The Zohran Mamdani Model of Exuberant Good Cheer

By
Meagan Day

The relentless negativity and performative cruelty of American politics is exhausting. Following Zohran Mandani’s lead, leftists can distinguish ourselves with a concrete political program paired with genuine enthusiasm for ordinary people.

A large part of what makes Zohran Mamdani so popular, and therefore so politically threatening, is his exuberant, authentic fondness for ordinary New Yorkers. (Angelina Katsanis / AFP via Getty Images)

The day after New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech last week, the political commentariat appeared untethered from reality. Veteran liberal talking head Van Jones said that Mamdani’s “tone was sharp” and that he was “almost yelling.” Jones described the performance forebodingly as a “character switch.” Far-right ideologue Steve Bannon seemed to agree with Jones. “That’s an angry guy. That was in your face,” Bannon said of Mamdani’s speech.

These were odd mischaracterizations of a speech that, while a bit cheeky at moments, was measured, confident, and hopeful. Even in their dispatches from a separate dimension though, the pundits got a few things right. Jones described pre-character-switch Mamdani as a “warm, open, embracing guy that’s close to working people.” Bannon, meanwhile, portrayed Mamdani as a politician of great significance, saying of him and other democratic socialists, “These are serious people.”

All of that checks out. In fact, the two are inseparable in Mamdani’s case. A large part of what makes him so popular, and therefore so politically threatening, is his exuberant, authentic fondness for ordinary New Yorkers.

There’s an iconic image of Hillary Clinton on the 2016 campaign trail looking out of place and conspicuously uncomfortable in an East Harlem working-class apartment. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor was the exact opposite of that, all the time. He was at home in every borough and on every block, talking to every type of person with curiosity and enthusiasm. He seemed to earnestly delight in New Yorkers’ company, from bus riders to templegoers to street vendors to rock audiences to baristas to tai chi–practicing grannies. If you live in New York City and you don’t own a predatory business that mistreats workers or an apartment building that’s gouging and mistreating tenants, Zohran probably likes you.

The Mamdani campaign holds many lessons for us on the Left, and herein lies a crucial one. In a climate where politics​​ is now synonymous with insider mudslinging and performative cruelty, Mamdani’s apparent lack of cynicism or misanthropy struck people as novel, refreshing, and convincing. It created a sense of buy-in for his concrete, positive political program. Given how drained and jaded people are by the unremitting hostility of American politics absent any meaningful change, Mamdani’s indefatigable good nature is a better medium for our politics than the caustic and cynical style the Left has refined over the last decade.

Rebels With a Cause

When Donald Trump rose to prominence starting in 2015, many took it as evidence of a working-class appetite for something real and raw, even if that thing was crass and uncivil — or maybe because it was crass and uncivil. Here, at last, was something unpolished and refreshingly blunt to cut through the artifice of the political status quo.

For our part, the Left opposed Trump’s right-wing politics wholesale, but we didn’t really mind his rhetorical style. Its projected effect, which many now call “the coarsening of political discourse,” even struck us as potentially necessary. The bipartisan political elite were courteous as they dismantled the American welfare state, diplomatic and well-mannered as they deregulated corporations, passed race-to-the-bottom trade laws, and oversaw the erosion of labor unions and the stagnation of workers’ wages while elites’ wealth soared. With the social rules of cordiality and deference thrown out, we thought, maybe the real conversation could begin.

Plus, the centrist Democrat decorum-mongers were grating beyond imagination, chastising the unwashed populist rabble on both sides. It seemed only right to rebel against the regime of false niceness.

In the mid- to late 2010s, the Left cohered around the figure of Bernie Sanders, who, while always sufficiently collegial on the page, has a kind of endearing gruffness to him that seemed to match our rough-and-tumble style. The “Bernie Bros” and “dirtbag leftists,” myself very much among them, rejected stifling decorum in favor of unrestrained, uproariously funny, deeply deserved ridicule.

