New York

Subterms

    Latest story

    238 Shares30 Views

    Yes, New York will soon be under new management. But Zohran Mamdani is just the start | Carys Afoko

    by

    A relatively unknown thirtysomething parachuted on to the national stage and into high political office. Energising to some of the Democratic base but lacking support from the party establishment. Not Zohran Mamdani but Lina Khan, who Joe Biden appointed to chair the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2021 when she was just 32. Khan, who left her role at the FTC when Trump returned to the White House, is now one of five women appointed to the mayor-elect of New York’s transition team.Khan is the most exciting pick for a few reasons. She entered the FTC with an ambitious mandate to transform the government agency, broaden its focus to increase scrutiny of corporate mergers and do more to protect consumers – and got results. She brought down the price of inhalers (routinely being sold for hundreds of dollars) by tackling price gouging by pharmaceutical companies. She blocked a huge supermarket merger and returned more than $60m to Amazon drivers in unpaid tips. All of her achievements were delivered in four years, while navigating a bureaucracy that was sometimes hostile to her leadership.Mamdani has a mandate from New Yorkers, but he can expect opposition from the rich and powerful, as well as many Democrats, to some of his flagship policies. Khan, who made her name calling out big tech monopolies, knows first-hand what it’s like to have influential opponents. After she was confirmed in post at the FTC with bipartisan support, Meta and Amazon tried to get her to recuse herself from investigating them. In the 2024 presidential race, two billionaire Democratic donors publicly called on Kamala Harris to fire Khan if she became president. The Daily Show host Jon Stewart claimed that Apple was resistant to him even interviewing the FTC chair on his podcast because of her views. Big tech and Wall Street execs have already been grumbling about her latest appointment, seeing it as a “shot across the bow”. What better sign that the mayor-elect is on the right track? More

    More stories

    • 213 Shares38 Views

      in US Politics

      Gen Z’s ‘first lady’: how Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, speaks to a new era of political fashion

