Mamdani Musings

Mamdani Musings

Jim Kavanagh

So, New York City, the most Zionist city in the world outside of Israel and the capital of capital, has elected a new Muslim immigrant mayor who is a professed anti-Zionist and socialist. How cool is that?! Let's consider.

First of all, yes, the role that Mamdani has played as part of the surprising, unprecedented, and quick, sea change in Americans’ attitudes towards Israel and Zionism—the normalization of not just “criticism of Israel” but explicit anti-Zionism within American political discourse—is important. As I’ve argued previously, there is nothing more important.  And, yes, Mamdani’s campaign has been a key reflection and driver of that change. It's indisputable that his “I'm not going to visit Israel” moment was a turning point in his campaign, and therefore an inflection point in the national political discourse.

At that moment, it became clear in New York that Mamdani was winning because he refused the Zionist loyalty test, and it became clear to the entire country that Zionist loyalty was becoming a political detriment that would be increasingly difficult to hide or overcome.  Anti-Zionists now say, “If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere,” while, astonished and infuriated, and after spending at least $22 million, the Zionists have to lament, “If we can’t make it there, we’re in trouble everywhere.”

Whatever ultimately comes of it, this victory of anti-Zionism is, in itself, an unprecedented and good advance in the ideological and political framework of the country, a positive         moment, a good political thing. And, have no doubt: It is the thing that Mamdani’s opponents are most upset about.

Let’s also recognize that, for the purpose of defeating Zionism in the world, Mamdani’s victory will have little to no practical effect. For one thing, it’s a local election. Because it’s New York, it’s of national ideological and political significance, but he’s still only the mayor of one city. Beyond the beneficial ideological effect of his victory, Zohran Mamdani can’t do much to change U.S. policy towards Israel and Zionism. He can institute BDS-type policies—divesting from Israel bonds, revoking contracts and partnerships with the Israeli government, municipalities, and companies, etc.—and most boldly, as he suggested, arresting Netanyahu if he sets foot in the city.

For another thing, Mamdani’s “anti-Zionism” is a little evanescent. There’s no reason to deny his career-long statements about Palestine: “It is Palestine that brought me into organizing, and it is Palestine that I will always organize for,” or his undeniably courageous refusal to endorse Israel as a “Jewish state,” which logically makes him (though I’m not sure he’s ever explicitly called himself) ”anti-Zionist.”

At the same time, there is no reason, either, to refrain from asking how his anti-Zionism relates to the entirely unforced Zionist-friendly decisions he is making.

It seems starkly contradictory, for example, to keep as police commissioner the uber-Zionist, uber-wealthy, oligarch heiress, Jessica Tisch.

This is the top cop who denounced as “antisemites,” and led the NYPD attack against, pro-Palestine, anti-genocide Columbia student protestors, and who “promised” the ADL that “the NYPD will …remain on the front lines of this fight” to treat anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

This is the police commissioner who sent her senior NYPD staff to a training session which “cast the Palestine solidarity movement as a significant threat to Jewish safety…, focused heavily on student protesters, repeatedly conflated antisemitism with anti-Zionism…categorized campus demonstrators as extremists tied to Hamas, and branded as antisemitic Palestinian symbols like the watermelon and the keffiyeh, as well as phrases such as ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘all eyes on Rafah.’”

This is a police commissioner who has the NYPD engaged in continuous joint training and intelligence-sharing with Israeli law enforcement and military forces, including the International Liaison Program, which maintains a NYPD detective post in Israel.

Israel: the 51^st state and 79^th precinct.

Sure, Zoran might say that, as mayor of New York City, he couldn't be expected to exclude everyone with Zionist thoughts from his administration. But the police commissioner is not a trivial administrative post; it’s one that deeply affects how pro-Palestinian politics can be expressed in the city. And Jessica Tisch is no casual, unthinking Zionist–by-default, but a committed, militant Zionist.

There are a thousand nasty battles over his professed anti-Zionism that are to come, with the NYPD and the federal government. To take the very difficult one, on which he has ostensibly staked out a determined anti-Zionist position: Will Zohran Mamdani be counting on Jessica Tisch to—almost certainly in defiance of federal authority—arrest Benjamin Netanyahu? Or has his “anti-Zionism” surrendered that battle in advance? One may like to keep an open mind about how that challenge will be resolved by Mamdani, but it seems to me it already has been.

Perhaps even more telling, because it cannot be excused by the exigencies of, nor will its effects be limited to, New York City—is Zohran’s decision to oppose a primary challenge to Hakeem Jeffries. It’s not even that Jeffries’s likely opponent, Chi Ossé, has such a strong anti-Zionist position; it’s that Jeffries has been so sycophantic to Israel that he’s been nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur,” and everyone understands he represents the worst of sold-out Democratic Zionism. Whether Mamdani wants to support Ossé or not, trying to prevent him from challenging Jeffries reads as a gratuitous defense of the rightly despised decrepit Democratic Party apparatus, including its intransigent Zionism, which Mamdani’s campaign was all about disrupting.

We cannot help but notice, as Steve Salaita puts it, that such decisions have “a detrimental effect on anti-Zionist consciousness.  Instead of inspiring (or reinforcing) a stronger stance against Israel, the campaign… [is] once again defending the appeasement of Zionists as a necessary condition of political success.”

