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Unlike too many on the left, I am not a Bernie Sanders fan. But I was deeply moved by the image of him swearing in Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. It’s an historic moment for a million reasons that we are only now beginning to unpack. What follows below is less a sustained, considered examination of the history of how we got here and more of a set of impressions. Like many on the left, I will undoubtedly have criticisms of Mamdani in the next few years, but I wanted to record and acknowledge the beauty of this moment. My description of canvassing and waiting in the cold is drawn from several different accounts. I have never canvassed for Mamdani or in any way helped in his campaign—I don’t write that to distance myself from him, but to make clear that I had absolutely nothing to do with his enormous success: that belongs to the thousands of dedicated volunteers, staff, and others who did the hard work for so long.
I don’t support Bernie Sanders in everything he does or says. And, yes, there are Berniebros, and they are obnoxious, sexist pigs. I recall when the Bernie worship began, and falling out with people because I seemed to be the only one who had issues with him. Years later, he’s now praising Donald Trump for his immigration politics, sneering at those who dare bring up abortion, and he refused to call events in Gaza a genocide for the longest time. He is too quick to support politicians like Graham Platner—despite the many issues with the candidate that some of us on the left have pointed out.
Sanders is as close as we can get to a politician who talks about inequality and a better world—but he also perpetuates that same inequality when he leaves immigrants and women behind.
But unlike too many on the left, I don’t demand pure politicians—I demand that we keep pushing politicians to do what we tell them to do. And we have to keep working on and forging our vision for the left. Sanders was, undeniably, prevented from his goal to be president by a corrupt and losing Democratic party, yes. It is also the case that the left needs to move beyond him, as Lily Sánchez has argued. But he has persisted, like the blasted, stubborn, blessed codger that he is—we can say with certainty that he is a major reason we have Zohran Mamdani sworn in, by Sanders, as a socialist mayor of New York: the first Muslim African of Indian descent in that position.
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I don’t think of Sanders as a leftist because I think that anyone with his politics on immigration and abortion is not on the left, and I am sick of people screaming, “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” Anyone who praises current immigration policies is not on the left. Anyone who does not understand why abortion rights is an economic issue is not on the left. But he matters and continues to speak up about the oligarchy, yes. I just wish he understood that you cannot dismantle capitalism and its evils without understanding that it moves through actual bodies—and those are bodies in Gaza, those are trans people, those are people forced to give birth to children they will never want but have to take care of for at least 18 years, resulting in a loss of income and opportunity, and those are people forced to work in fields for no healthcare and $5 an hour if they are lucky. In many ways, on such matters, Sanders’s politics are not that different from the kind espoused by guilty white liberals who would like to keep the status quo.
As for Mamdani: I think it is fine and even necessary to keep a critical eye on him, but I also think armchair leftists have no clue what it means to run the world’s financial centre. Some of you have never organised a lemonade stand but think you know how to run NYC. Yay for you. He will make decisions we hate, and we should call him out on them—like it or not, he’s not just the mayor of New York because, well, New York. I have no patience for words like “grace” but I think we can and should be more elastic, just as we should demand more from a socialist mayor than we could ever expect from Eric Adams (whose term will be a mystery for future historians to solve). Mamdani is also smart enough to know that social media trolls will not be able to decide his politics unless he gives them permission to do so, and neither will the words of a 250-year-old sitting somewhere in Chicago, hurling her thunderbolts into the skies.
The past is never just the past: sometimes, if we stand still long enough, on a bitterly cold winter’s day when it feels like we will never move our legs again because they are frozen in place, after a year of constant movement and knocking on doors until our knuckles seemed to bleed—sometimes we can see the past move with us into the future.
Yasmin Nair is no relation.
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See also:
New York: The Invention of an Imaginary City
Who’s Left?: A Taxonomy of Sorts
On Bernie Sanders and the Left’s Fantasy about Class
Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith Podcast: “Why is the LEFT FETISHIZING Graham Platner?” (w/Branko Marcetic, Matthew Hoh, & Yasmin Nair)
Image: screenshot of ABC’s coverage of the inauguration.
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