      by

      It is the most traditional of assets for any ambitious young male politician: a fashionably dressed, beautiful young wife. But as with everything else about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, his wife, Rama Duwaji, represents a new era of politics which speaks to a new generation of voters.Married to the soon-to-be leader of the biggest city in the US, Duwaji, 28, is arguably the US’s first generation Z “first lady”. Duwaji is an artist and illustrator of Syrian heritage, whose work explores themes of Arab identity, female experience and social justice. Working in paint, line-drawing, ceramics and animation, she graduated with a master’s degree in fine art from New York’s School of Visual Arts in 2024. Her thesis was titled Sahtain!, an Arabic expression which translates as “bon appetit”, and explored the communal act of making and sharing a dish and its role in Middle Eastern culture.View image in fullscreenIt is fair to assume that one does not pursue a career as a socially conscious artist contributing line drawings to niche left-leaning publications with the aim of becoming a global celebrity. But Duwaji’s life took an unexpected turn when, in 2021, she met Mamdani. The couple married in February this year, about eight months before Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, and Duwaji was thrust into the spotlight as New York City’s 28-year-old first lady. In the week since Mamdani’s triumph, Vogue headlines have included “Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji Are Making Finding Love on Hinge Seem Possible Again” and “Fall’s Next Cool-Girl Haircut Is Officially the Rama”.View image in fullscreenFirst lady is one of the most high-profile spots in US politics and culture. From Eleanor Roosevelt’s civil rights advocacy to Hillary Clinton’s healthcare reforms, the political wives of the White House have long been impactful players on the political scene. As the first lady of a city, rather than the nation, the stakes are more muted for Duwaji – but the buzz around her husband is shining a spotlight on both of the new inhabitants of Gracie Mansion.New York City last had a first lady when Chirlane McCray, Bill de Blasio’s wife, oversaw a portfolio of mental health programs with a budget of $850m. (Eric Adams, the current mayor, is unmarried.) But the position has a significance that extends far beyond policy. First ladies are expected to fulfil the role of America’s sweetheart, embodying shared values and semaphoring tone with every public appearance. Michelle Obama’s recent comments, characterising the media’s fixation with her toned arms in sleeveless dresses as a strategy to “otherize” her as a Black woman, illustrate the extent to which the first lady discourse can become a cultural battleground around the status of women and people of colour, while the ongoing psychodrama about Melania Trump’s non-appearance on the cover of American Vogue speaks to an enduring fascination with the first lady as a poster girl for the US itself.View image in fullscreenDuwaji’s victory-speech look was sober: all-black, with a high neck and calf-length skirt, and silver jewellery. But her low-key style did not deflect a feverish online reaction, with her chic dark bob and vintage-style boatneck top bringing instant comparisons to Audrey Hepburn. The outfit was notable for being consistent with Duwaji’s personal style, rather than a cut-and-paste political wife style. (“Rama Duwaji Is New York City’s First Lady, and She’s Not Wearing a Sheath Dress,” noted Harper’s Bazaar magazine approvingly.) Fashion industry paper Women’s Wear Daily reported her style choices under the headline “Rama Duwaji’s Election Night Look Bridges Brooklyn and the Middle East”, noting that Duwaji’s denim top, embellished with laser-etched embroidery, was by the Palestinian-Jordanian designer Zeid Hijazi. The choice of a Palestinian designer was widely interpreted as a deliberate and political choice by Duwaji, who has expressed clear and vocal support for the plight of Gaza. Duwaji’s velvet and lace Ulla Johnson skirt and silver Eddie Borgo earrings showed support for two independent New York designers drawn from outside the traditional high-status Manhattan names – Oscar de la Renta, Carolina Herrera and Michael Kors – with whom modern first ladies have been most associated.View image in fullscreenIn their style and in the story of their relationship, Mamdani and Duwaji blend youthful energy with traditional elements. Mamdani maximises his youthful advantage as a digital native and uses social media as a political broadcast channel, but does so while wearing the most traditional of outfits: a dark suit and tie. Duwaji, likewise, steers clear of the first lady cosplay of a pastel skirt suit, but her quirky retro-tinged elegance has a ladylike tone, albeit one forged in the vintage boutiques of Brooklyn rather than the department stores of Fifth Avenue. She has a taste for chunky flat boots and oversized white shirts, layered necklaces and winged black eyeliner. These are recognisable as the authentic style choices of a 28-year-old woman, but they do not present as challenging or radical. Likewise, their love story is both strikingly modern – the two met on Hinge – and solidly traditional in being formalised by marriage. Wedding photos shared on Mamdani’s Instagram show the couple holding hands on the subway as they travel to city hall, Duwaji wearing a vintage coat and her trademark flat boots with a short white dress, Mamdani carrying an umbrella. Their combination of romcom-worthy New York spirit and down-to-earth, affordability-conscious relatability has charmed the public.View image in fullscreenIn the ultimate cultural flex, Duwaji has already had a vibe shift named after her. “Aloof wife autumn” is trending on social media after a New York Post headline reported that the new mayor-elect’s “aloof wife … quietly steered his campaign from behind the scenes”. Duwaji’s husband is conspicuously absent from her Instagram page, where she posts street selfies in chic monochrome outfits and “things I saw that made me want to make art”. Her creative purpose and cool-toned self-possession are in striking contrast to the docile, gingham-aproned “tradwife” aesthetic that has stormed the TikTok algorithms in recent years.As a visual artist, Duwaji is aware of the power of image-making. She is also comfortable moving in the circles of the more avant garde end of the fashion industry, recently attending a catwalk show for Diotima, which is helmed by Rachel Scott, an American designer of Jamaican heritage who is a rising industry star. Scott, who dedicated the collection to “the honour of all displaced persons”, said that she invited Duwaji because she was “intrigued by her work and her personal style”.The stylist Bailey Moon, who helped Dr Jill Biden with her wardrobe throughout her tenure as first lady, was last week reported to have been working with Mamdani and Duwaji. Bailey, who is also credited with the recent high-fashion makeover of actor Pamela Anderson, is an experienced political stylist, who told Vogue that clothes “are part of the conclusion people make of an event or an appearance”. However, Moon told the New York Post that he was not on the Mamdani payroll, noting that he “shared some advice” but that no fee was charged.View image in fullscreenFor many young New York voters, who have not until now felt themselves represented in civic life, Duwaji’s style is more than ornament. It represents a shift in what public leadership can look like, and speaks to voters who are accustomed to absorbing news and understanding values through visual clues and messages. The biggest city in the US is about to rewrite the first lady myth for a new generation. More

