“I am a democratic socialist.” These words were really spoken by an American politician on live TV, just hours after being elected to govern a city with a population greater than that of all but twelve US states, in the year 2025. In the big, packed room in Brooklyn where I watched Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech, every other sentence brought cheers of joy. But after those five words the roar was like a waterfall, a dam breaking.
Several spirits presided over Mamdani’s remarks, which he gave to an ecstatic crowd at the Brooklyn Paramount, a newly refurbished deco movie palace turned concert hall in the borough’s downtown. The first was Eugene V. Debs. “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” Debs told a starkly different audience on September 18, 1918. That day, the Socialist Party leader addressed the judge in an Ohio courtroom, where he had just been convicted under the new Espionage Act for a different speech, which Debs had given three months earlier. (State repression in those days moved with a swiftness President Trump can only envy.)
The statement to the judge, which Mamdani quoted in the opening sentence of his own speech, might be Debs’s most famous; it includes his embracing rhapsody on solidarity (“while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”) that people will continue to post online and tattoo on their bodies for as long as something like the socialist ideal survives. But in the afterglow of Mamdani’s victory, I think more about that earlier speech by Debs, the one that would land him in prison.
Debs was speaking at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, against the war and in defense of three local Socialist leaders who had been jailed for blocking draft registration. Before rising to barnburning crescendi (“The history of this country is being written in the blood of the childhood the industrial lords have murdered”), the address is mostly simple and short, with punchy rhythms and salty wisecracks, geared to an audience of craftsmen and factory workers. “I never had much faith in leaders,” Debs announces, to knowing laughter. “I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader.” His allegiance is to “the rank and file.” “When I rise,” he declares, “it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.” For a tireless campaigner who ran five times for the Presidency, Debs looked warily on elected office. “You will never vote the Socialist republic into existence,” he told the Canton crowd. “You will have to lay its foundations in industrial organization.”
In New York, where one in five workers belongs to a union, that foundation stands firmer than in most parts in the country. But when you consider that just a generation ago, that number was one in three—and recall the many local labor leaders who, out of sheer fear of reprisal, backed the politically bankrupt Cuomo in this year’s primary, only to later endorse Mamdani when his victory seemed assured—the foundation’s gaps and cracks start to appear. How will the more than one million voters who carried Mamdani to victory, the most to support a single mayoral candidate in sixty years, be not only exhorted but equipped to fulfill the promise of Zohran’s election night words?
Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last twelve months, you have dared to reach for something greater.
Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.
These very workers—stockers, deliveristas, line cooks—are among those most at the margins of organized labor, and most exposed to Trump’s anti-immigrant terror. Power, “the future,” belongs in their “hands,” but elected administration, as Debs knew, forms only part of the prize. Even at the scale of city government, power is less something to hold than to make. The Debsian collectivity of Mamdani’s “you,” “we,” and “our” will require rebuilding every day.
To take political office as an avowed socialist, in the headquarters of global capital, is to expose conviction to contingency, to put fixed principles to the test of changing conditions, fragile alliances, and determined enemies. The boundary between tactical concession and neutralizing submission is less clear than we want to think. Zohran—and I say this as a campaign volunteer, a believer—will struggle and disappoint, as any single leader in our malformed democracy will disappoint. But he need not fail. When, in his words, “we enter city hall,” I’ll be among the millions working, hoping, cheering for the future.
—Colin Vanderburg
“Years from now,” Zohran Mamdani said, around halfway through his victory speech, “may our only regret be that this day took so long to come.” A remarkable line, consisting almost entirely of monosyllables, it is a deliberate archaism (“may our only regret be”), delivered spondaically like so many of Mamdani’s rhetorical feints, projecting wistfully into the future the retrospective accomplishments, still notional, of the not-past. It is the time of magic realism (“Years later, as he faced the firing squad…”), of Proust and Woolf run through Faulkner, Morrison, García Marquez, Rushdie, the proleptic imagination, pervaded by a sense of loss, even of trauma. “At last we have arrived, but too late, too late for us . . . ”
For all his genial optimism, Mamdani came to the world’s attention in a video marked by its ruefulness: In the wake of Trump’s victory, surrounded on a cold day by those on Fordham Road in the Bronx who had given up on politics, who had voted not affirmatively but bitterly for the criminal President, who decried a nation wealthy enough to be steeped in sanguinary wars, while crushing its own people with enforced poverty. A kind of conservatism, marked by rejection and self-preservation, had set in, even in a city known for its Democratic politics, “despite and because” (as Proust would say).
