We New Yorkers in spirit have a new mayor and, demonstrating that Gotham is still the cultural capital of the world, we have seen how the general polarization of brains has caused a delusional echo of opinions to explode, painting the arrival of Zohran Mamdani at City Hall as the hopeful return of the antifa-anticapitalist-anti-etcetera left or, on the other side of the paranoid, as if the voters had favored the reincarnation of Bin Laden himself.
The reality, as usual, is much more prosaic, and we must begin by remembering something as simple as that Zohran Mamdani is a product as essentially Yankee as a Tomahawk missile. Although, thanks to Trumpism, the Democratic Party has been forced to shift towards centrist (or almost right-wing) positions, making a self-proclaimed socialist leader seem like a Martian, Mamdani's history and thought are as predictable as mac and cheese.
Before getting hysterical to proclaim advents or the Apocalypse, when getting to know a politician, one should do something as simple (and as common) as asking who their parents are and where they studied. Mamdani's biography is quite explanatory in that sense, because although born in Kampala, his Americanism comes from the mystique (and counterculture logic) caused by globalization.
The new mayor of Manhattan and surrounding neighborhoods is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, professor of African Studies at Columbia, specializing in the permanence of colonial structures stuck within supposedly free African states, and Mira Nair, a good filmmaker of movies where Indian cultural heritage is chewed so that Westerners can digest it without problems. Despite spending time in Uganda, Mamdani is a prototypical American, son of the economic dream of quite wealthy immigrants who now see how their offspring cannot afford an apartment.
In parallel, and far from being the working class hero that the Catalan left would want to re-enact the Colau phenomenon in Barcelona, Mamdani was a boy who had the comfortable existence that almost always prevails on the Upper West Side; he studied at the Bank Street School for Children (that is, one of those schools where a lot of cool racial diversity is worked on but where the Fifth Grade at this precise moment costs almost seventy thousand bucks), then at the public Bronx High School of Science (where he fell in love with the expert professor in unionism and activist Marc Kagan), finishing his African studies at Bowdoin College in Maine, a private university where he continued the intellectual spirit of his progenitor with a thesis dedicated to Fanon's post-colonialism and Rousseau's thought; the latter, at home we know him as the culprit of all the dreadful things that happen in our world...
I review all this to highlight that the ideological tradition in which Mamdani's political career has been woven is nothing new and is strongly intertwined with the imaginary of Americans. In other words, whoever sees in the future star mayor both a radical woke and a Chavista communist is somewhat disoriented. In fact, his star measures ---namely, the rent freeze in the rent-stabilized apartments category, free buses and universal healthcare for children--- could be ideas shared by a Nordic center politician or even by some leader of the Germanic right. This does not mean that Mamdani is not an obvious counterpoint to the nativism promoted by Donald Trump (who, it is also worth remembering, has a quite loyal immigrant vote!) and that his tactic of bringing down Trumpism through greater radicalism cannot change the course of politics in the US.
However, as happened with the Comuns in Barcelona, Mamdani will have to clash with the logical limitations of a very ambitious program that has not yet explained how it will be funded, beyond the refrain of tax the rich. He will also have to nuance his positions regarding city institutions that are a complete counterpower, such as the NYPD, an armed group of men that outnumbers many armies in the world and has been a key factor in each and every one of the mayoralties that have preceded the present one. As for immigration, I would say that in New York the issue will change little because, unlike our tribe and its status as a stateless region, the cultural assimilation capacity of this city is still prodigious. Be that as it may, Mamdani's impact on national politics will be limited, because a New York Democrat has nothing to do with a leftist militant from Wyoming or Oklahoma.
Barcelona shares with New York the increase in rental prices and other problems, but in Manhattan a fortune is amassed that we cannot even dream of.The infatuation of Barcelonans with Mamdani is logical, because we love anything that happens in oursister city. But its translation to our country is difficult, not only because he is a proudly happy left-wing leader with the market economy, but because the participation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in Yankee politics is already more than normalized. To put it in a more prosaic way, New Yorkers do not suffer for the health of English despite living in the most multilingual city in the world, simply because ---at a cultural level--- everyone must jump through the hoop of the common language.
Barcelona shares with New York the increase in rental prices and other problems of the domestic economy, but in the offices and cultural centers of Manhattan a fortune is amassed that we cannot even dream of here. Catalans and Barcelonans, unfortunately, are New Yorkers without an army... But the most curious thing about the case is to see again how The City has an astonishing capacity to integrate opposites, since Zohran Mamdani and Donald Trump are two sons of the same Queens neighborhood. May New York continue like this, pacifying the wars of the world, and may it be for many centuries.
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