Samuel Earle, The Guardian:
Years of scandal and disappointment have left a void in our politics. But New York’s new mayor offers an alternative to more apathy: hope
On 1 January, to mark his inauguration as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani threw a block party. As he was sworn in outside city hall in front of a crowd of a few thousand of us, a nearby street in Manhattan was closed to traffic so that tens of thousands more could gather to watch the historic moment live on enormous screens. The weather – a cloudless blue sky and arctic winds – felt somehow fitting: a licence to dream and a warning against complacency.
Mayors don’t usually take office amid such a festival atmosphere. A smaller, more exclusive event is normally adequate. But a key feature of Mamdani’s rise has been the desire for mass participation in politics. There was no chance this day was going to pass without an open-invitation party.
Throughout his mayoral campaign, Mamdani found novel ways to include people in his movement. It began in November 2024 with a viral video taking to the streets to interview people in parts of Queens and the Bronx that had swung heavily to Donald Trump in the election. As his popularity grew, he inspired an army of volunteers for canvassing and door-knocking whom he eulogised in his speeches. In August of last year, he organised a city-wide scavenger hunt that thousands of people took part in. There was a football tournament not long after. After his victory in November, he immediately opened a jobs portal where people could submit their CV and area of interest, prompting 74,000 applications. In mid-December, he invited New Yorkers to speak with him about their problems and concerns in 15-minute slots, across 12 hours. No longer is politics “something that is done to us”, he declared in his victory speech. “Now, it is something that we do.”
These forms of participation are not trivial publicity stunts: they are as much a part of Mamdani’s rejection of the old neoliberal consensus as his universalist welfare policies are. For decades, major political parties across the west subscribed to a negative image of politics, in which government’s declared role was to get out of the way of private business and to help people only begrudgingly. In this framing, receiving welfare could feel like a sign of individual failure and participating in electoral politics like a waste of time. Political leaders themselves stoked disillusionment and suspicion toward their power. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” President Ronald Reagan famously declared. Former British prime minister Tony Blair felt compelled to say in 2000: “I don’t feel myself a politician even now.” As election turnouts fell or stalled, and political parties shed their partisan purpose and their memberships, a generalised feeling of depoliticisation and apathy set in. By 2006, the political scientist Peter Mair could aptly describe governing western democracies as “ruling the void”.
Mamdani’s remarkable achievement is for seeing that this “void” is full of interesting voices, overlapping
interests and shared yearnings – and for unashamedly stating that the government should be here to help them. His project is, in this sense, to transform the role politics plays in people’s lives. Enacting his universalist welfare reforms – free childcare, free buses for all and a rent freeze on all rent-stabilised apartments, free from any stigma about who “needs” it – is one part of the challenge. The other part is to continuously explore ways to include people in politics. It is a far harder task when governing than when campaigning, but one that Mamdani and his team see clearly. “I don’t think the campaign can end,” Mamdani said in a recent interview. “The same people who got us to this point, we want to keep moving forward with them.”
The inauguration event felt like both a triumphant culmination and a symbolic continuation of the campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders provided the supporting cast, as they had at various moments in the mayoral election. There were chants of “tax the rich”, the unofficial soundtrack of the campaign. Volunteer leads were given the bulk of the seats, and every attendant received a pamphlet with “a message from the mayor” that paid exclusive homage to their efforts. “We are able to gather together only because more than 104,000 of our friends and neighbours … gave their time and energy to this movement,” it read. For the finale, Mamdani’s closing speech provided both a love letter to New York and an ode to the power of collective action, heralding “a new era” of “big government”. “If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it,” he said.
Mamdani is far from the first politician to seek to answer this yearning. Since the 2008 financial crash,
spurred by social media and disillusionment with the major parties, various movements have arisen to meet this burgeoning desire for participation, this appetite for alternatives, across the political spectrum. Even the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage – with their mass rallies and social media fluency – give their supporters a feeling of inclusion and an appearance of an alternative. But the negative image of politics, which longs to rule a void, persists. Keir Starmer’s uniform unpopularity offers a warning of where this approach can lead.
Unlike Mamdani, Starmer has assumed that people want less politics. As he explained in January 2024, after 14 years of Tory misrule, people wanted “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”, because “the thing about populism” is that it “needs your full attention … and that’s exhausting, isn’t it?” In this vision, the best prime minister is one who lets us go about our business in peace once again. But the intended quiet didn’t last long, and soon all sorts of noisy actors rushed in to fill that silent void.
The assumption that people want less politics affirms the conflation of politics with disappointment, scandal and devious leadership, surrendering to the disillusionment of past decades. Mamdani has shown the opposite can be the case. Many people want more from politics, and more of it: a movement to believe in, work for, mobilise and socialise through – spurred by the dream of a collective life, not a quiet one. “It will be loud, it will be different,” Mamdani told the crowd. With the block party broadcasting his speech a few streets away, it sounded as if his words were echoing through the city. Even Manhattan’s imposing skyscrapers were standing to attention.
