cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/23756
Mamdani may appear to occupy the office, but the office actually occupies him.
There is a seduction in the story of Zohran Mamdani. The insurgent from Queens. The son of an African exile, an anti-colonial academic, a Freedom Rider participant father, and a South Asian Golden Globe-winning cinematic royalty. A hunger striker for taxi drivers. A face of the "new" New York—brown, Muslim, diasporic, fluent in solidarity, in TikTok, and in that tender performance of Left political hope that allows American liberalism to feel clever rather than culpable.
"Once-in-a-generation political talent," as Mehdi Hasan called him. A democratic socialist for the city that invented derivatives and foreclosure. A rent-freeze prophet in the kingdom of landlords. A soft-spoken radical for a metropolis that still mistakes moderation for modernity.
Mamdani's campaign and his victory should have been beautiful.
Mamdani's candidacy is not merely a question of charisma, policy, or diasporic pride. It is a test of whether insurgency can survive within institutions designed precisely to prevent it. It asks whether one can bend the arc of history inside a party whose nefarious genius lies in its ability to absorb dissent rather than confront it. It stages, once again, the familiar American drama: how radical language becomes managerial grammar the moment power peers back and says, enter, but only if you behave.
It is a structural inquiry into how the Democratic Party functions as a containment architecture—a velvet noose that dresses obedience as participation. It is about how the socialist idiom, once spoken within the frame of its liberal, or "democratic" compromise, mutates into a rhetoric of affordability and inclusion, stripped of its capacity to defeat capitalist antagonism.
The Mamdani phenomenon reveals a pattern already visible in the trajectories of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: the progressive who enters the political arena to rupture the machine only to end up adopting the party line and circulating to manufacture their mass of consent for compromise. The story is not betrayal in the colloquial sense, but betrayal in the historical one—it is the betrayal of possibility inherent to liberal hegemony's architecture of containment.
Read more via Scalawag: Zohran Mamdani and the Sorcery of Soft Rebellion.
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