Empire State Of Mind

Why Mamdani’s win is bigger than the Big Apple

When Zohran Mamdani took the stage for his victory speech in the New York Mayoral election, politics finally looked like the 21st century. Not simply because of his appearance — at 34, the youngest Mayor in more than a century, a charismatic Muslim communicator — but because he represented a powerful undercurrent that has been surging since this new age dawned.

The statistics of Mamdani’s success ram home that this was a pivotal moment. A turnout of more than two million voters, the largest number in 56 years — a time when the counterculture was still fighting to defeat the repression of the twentieth century. A million-plus votes for Mamdani, more than the combined vote for his rivals. 80% of NYC women under 30 voting for him.

This was the release of years of building pressure.

People invested in politics like to see it as a continuum. They study elections from a hundred years ago and talk about pendulums swinging back and forth. Things carry on as they always have, with minor variations, because history has told us that is so.

They forget that politics in itself is meaningless. It’s simply the part we see of people’s lives, hearts, spirits. And in times of revolution it can be thrown off in an instant.

And we are in a revolution, a new industrial one. The technological age that dawned for most people at the turn of the millennia has disrupted everything. It’s broken traditional business models, killed longstanding companies, split families, smashed the social fabric, convulsed dating and romance, home owning, retirement, friendship, entertainment.

It’s hard to get the scale of it where you’re drifting along on the river of change. But people feel it deep in their bones.

Everything has changed and the system that was inherited from the last century just isn’t working for them any more. It’s dying on its feet and in the process spawning a few very big winners and a vast multitude of losers. People have moved beyond disenchantment to anger.

It’s not just an American thing, or a Western European thing. You can see it in the Gen Z revolt that has been sweeping across Asia and Africa, upending governments in places as diverse as Nepal and Madagascar and causing chaos in Tanzania.

Some commentators caught up in their little world have been quick to say today that what happens in a progressive city like New York has no bearing on how to deal with the Reform voter in Clacton or the MAGA supporter in the corn belt. They’re wrong.

Many people say they can’t understand why voters sign up for an appalling bigoted failure like Trump or a snake-oil salesman like Farage. The mistake many make is to see it on the old Left-Right political spectrum, a relic of the twentieth century that should long since have been retired. It doesn’t remotely begin to map the terrain.

A significant proportion of those who cast their votes for the Far Right aren’t suddenly keen fans of torchlight parades and polished jackboots. They see Trump and Farage as anti-system candidates. It doesn’t matter if they’re failures or conmen. They’ve promised to smash something that isn’t working. For many that’s enough. They don’t want to buy into parties promising to carry on with what is slowly killing them.

Studies show that half of Reform supporters hate Labour and the Conservatives equally. They might be socially conservative, but they’re very keen on left wing policies like taxing the rich, boosting the NHS and investing in public services. That’s a huge problem that Farage will have to confront at some point.

But it also ties in to a trend that has been accelerating across the last 25 years. People are increasingly less likely to see themselves as Labour or Conservative, Democrat or Republican. They’re moving on, though they’re still likely to lend their vote to stop the worst happening.

That mood has broken through a couple of times this century. UK people with long memories will remember Cleggmania from 2010 when there was a sudden surge in the polls for the Liberal Democrats and leader Nick Clegg, mainly from young people who recognised what they hoped was something new. Clegg threw it away when he instantly pivoted back to the past.

And there was Obama who represented on many levels that desire for something different.

But what happens when the 21st century starts to break through is that all those who benefited from the twentieth century push back a hundred times as hard. For them, it’s an existential fight. They know the tide of history is against them. The more they sense they’re losing, the more they will do anything, absolutely anything, to maintain their grip.

That should be everyone’s fear for the coming months and years.

There will not be the change for which so many desperately yearn until the twentieth century is destroyed and all the people who champion it are shown the exit from the public stage.

Zohran Mamdani is not a symbol of socialism, or communism as Trump says, those boogeymen which fill the hearts of many Americans with terror. He’s something more powerful than that. His cry is: we don’t have to do things like we used to do.

Everything can change.

And it’s a message of hope that can resonate everywhere.