"It is, after all, his job, now that New Yorkers have elected him to the highest office of America's largest and most dynamic municipality. Yet, as he succeeds, Mamdani has the potential to transform not just a city but the politics of a nation that desperately needs a robust antidote to Donald Trump's oppressions. As Mamdani told The Nation after his Democratic primary win in June, "You cannot defeat this attack on democracy unless you also prove its worth.""
"What took Mamdani's candidacy from impossible to inevitable was his fundamental understanding that to prove the worth of democracy, leaders must make the lives of the people who elect them measurably better. Trump has failed miserably in this regard. But so, too, have many Democrats. One of the primary reasons the Democratic Party lost in 2024 was that its technocratic response to the affordability crisis struck Americans as lacking in both urgency and ambition."
Zohran Mamdani will serve as mayor of New York City and seeks to transform urban governance and national politics by demonstrating democracy's worth through measurable improvements. He emphasizes that leaders must make voters' lives measurably better, positioning this as essential to countering threats to democracy. Mamdani proposes rent freezes, fast and free buses, universal childcare, city-owned grocery stores, and taxes on billionaires to fund these programs. He draws inspiration from FDR, La Guardia, and Bernie Sanders and criticizes both Trump's failures and Democrats' technocratic, insufficiently ambitious responses to affordability and economic crisis.
Read at The Nation
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