
is the journal where Mary McCarthy __reported on the Vietnam War from
Saigon_
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Hannah Arendt wrote her __“Reflections on Violence”_
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Noam Chomsky wrote about __the responsibility of intellectuals_
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Susan Sontag __challenged the claims of modern photography_
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Baldwin __penned a letter to Angela Davis_
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Jean-Paul Sartre __talked about the loss of his sight_
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and Elizabeth Hardwick __eulogized Martin Luther King_
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Karl Marx
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* New Deal
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* food diversity
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* productivity
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