by William Shoki
On Oct. 27, Forest Hills Stadium — a 13,000-seat venue in New York more used to rock concerts than rallies — filled to capacity. But it wasn’t for a pop star or even a president. It was for Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist and the front-runner in New York’s mayoral race.
The turnout speaks to a quiet truth that has become harder and harder for political elites to admit: that bread-and-butter politics still moves people. In a media ecosystem saturated with culture-war theatrics, Mamdani has cut through by doing something disarmingly simple — talking about how to make life less punishing. He has focused on rent, transit and childcare, on building a city where ordinary people don’t have to leave just to live.
The rally came only one day after early voting began in the mayoral primary. As the race entered its final stretch, Mamdani’s message — grounded in daily hardship and hopeful about collective solutions — stood in stark contrast to the cynicism that dominates politics internationally.
His opponents, backed by billionaire donors and establishment networks, have responded not with counterarguments but with a flurry of attacks. First came accusations of antisemitism, then the red-baiting and, most recently, an intensified wave of Islamophobic fearmongering. These attacks are not just about Mamdani. They are about the possibility that politics can still be about transformation, and that a multiracial, working-class movement in the heart of global capital might actually win.
There is something profoundly significant about this campaign unfolding in New York. It is not just another municipal election, nor merely a contest over who can best manage the city’s dysfunction. New York is both a symbol and an edifice: the cultural capital of the US, the nerve center of global finance, the seat of institutions such as the UN, and the testing ground for nearly every experiment in austerity, policing and real estate speculation.
But it is also a city of peripheries, a city built by and for people escaping other empires. From the tenements of the Lower East Side to the taxi garages of Queens, it has long been home to those fleeing famine, fascism, war, dictatorship or simply poverty. Its mythology, however distorted, still rests on the promise of sanctuary and struggle. That contradiction is part of what makes this election so charged.
At the Forest Hills rally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it plainly: “This city was built by the Irish escaping famine, Italians fleeing fascism, Jews escaping the Holocaust, Black Americans fleeing slavery and Jim Crow, Latinos seeking a better life, Native people standing for themselves, Asian Americans coming together in Queens, in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, in Manhattan, in Staten Island.”
Her speech was not just a roll call of diasporas. It was a reminder that the city’s wealth, density and diversity are not the product of top-down benevolence, but of struggle. Mamdani’s campaign speaks directly to that legacy. It asks what it would mean to govern New York not as a playground for elites or a launchpad for presidential ambition, but as a sanctuary for the working-class multitudes who make the city function. That is what makes the campaign feel so destabilizing. It is not trying to manage decline or tinker with the margins. It is offering to take seriously the idea that New York could be remade from the bottom up.
At the heart of Mamdani’s campaign is a message that feels both radical and refreshingly straightforward: New Yorkers deserve to live dignified lives. That begins with material concerns — affordable housing, free public transport, universal childcare and accessible food. These are not abstractions. They are daily struggles for the majority of people in the city, especially in the outer boroughs where Mamdani has built his base.
What distinguishes his politics is not just the content of his demands, but the clarity with which he presents them. In debates, interviews and viral videos, Mamdani does not perform outrage or lean into the language of the culture wars. He talks about how much people are paying for groceries. He talks about bus routes. He talks about rent.
That rhetorical discipline is not accidental. It reflects a deeper commitment to organizing as a political method, one rooted in talking to people where they are, identifying the systems that shape their lives, and inviting them into struggle. Mamdani has not built his campaign through elite endorsements or algorithmic outrage. He has built it the old way: by knocking on doors, holding town halls, and growing an infrastructure of eager volunteers and base-building organizations.
What Mamdani has demonstrated — and what his opponents seem to fear — is that political movements do not have to choose between seriousness and spirit. They can be rigorous in their demands and expansive in their tone. They can speak to people’s hardship without turning it into a spectacle. In a world where the political class has grown accustomed to low expectations and tired technocracy, Mamdani’s campaign suggests something different: that politics can be hopeful without being hollow, and grounded without being small.
The success of Mamdani’s message has not gone unanswered. As his campaign has gained momentum, the attacks against him have escalated. What began as cynical attempts to portray him as antisemitic for his support of Palestinian rights and self-determination has evolved into a full-fledged smear campaign. He has been red-baited, falsely accused of supporting terrorism, and targeted with Islamophobic slurs.
In one especially grotesque moment, a talk radio host joked that Mamdani would celebrate another 9/11. Disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, sitting across from him, responded: “That’s another problem.” This was not an isolated gaffe. It was a glimpse into a broader consensus: that Mamdani, by virtue of who he is and what he represents, cannot be trusted to wield power.
