This article has been published with: The populist America needs today
It’s not every day that a Muslim of Indian origin becomes the mayor of the world’s richest city—New York. But today, Zohran Mamdani, born in Uganda to Indian parents, raised in Queens and long seen as an outsider in American politics, pulled off what many called impossible.
In a city built by immigrants but ruled by elites, a man who once rapped about inequality and later worked as a tenant organiser fighting evictions now holds keys to the city hall.
Mamdani’s victory isn’t just his own. It’s a mirror held up to America, a country still wrestling with what it means to be “American.”
In a political landscape fractured by polarisation between the populist right and an exhausted liberal establishment, Mamdani has found resonance by talking about something both sides often forget, the cost of living. His promises of free bus rides, rent freezes, public grocery stores, and universal childcare sound almost utopian to his critics, but to many ordinary New Yorkers burdened by rent hikes and long commutes, they ring as necessary, even overdue.
For nearly a decade, political populism in the United States has worn a single face that of Donald Trump. His “America first” rhetoric, nationalist nostalgia, and resentment-driven movement have defined one half of the nation’s mood. But Mamdani’s win represents a very different kind of populism—one built not on fear and exclusion, but on empathy and inclusion.
Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t about identity politics, though identity was impossible to ignore. His very presence challenged the unspoken hierarchies of American powers. Yet, what propelled him wasn’t his biography, but his politics; one of survival.
One tells his followers that they have been robbed by outsiders, the other tells his voters that they have been forgotten by insiders. It is a subtle but radical difference, the shift from populism as protectionism to populism as participation.
That Mamdani openly identifies himself as a Democratic Socialist would have seemed unthinkable in the America of even a decade ago. Yet it reflects the slow transformation of political imagination among young voters who came at age through crisis like 9/11, 2008 financial crash and the pandemic each, chipping away at the myth that capitalism alone guarantees freedom.
Mamdani has revived socialism not as an imported ideology, but as an American inheritance rooted in the labour struggles, anti-war movements, and civil rights campaigns that have long coexisted with capitalism’s glare.
Still, his rise has unsettled many in the party. Centrists fear that his identity and socialist economics will be used by Trumpist to stoke old cultural divides ahead of the 2026 midterms. Yet the left within the party sees Mamdani what the Democrats have long lacked; moral clarity.
He talks not about “unity” as a slogan but about justice as a material condition. His message of affordability and inclusion gives populism back its original democratic meaning.
In that sense, Mamdani’s victory is less a footnote in New York’s political history than a window into America’s ideological future. It suggests that populism need not always carry the smell of nationalism. It can instead, be the language of a new social contract, one that redefines “the people” not by who they exclude, but by what they endure together.
The MAGA movement made anger the grammar of American politics. Mamdani’s populism makes solidarity it’s syntax. Both claim to speak for “the forgotten,” but only one seeks to ensure that no one is forgotten again.
