Intervention is too busy on all fronts to resume publications at the moment but it is sparing just a few minutes to celebrate the victory of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York. His victory is not just an electoral one but the defeat of what The Washington Post has aptly called “Trump’s angry nationalist project”. His victory, in that sense, signals the unravelling of right wing nationalist illiberalism and is thus worth celebrating across the world.
The defeat of bigotry and angry, right wing nationalism
All attempts at labelling Mamdani an Islamicist failed disastrously as New Yorkers simply ignored a desperate, hollow campaign of calumny. Again, The Washington Post is right to dismiss the victory of Mamdani as a case of ‘Clash of Civilisations’. His rise is not even a clash of ideologies but a clash of discourses or visions of how and for whom the world should work.
Intervention would mention the one most key lesson that immediately shoots up from Mamdani’s victory. It is the constructedness of democracy. Anyone who wants democracy should start by outlining his or her notion of it because there is no such thing as democracy standing there already defined and fixed in meaning. Any sense of democracy as a checklist of metrics is liberal falsehood and quackery.
It is interesting, of course, that Mamdani is an African, the significance of which is not in identity in the rigid sense many people understand it. In this context, the significance lies in a global subaltern (an objectionable word though) penetrating and delivering a humbling electoral message to the establishment in the contest for power over the world’s most mega metropolis – New York City.