At a young age already a veteran of the fight for Palestinian liberation, Mamdani knows that global revanchism and imperialism are not limited to those districts and places where Republicans were accustomed to winning, but that it relies too—even especially—on those places, like New York City, where it seemed most absent. New York, too, or in particular, saw police throwing students down stairways at Columbia University; saw untold thousands seeking shelter every single night, more than ever in the records that have been kept; saw the increasingly wealthy cocoon themselves in spindly towers that seem to pin the city down. Steve Bannon recently made a point of calling Mamdani a “neo-Marxist” (a term used in this magazine only once, to refer to our comrade journal Jacobin), and whatever the merit of the claim, Mamdani’s victory speech was dialectical in the extreme, risking even the happiness of the moment by reminding his audience that New York was the city that “gave birth” to Donald Trump, and therefore had a special role to play in giving him his comeuppance.
Parochial when he needed to be—claiming, in a high point in the campaign, that unlike his competitors he would not visit Israel but stay in New York City—in victory Mamdani was borderless, gesturing to so many of the countries whose emigrants populated New York City while implicitly calling back to the liberation of the Indian subcontinent, where his family is from, in his quotation from Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech, given at midnight when India (and, the next day, Pakistan) achieved independence, but only in the midst of a partition that would leave millions dead. “We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come,” Nehru went on to say in his speech. “They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good [or] ill fortune alike.” Solidarity: New York is not an island, entire of itself, and liberation awaits us all.
—Nikil Saval
Among the hundreds of thousands who must have watched Zohran Mamdani’s triumphant address on Tuesday evening, few could have recognized the song that began to blast through the Brooklyn Paramount as he concluded his speech. Fewer still could associate that song with the strange, kitschy, comical nostalgia it awakened while Mamdani embraced his loved ones and campaign staff that night. But by the next day, as the sun set on what was now mayor-elect Mamdani’s city, that song, “Dhoom,” from the 2000s Bollywood hits Dhoom and Dhoom 2, had become a much remarked-upon motif in reactions to Mamdani’s campaign, his victory speech, and his relationship to his Indian heritage and family. Populating (or, I should say overwhelming) that last category were articles in Indian newspapers, both serious and trifling, that fawned over Mamdani’s supposedly renewed patriotism. A slew of these articles coursed through the many WhatsApp channels I share with family and friends at home.1
While it’s tickling and sweet that the incoming mayor of New York City soundtracked his victory with a beloved, revelrous Bollywood tune, this Indian response to Mamdani’s “Dhoom” outro has been strangely solipsistic. Articles about the victory speech start sappy and celebratory but quickly inflate into a misjudged fantasia about the song as a sign of Mamdani’s “undying” love for Bollywood and “unwavering pride” in India, a “celebration of his ethnic heritage.” More than his ambitious citation of Nehru’s independence speech to the newly unbenighted citizens of India, it was this song that sent the national media into a frenzy. Perhaps it is not surprising that the most popular cultural artifacts in an economically flatlining, communally fractured country are those that serve to flatter its nationalisms. After all, for all the Indian leftists congratulating Mamdani, there were Indian politicians who regurgitated toward the candidate the same Islamophobia with which they routinely indoctrinate their own Indian constituents.
Mamdani’s campaign has scrambled many taxonomies of the Indian politician abroad. He’s Muslim; he’s a fierce critic of Narendra Modi; he’s actually Ugandan; he’s a socialist. Meanwhile, Indian Americans and their lobbies routinely pour millions into funding Modi’s ethnonationalist reelection campaigns and globalizing the false image of genocidal Hindu nationalism as a decolonial project. Following Mamdani’s win in the primary, a few politicians from the BJP, which just fortified an arms deal with Israel, publicly decried his campaign and its alleged antisemitism. As with the consistent ideological hostility toward Salman Rushdie, political leaders were quick to disown whatever was threatening in the image of a Muslim Indian populist and dismiss him to a spoiled product of the West. But these were ultimately impotent gestures. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t constrained by ties to an Indian American voter base, or its blood money, nor by the ideological parochialisms of the subcontinent itself.
When Zohran delivered his speech on Tuesday, it was the expansive idioms, historic referents, and universal freedoms that raptured the world’s attention, not a thumping Bollywood track. Zohran’s triumph promises for his local constituents a new dignity in daily life, even as it echoes across the globe. May its call never be betrayed.