But Sanders’s political leadership provided necessary structure, balancing the Left’s boorishness against the imperative to be appealing and persuasive. In the years after Sanders’s 2020 primary loss, rudderless and justifiably outraged by persistent and worsening inequalities, the Left grew ruder and more self-righteous. Increasingly we delighted in being mean-spirited for a good cause. In time, some of us graduated from posting snake emojis at Sanders opponent Elizabeth Warren to posting comic illustrations of blood spurting from Charlie Kirk’s neck. We thought we were rebelling against the mainstream, but we ended up going along with it, participating in the normalization of ruthless dehumanization and proud moral indifference in American political life.

Now well into the second term of the chief corrosive agent Donald Trump, the outcome of all this “coarsening” is not a liberated political discourse but another type of stultification. The voting populace is either seething with contempt for half the population, demoralized into complete political paralysis, or some mixture of the two. Cynicism is nearly universal; sadism has lost any hint of taboo. It turns out the only thing worse than artificial niceness while nothing changes is pervasive and indiscriminate meanness while nothing changes.

A Time of Mensches

Working-class people across demographics like democratic socialists’ political ideas. They want to fight corporate greed and build strong public programs that meet their daily needs. When somebody promises to lower rents, raise wages, furnish good transit and health care and childcare, and make their city livable for everybody, they like the sound of that.

Still, earning their trust is a challenge. People don’t want to invest their hopes in something that’s doomed to let them down. Abandoned by both political parties for half a century, their hearts are guarded against disappointment.

With authentic warmth and camaraderie, Mamdani overrode that ingrained fear of being taken for a sucker. He accomplished this by exuding genuine fellow feeling — not by indulging his contempt for the many evil idiots who no doubt deserve it.

He could have engaged in endless back-and-forth squabbles with his many critics, like his fellow millennial and certified discourse goblin J. D. Vance. Instead, Mamdani could be found at the club singing along to dancehall and Jay-Z, dapping up cab drivers at LaGuardia Airport, talking about the cost of living with kindergartners, asking people where in New York City they fell in love, taking the mic at street parties to talk about sending “Andrew Cuomo back to the suburbs,” and otherwise enjoying the company of real working-class people.

Mamdani embodies the axiom of the late left-wing commentator Michael Brooks, who exhorted us to be “ruthless with systems but kind to people.” That quote still circulates widely on the Left. Even so, Mamdani is miles ahead of left-wing culture in this regard, especially online. Social rewards continue to flow to those most adept at spotting unforgivable blunders, generating creative insults, nursing grudges in public, and withholding mercy from avowed opponents and disappointing allies.

These dynamics aren’t unique to the Left: what distinguishes us is the way our moral convictions provide cover for this antisocial behavior, as though our devotion to “the people” in the abstract permits us infinite hostility toward people in particular. Mamdani doesn’t act like that. If he did, he wouldn’t have inspired anybody beyond a small circle of true believers, and he wouldn’t have won.

As democratic socialists, we know we will be tarred as extremists, slandered as cheats and frauds, and subject to the best political subterfuge corporate money can buy. There will be plenty of negativity, no matter how we choose to present ourselves. No need to add to it. As a former avid consumer and occasional producer of shitpost-adjacent left-wing online content, I’ve spent the last half-decade making up my mind that authentic celebration and collective joy are healthier attitudes to put into the world. Good news: Mamdani’s victory shows that mensch energy can win.

Mamdani’s working-class conviviality feels every bit as fresh today as Trump’s brazen rancor did ten years ago. People experience it as an antidote to the miserable misanthropy and tribalistic contempt that have done nothing but further depress and immobilize Americans over the last decade. His earnest enjoyment of ordinary people and his refusal to be dragged into the whirlpool of political negativity are instructive qualities for the Left today. If we didn’t quite know how to comport ourselves in the age of political sadism before, now we have no excuse.