These attacks are not new in form, but they have grown sharper and more acceptable. Just as the specter of the “Judeo-Bolshevik” once animated reactionary fear across Europe, today it is the figure of the “Islamo-leftist” that haunts the political imagination of the establishment. In France, this has taken the form of legislation and media hysteria about l’islamo-gauchisme, the supposed alliance between Muslims and the radical Left.
In New York, the idea plays out more subtly but no less viciously: Mamdani is painted as a fifth columnist, a danger to the city’s stability, a foreign element cloaked in progressive rhetoric. What makes this backlash so revealing is not just its racist ugliness, but its desperation. Mamdani’s opponents have largely abandoned the attempt to contest his platform on its merits. Instead, they have turned to fear: fear of Muslims, fear of socialists, fear of political change that is led by people who look and sound like Mamdani. That fear is not rooted in misunderstanding. It is rooted in clarity. The political class understands exactly what Mamdani is doing — and how close he is to succeeding.
By now, Mamdani’s personal story is well known. He was born in Kampala to the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani and the Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair. He spent time in Cape Town as a child before settling in New York City, where he now represents parts of western Queens in the New York State Assembly. Before entering politics, he worked as a housing counselor and was active in tenant organizing. He also rapped.
In one of his early tracks, written and performed in Kampala, he used chapati — a flatbread with roots in India but remade in East Africa — as a metaphor for migration, belonging and pride (he wrote about it on Africa Is a Country). The lyrics toggled between Luganda and English, rejecting the idea that identity must be singular or fixed. That sensibility has carried into his political life, where Mamdani has never sought to flatten his background into a brand.
He does not perform identity for political capital. Nor does he obscure it. He insists that who he is should never matter more than what he stands for. Still, it would be a mistake to treat his background as incidental. Mamdani’s ability to name systems of power, to recognize the boundaries of the imaginable and push against them, is shaped by having grown up across the world’s imperial and postcolonial margins. He understands how power operates — not just through repression, but through narrative, through consensus, through the quiet narrowing of what counts as realistic.
That is part of what makes him such a rare figure: a politician fluent in naming the structure — unapologetically critical of capitalism — but doing so in a register attuned to contemporary political consciousness. His references echo Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela as often as Marx, and he acts from conviction without becoming self-righteous.
I interviewed Mamdani in 2020, in what was then his first public interview as a politician. Even at that early stage, he spoke with remarkable clarity about the relationship between movements and institutions, between principle and compromise, between urgency and patience. He understood that electoral work was not a betrayal of radical politics but a terrain on which it could be tested and expanded. That sense of balance — between the ideal and the possible — has defined his approach ever since. It is what allows him to be disciplined without being rigid, hopeful without being naïve and determined without being doctrinaire.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is not simply surviving a coordinated, bigoted onslaught. It is thriving. And that is not in spite of the attacks, but because his politics have struck a nerve with both his supporters and his opponents.
For the Left, Mamdani’s rise offers lessons that go beyond one race or one candidate. It shows what it means to move from protest to politics, from moral clarity to strategic power, from simply repudiating the system to building the capacity to transform it.
That path is not always clean. It involves compromise, risk and the temptation of retreat. But it also opens up new possibilities for collective life. Mamdani has never pretended that he can change everything at once. What he has offered instead is a strategy — rooted in organizing, grounded in solidarity and serious about governing.
Of course, not everyone on the Left sees it that way. Some, especially in the online echo chambers that so often distort movement horizons, worry that Mamdani is already too conciliatory, too willing to build coalitions, too cautious in his rhetoric.
But this criticism often mistakes tactical posture for principle. It treats the appearance of militancy as the substance of politics. It forgets that power is not only something to be resisted but something to be wielded, and that wielding it demands more than slogans.
Mamdani remains accountable to the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization that helped propel him to office, and to the broader movement ecosystem that has sustained his campaign. That accountability must continue. But it must also be matched by an understanding that purity is not the same as vision, and that movement-building requires patience as well as passion.
What makes Mamdani such a singular figure is his ability to hold these tensions without collapsing into cynicism or rigidity. He does not reduce politics to vibes or aesthetics, but neither does he allow it to be drained of feeling. Whether hosting scavenger hunts across the five boroughs or running city-wide soccer tournaments on the eve of a North American World Cup, he has managed to make struggle feel like something worth doing — together, and with joy. That sensibility is not incidental. It is political. It reflects a deeper belief that the fight for a different world is also a fight for a different way of relating to one another.
This is how the Left wins: by organizing at scale, speaking with clarity, building power that lasts and doing it in a way that feels alive. That is what Mamdani has begun to show. And that is what the system is trying, with increasing desperation, to stop.
William Shoki is editor of AfricaIsaCountry.com.