The second radical leg of Mamdani’s signature political project is his professed “socialism.”

Again, it’s a good thing that Mamdani helped to normalize the idea of socialism, which has been growing among people whose lives are being increasingly constricted by capitalism. His campaign has demonstrated that some version of "socialist" discourse and policy, presented forthrightly, wins.

Of course, you don’t have to be a Marxist theoretician to understand that Mamdani’s (the DSA’s, AOC’s and Bernie’s) concept of “democratic socialism” is the mildest version of social-democratic reform, and that his proposed “municipal socialist” policies—rent freezes, free buses, childcare, public groceries— represent no radical threat, and nothing particularly new, to New York or American capitalism. (I urge everyone to see one of Mamdani’s best campaign videos, an homage to Vito Marcantonio, an Italian-American who represented NYC’s East Harlem in Congress for seven terms as a lifelong socialist, in a historical context where there was a real socialist movement.)

In today’s capitalist America, any attempt by a politician like Mamdani to re-introduce a concept of basic “sociality,” of concern for the general welfare of the people and society—let alone the vigorous socialist politics that once had purchase in American local and national politics—is furiously portrayed and attacked as an attempt to turn the country into “North Korea, with a dash of Sharia.” (I kid you not. I can’t make this shit up.)

As the capitalists and Mamdani know, there’s no such thing as socialism in one city. The mild, socially aware reforms Mamdani may be able to achieve would be of concrete help to a lot of people, and are worthy of support, but they will be contained within the limits of New York City and national capitalism. Only if the Mamdani victory became a building block of a national movement not just to reform, but to consciously confront and overturn the dictatorship of capital, would it be a threat.

As the man himself said:

Mamdani’s increasingly uncritical implication in the Democratic Party is reflected in his legacy-Democrat transition team, whose most radical member, Lina Khan, has progressives all aflutter. That, combined with his defense of Democratic leadership in the person of Jeffries, smells more of ambitious Democrat team spirit than revolutionary socialist fervor.

As the capitalist dictators understand quite well:

https://x.com/FiorellaIsabelM/status/1986089972940652702?s=20

Let’s, please, not forget that we’ve seen the emergence of “socialism” before—not long ago by any but American memory standards, and in a context where it was taken much more seriously by even mainstream pundits.

When I started posting political commentary online, I chose the above February 2009 cover of Newsweek, when the financial crisis made everyone, on a national level, recognize the failures of capitalism and the need for state intervention and for managing social wealth in a different way—you know, more for the benefit of the whole of society than the 1%.

Propelled by immense popular and political support (more than Trump just came in with), Barack Obama walked through the door that had opened to socialism and promptly shut it in the face of the working class, promising the banksters that he would stand as "the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And he, indeed, helped transfer mass amounts of wealth to them, while evicting homeowners and demolishing small (especially black) businesses.

I continue to use that icon because I don't want people to forget what happened, when something else was possible.

Because of the legacy of Obama's failure to change things fundamentally, as he could have, a failure that the Democratic Party refuses to recognize, and continued to embrace through Biden, more millions of people ever year—especially working-class and non-white people (read those links and weep)—were driven to the false hope of “anti-establishment” Trump and the “anti-government” Republicans.

Mamdani needs to remember the first video that marked him as a possible winner—the one where he listened respectfully to non-white, working-class New Yorkers who voted for Trump. It was Obama and the Democratic Party that made that happen. Any professed “socialist” or “progressive” politician or movement that does not recognize, and say, and persuade people that they understand that—and I suspect Mamdani, now settling into the AOC-Bernie-progressive Dem nest, will not—is going to end up doing it again.

Zohran Mandani, even if he professes (as Obama did not) to want to open a door to socialism, will find it virtually impossible to find that door today in the fortified capital of Capital, especially if he’s dragged down by the dead weight of the “We’re capitalists. And that’s just the way it is” party he’s clinging to.

Mandani is not the radical jihadist or the revolutionary socialist of the fevered tabloid dreams. He’s another Obamacan reformist. Whether he’s more sincere and less of a con man, we shall see.  His professed commitments to the most unradical, basic social ethic at home and anti-colonial ethic internationally turned the reactionary capitalist-Zionist American ruling class of New York City and America apoplectic. They know very well, however, that his ability to realize any but the most minimal of his stated goals will be constrained by their class power and by Zohran’s self-confinement within the Democratic Party wing of the political apparatus that their class provides.

Sure, wait and see. I’m an old-school native New Yorker, and I “know the score by now.” Without promoting him or expecting anything more from him than AOC 1.5, I voted for Mamdani—for the pleasure of watching Shmuley's and Rappaport's heads explode, if nothing else. I hope he gets, and think he might, a couple of the moderate reforms he’s proposing, and maybe, relative to his poor predecessor and with the help of such as Soros, he’ll succeed as mayor and be wound up for higher office.  I will not be surprised, however, if, as Obama's pitchfork management paved the way for Trump, Mamdani’s paves the way for the next Giuliani or Bloomberg.

Whatever Zohran Mamdani does in New York, and wherever he goes from here, the system needs a revolutionary change nationally that's not going to come from him.

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