David Austin Walsh at the Boston Review:
Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor of New York City. Amid the chaos unleashed by Trump in the first weeks of 2026, it can be easy to lose sight of the truly seismic shift in politics his mayoralty represents.
To recap: an obscure, thirty-four-year-old state assemblyman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who a year ago could barely fill a seminar room at New York University, beat both incumbent mayor Eric Adams and former governor Andrew Cuomo by running on an unapologetically progressive ticket, critical of ICE and Israel as much as rents being too damn high. India Walton came close to a similar upset in Buffalo four years ago, but this time the socialists prevailed. In his inaugural address on New Year’s Day, sworn in by Bernie Sanders and quoting Fiorello La Guardia, Mamdani spoke of building a city “‘far greater and more beautiful’ for the hungry and the poor.” Handing out free tickets to a theater festival earlier this month, he spoke of his vision of a city “where we make it possible for working people to afford lives of joy, of art, of rest, of expression.” When’s the last time you heard a politician talk like this?
More here.
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