Mayor Zohran Mamdani Will Usher in a New Era of Excellence
Reflecting on Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech yesterday, Corey Robin argues that the Left must now embrace excellence rather than ceding it to the Right, fighting for the flourishing of all people as the aspiration of a truly democratic society.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife Rama Duwaji smile as confetti falls after his ceremonial inauguration as mayor at City Hall on January 1, 2026, in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by mid-century writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb.
So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family who had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century.
That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no?
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