New York Reruns: What Mamdani Means for New York
New York flirts with a familiar disaster as Zohran Mamdani rides Rousseauvian rhetoric toward the same ruinous script that doomed revolutions past.
By Roger Kimball
November 2, 2025
As the world waits for New York’s first Islamo-Communist mayor—hailed alike by the overtly malicious and the terminally stupefied—it may be worth stepping back to ask what the advent of Zohran Mamdani, the pampered 34-year-old rich kid who was born in Uganda, tells us about the decay of liberalism.
In many ways, Mamdani—who, as I write this, is a comfortable 10-15 points ahead in the polls—is just the latest avatar of the AOC-Ilhan Omar wing of the Democratic party. He loves talking about (re)distributing the wealth of others, defunding the police, arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, and penalizing “landlords,” which last is just one of his many code words for Jews.
But haven’t you seen this play before? Don’t we know how it ends? Yes, we have, and yes, we do. It ends badly.
Remember the intoxication that greeted the French Revolution in 1789 or the Russian Revolution in 1917. At first, it was all “what bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.” But the bliss quickly soured and turned rancid.
Mamdani does not quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, his utopian politics owe a great deal to Rousseau’s hothouse sentimentalities—and their more somber incarnation in the theories of his disciple Karl Marx. For more than two centuries, Rousseau’s mesmerizing rhetoric has provided despots of all kinds with a means of promoting conformity while ostensibly praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips.
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https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/02/new-york-reruns-what-mamdani-means-for-new-york/
