Free bus rides with a dash of racism: Is New York’s potential new mayor the future of the left?

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is tailor-made for dopey white kids with six figures owing on their arts degrees and mummies and daddies still helping them pay the rent, writes James Morrow.

Free buses, free Palestine. What could go wrong?

As it turns out, plenty – though so far, it seems voters in New York City haven’t fully thought this one through.

Instead, they have set up what may be the most consequential and most watched election in the US this year that will help chart the future course not only of America’s Democrats but of left-wing parties around the English speaking world.

Last month, Zohran Mamdani, a young Shi’ite Muslim and self described “democratic socialist” stormed home in the city’s Democrat primary after seeing off his establishment challenger, Andrew Cuomo.

This puts him on the ballot in November’s general election, running at the top of the ticket for the party that normally has the home field advantage on the sort of radical platform that has become the norm for younger Democrat politicians.

New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (right) has had no qualms about picking the scabs of racial and religious resentment in famously diverse New York. Picture: Adam Gray / GETTY IMAGES

On the face of it, Mamdani defies explanation.

He’s just 33 years old and has only been a US citizen for the past seven of them.

He was born in Uganda, though his Indian parents had spent years in exile after the dictator Idi Amin expelled Indians and Pakistanis from the country in 1972.

Zohran Mamdan’s policies are tailor-made for dopey white kids with six figures owing on their arts degrees and mummies and daddies still helping them pay the rent. Picture: M. Santiago / GETTY IMAGES

So far, so American Dream, but there’s a twist.

Despite coming up against this hard edge of Uganda’s identity politics, racial division ultimately became something of a family business for the Mamdanis.

Mamdani’s father became a professor of postcolonial studies at Columbia University (home to some of the most extreme pro-Palestinian encampments post-October 7) and Mamdani himself has a long, deep and wide contempt for Israel.

Far from running from this record, in his campaign Mamdani has had no qualms about picking the scabs of racial and religious resentment in famously diverse New York.

Besides refusing to disavow phrases like “globalise the intifada”, Mamdani has also called for the property tax burden to be shifted to economically prosperous “white” neighbourhoods.

Ironically, this is the same logic of resentment that led to his family’s expulsion from Uganda, though when challenged on this last week he stood by the idea, adding, “I don’t think we should have billionaires”.

Zohran Mamdani's habit of eating with his hands on his campaign videos to emphasise how cool and exotic he is has worked a treat with his bandwagon followers.

Not only that, he’s for all sorts of things that might sound good for a nanosecond to anyone who doesn’t have a passing familiarity with how socialism goes every time it’s tried: Free buses, freezes on rents, and even government owned grocery stores.

And he sells all this with bright, buzzy videos (did I mention his mother is a filmmaker?) with upbeat messaging that often feature him eating Indian food with his hands on public transport – a clever way to subtly underline his not-another-white-guy exotic background.

In short, it’s as if he had been tailor-made to appeal to dopey white kids with six figures owing on their arts degrees and mummies and daddies in the suburbs still helping them pay the rent in Brooklyn.

Which is not too far off a description of his most enthusiastic supporters.

But as Mandani’s foes – among them Republicans and what’s left of the city’s working classes who see straight through the act – coalesce around running current mayor Eric Adams as an independent, the race is exposing deeper fissures in American life.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, an independent, announced his re-election campaign on the steps of City Hall days after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic nomination. Picture: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images/AFP

Sure, Donald Trump’s return may have, on the surface, slaughtered woke.

Just look at the number of big corporates who, in the past six months, have decided all those bells and whistles diversity programs weren’t actually helping the bottom line.

But far from deactivating the left or encouraging Democrats to move back to the centre to reclaim middle of the road voters lost to Trump, the opposite has occurred.

Democrats themselves have made “resistance” their brand, not in the name of making America great again in their own way but in the name of tearing it down.

On Monday, a new poll from the highly respected Gallup organisation found that just 36 per cent of Democrats say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be Americans, as opposed to nine out of 10 Republicans.

Overall Generation Z (those born after 1996, Mamdani’s target audience) was found to be the least patriotic of any generation, no matter their party: Just 41 per cent of adults in this cohort were “extremely” or “very” proud Americans.

All this presages more, not less division in the US – and a Democrat party that may swing hard towards its own brand of Trumpish outsider, populist politics.

Meanwhile, the city and the country waits for November.

Perhaps the best that could be hoped for in a Mamdani win is that the rest of the country (and the world, including Australia) will get a very high profile look at what happens when race-based socialism is implemented in America’s biggest city and say, “fuggedaboudit”.

Originally published as Free bus rides with a dash of racism: Is New York’s potential new mayor the future of the left?