If you watch this short clip of Zohran Mamdani getting heckled, you’ll see why he’s the greatest living politician in the United States today.

Without batting an eye, Mamdani says, in response to the heckler:

I want that man to be able to afford to keep living in New York City. Because the day that I don’t hear him yelling at me, it means he got priced out of this place. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for him. I don’t want that for anybody in this city. We need to make this a city where it’s affordable enough to yell at your politicians.

Notice the four things Mamdani is doing.

First, he remains unflappable, gracious, calm, and funny.

Second, he doesn’t treat the heckler as a crazy or an enemy, as a problem to be managed or an alien to be tossed out. He treats the heckler for what he presumably is, a fellow New Yorker.

Third, not only does Mamdani pivot immediately to the issue he cares most about, affordability, but he turns the very fact of the man’s heckling into the issue he cares most about.

Last, Mamdani artfully points out that one of the main ways in which speech is stifled in a capitalist society is economics. If you can’t afford to live in New York, if you can’t afford to travel to New York, you can’t speak in New York.

Many years ago, the Marxist Oxford philosopher G. A. Cohen made a sharp argument against liberal theorists who claim that freedom and capitalism are mutually constitutive, that there is a distinction between being free to do something, which is liberty, and being able to do something, which is personal capacity. Against that distinction, Cohen pointed out that not having money to pay for a train ticket is different from being too sick with the flu, say, to travel. While the latter is a matter of personal capacity, an accident of nature that can happen to all of us (though of course, in our age of vaccines and vaccine denial and lack of health care, that line can get fuzzy), the former is a more elemental abridgment of liberty, a violation of our freedom to move, which is not unlike a policeman’s or other state official’s prohibiting you from getting on a train to travel. It’s not that you’re not able to travel, in the way that being renders you unable to travel. It’s that you’re not permitted to travel. You can be stopped in the way the same way that a policeman or a judge might not allow you leave a city.

As Zohran shows, a similar argument works for freedom of speech.

So, here he is, taking what is a fairly sophisticated argument in political theory and translating it into a humorous response to a heckler. I call that political leadership, of the most profound sort.