Sometimes you get what you want. Not often. For leftists, maybe once a generation. But sometimes, you find someone who can both win power, and do what you would do with it. Someone who starts out their victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs. Who doesn’t apologize, doesn’t triangulate, doesn’t immediately set about doing less than when they are given the chance to do something. Who looks at the biggest villain and says, “we’re coming for you.” Who looks at the people and says, “I am you.”
Bona fide moments of transformation like this are rare and terrifying, their sense of possibility and wonder freighted immediately with the worry that it could all somehow collapse. Belief can nurture these moments into something bigger, just as a lack of it can choke them to death. When I interviewed New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani a year ago, I thought I was doing the fringe candidate a favor. That was not the case. Since he won the Democratic primary in June, he has attracted a level of press interest comparable only to presidential campaigns. He has acquired the halo of fame, the omnipresent scrum of cameras and aides and gasping passersby that indicates a common agreement that this man is something special. It is a force field that can’t be bought with money or conjured up with brute force. It emerges when you inspire a lot of people to believe that the world can be something more than they previously thought it could be.
On Monday night, the night before Election Day, Mamdani made his final pre-election appearance at a canvassing event in a playground in Astoria, Queens. Half an hour beforehand there was already a full array of cameras arranged in a crescent around the podium where he would be standing. Local reporters and photographers jostled and elbowed one another and said “Your whole head is in my shot” to the other reporters and photographers. The candidate arrived and hugged and shook hands with all of the political world people who had, at long last, fallen in line, having accepted the inevitability of his ascent. He had shaved his dark beard down lower than his mustache, as if to get aerodynamic. For the first time I could remember, he looked weary. How many miles had he walked across this city’s streets over the past year, dragging a swelling army behind him? When the time came to shout out questions, I found that I didn’t have anything else to ask. All I could think of was: “Can you do it?”