Zohran Mamdani has introduced several changes to American politics—joining ideological maximalism to policy minimalism, crafting a winning political identity as a Muslim socialist, taking a stand on Palestine, listening to voters. One innovation has not received the attention it deserves: his pledge, 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 that socialism 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 to run the government as if it were a business or corporation or bragged 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, 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 onscreen by Cherry Jones in Cradle Will Rock. In 1939 Flanagan wrote that “the 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 in 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 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 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).
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