—JK Mehta
I went to my first canvass for Zohran Mamdani this February, in the bleak midwinter. I walked about forty minutes south from Bushwick’s Morgan Avenue L train stop to Herbert Von King Park, in Bed-Stuy. Fresh snow still covered yards, sidewalks, windowsills, and the park itself. Several times I almost slipped. It felt like a foolhardy venture in more ways than one, but I had convinced myself the campaign was worthwhile, because the New York City chapter of DSA had endorsed it. To run a cadre candidate who could transform the tenor of this year’s election would be a moral victory if nothing else. Still, my hopes were not high.
When I got there, I was surprised to find dozens of people gathered on the sidewalk across from the park. No one seemed older than thirty-five or forty. The field leads gave us the same tutorial I had heard dozens of times through the years, from Bernie onward—telling us how to use the canvassing app, how to knock on someone’s door like a friendly neighborhood commie and not like a fed, and so forth. I went out with a white guy, presumably straight, and we bitched and moaned to each other about how shitty our service-industry jobs were, how expensive and useless our degrees felt, how unlivable life was, how sad it was that Trump was President again, how the Democrats had lost for a second time in under a decade to a widely loathed felon, how cute this whole Zohran thing was.
At the doors, we had decent conversations. I remember helping an elderly, wheelchair-bound Black woman into her apartment, holding up one side of her chair while her husband held the other. An Afro-Latino father who was studying at CUNY perked up at Zohran’s proposal for universal childcare. We told him that CUNY tuition was free until the ’70s; he had no idea. A young white couple, a man and a woman with a newborn in her arms, even let us into their apartment on the top floor of a walkup building. They were Working Families Party voters, and naturally loved the idea of freezing their stabilized rent and not having to pay an arm and a leg for childcare; not ranking Cuomo or Adams was likewise a no-brainer. They were going to vote for Brad Lander. But Zohran intrigued them. I marked them as supporters.
I did not canvass for Zohran again until June, by which time I had lost the shitty barista job, was struggling even more with rent, and had a lot more time on my hands. I needed something to fend off the anxiety that at any moment I’d find an eviction notice tacked to my door. By this time, Zohran seemed to have a real chance of knocking out the disgraced scion of the most powerful dynasty in New York politics. The very avatar of the neoliberal centrism that had thrown yet another election to the MAGA right and made the city’s housing crisis such that I was paying more than a thousand dollars for a windowless room on the treeless border of Bushwick and Williamsburg.
In those humid last few weeks of the primary, I went door knocking solo, or got friends to accompany me. I canvassed in Ridgewood, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy. On the hottest day of the year, I did poll-site visibility outside the same spot where I had left the top of the ballot blank the previous November. I remember standing at the entrance to Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick with a childhood friend of mine and his wife, handing out campaign literature and convincing folks to put Zohran on the ballot. Canvassing in Bushwick’s so-called Commie Corridor was literally a walk in the park. The many interactions I had at doors or on the streets were almost unanimously positive.
But I still wasn’t convinced. Personally and politically accustomed—primed, even—to defeat, I refused to believe any sign that pointed to victory. Drenched with sweat on primary day, watching voters file into the polling site, I could not believe Zohran would win. Then, at the watch party, in a crowd full of friends and comrades at an East Williamsburg bar, the results started to pour in. Mamdani’s lead over Cuomo widened into a landslide right in front of my eyes. I was agog. It was unbelievable. We did it. We pushed one of our own, a committed DSA member, into the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of a global metropolis. Not even a decade into my DSA membership, here we were, political kingmakers, a ragtag group of Young Turks who made the city’s sclerotic, landlord-friendly, scandal-ridden Democratic machine so afraid that a swath of it has since bowed to Zohran. People I have long regarded as intractable enemies—State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Governor Kathy Hochul, and a host of city officials—have all bent the knee to DSA, by bending to Zohran. A socialist organization has managed to crack the code that has stymied left movements, leaders, and parties for so long. In Zohran’s nomination, we sent a shot across the Democratic establishment’s bow by relying on our own strength: an army of almost one hundred thousand volunteers who have bested the combined might of political autocracies, billionaire money, and Islamophobic fearmongering. Today the air is cold once again, and my rent is still too high. But this time, I believe.
—José Sanchez
I can’t recall any memory of watching the supposedly epoch-changing phenomenon of Dhoom. Then again, this is probably because it was a middling movie—trashy and bizarrely hard to follow, a quintessentially dawdling Bollywood heist flick, whose main legacies are a high-speed chase scene on Suzuki supersport bikes by cops and robbers in fiery specs, and, of course, the eponymous party anthem “Dhoom.” I do, though, remember owning a beautifully shiny, orange Suzuki Bandit toy bike complete with mobile steering, and lurching awkwardly to the synthy, high-octane beats at many a school function. ↩
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