    • 188 Shares66 Views

      in US Politics

      Zohran Mamdani’s writer on crafting a historic victory speech: ‘In New York, inspiration is everywhere’

      by

      In his victory speech after winning the New York mayoral election last week, Zohran Mamdani came out swinging.The speech included, among other dramatic flourishes, a reference to the socialist titan Eugene Debs, shoutouts to the city’s “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses”, tributes to Jawaharlal Nehru and Fiorello La Guardia, sprinkles of Arabic – and it was all delivered with the cadence and command of a hip-hop emcee. Many who were listening could not help but wonder: how the hell did he pull that off?A healthy portion of the credit should go to Julian Gerson, the speechwriter on the Mamdani campaign who typifies the young, leftwing lieutenants powering this insurgent operation – a 29-year-old outer-borough dweller (in his case, Brooklyn) with unerring message discipline. He is especially unabashed when it comes to the words he puts in his boss’s mouth that draw inspiration from socialist greats and the multicultural city that the Mamdani campaign holds dear.“When this campaign has sung the most is when it feels like a love letter to New York,” Gerson told the Guardian.To write the victory speech, Gerson began working a week in advance, collaborating with Mamdani and his campaign consultant Morris Katz on overarching themes, before locking himself in his apartment until he had a draft ready for Mamdani to review on the Saturday before the election. (Mandani never saw a draft of the concession speech, which Gerson said was “not fun to write”.) “Push yourself to think of speechwriting as more than just the written word,” he said Mamdani told him – which is to say the 34-year-old Muslim and Indian Ugandan state assemblyman was already thinking about the space his victory would occupy in the annals of history. Gerson threw out a couple names he hoped to quote in the speech – and recalls Mamdani responding: “‘OK, but can you make sure to quote Eugene Debs?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, he’s already on the list.’”Gerson, the son of a Texas-born mediator with strong ties to the local Democratic scene and a Belgian NYU professor, did most of his growing up in the West Village and attended the prestigious Dalton school in Manhattan. One early exposure to professional writing came when his father, Stéphane, published a book about his younger brother Owen dying in a rafting accident at age eight. “It was a very formative, very hard part of my childhood that taught me how to express myself through the written word,” said Gerson, who gave notes on early drafts.View image in fullscreenGerson got his start in politics as a high school summer intern in Mike Bloomberg’s New York mayoral administration. For university, he went to Middlebury College in Vermont, where he served as the communications director for the Middlebury College Democrats. After graduation, he worked for Manhattan congressman Jerry Nadler – whom he commends for his bravery leading the first impeachment of Donald Trump and for voting against the Iraq war – and did a two-year stint ghostwriting for New York governor Kathy Hochul.Gerson joined the Mamdani campaign in March as political director, soliciting endorsements from elected officials across the state while working with Mamdani to deepen his relationship with a panoply of constituents across the city. “A lot of that was figuring out, how do we get him into parts of Black New York? How do you have him speaking with gay and trans New Yorkers?” Those ground-level experiences wound up supplying Gerson with steady fodder for speeches that would pull straight from the communities Mamdani was courting.For the victory speech, Gerson found the opening Debs quote – “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” also cribbed by Martin Luther King – inside William Safire’s speech compendium titled Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. The quote comes from a speech made when the labor organizer and perennial Socialist party candidate was sentenced to prison in 1918 for denouncing the US’s involvement in the first world war. “That’s it!” Gerson recalls saying when he came upon it.It was in many ways inevitable that the speech would draw comparisons to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential victory address in Chicago’s Grant park, widely regarded as one of the greatest orations in modern American history. He called it “a formative memory of what a speech can mean and how it can speak to people”, he said. “It was the only speech I really read in depth before I started writing.”Like Obama’s speechwriters, some of whom Gerson said he spoke to for advice, Gerson enjoys the benefit of writing for a deft multimedia performer. In the days leading up to election night, Gerson subbed in for Mamdani to give his voice a break. “At a certain point I would get into it and try to give a performance, and it’s crazy how different and how much better the speech is when you have somebody who just has this innate talent for knowing when to pause, knowing which syllables to emphasize. The most successful speechwriter-principal relationships are those where it’s close to a partnership, where they engage with the material really intensively and make it theirs.”Obama’s many rhetorical imitators in the Democratic party – US senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro – latch on to his pentecostal intonations in their public speaking. But Mamdani, who once pursued a rap career under the name Mr Cardamom and who still psyches himself up for work by playing Many Men by 50 Cent (a vocal critic of Mamdani’s plan to tax the rich), embraces the language and swagger of hip-hop. The kiss-off he delivered to rival Andrew Cuomo in his victory speech – wishing him “only the best in private life” while quoting his father, Mario, the former New York governor, without attribution (“A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose”) – was a mic-drop moment straight out of a New York rap cypher.“We all know Mr Cardamom exists in the world,” Gerson said. “But when you’re in the midst of a campaign, you have to shave off parts of your life. First goes exercise, then reading, then grocery shopping – until you’re hoping you just make it to election day with laundry. Cultural consumption shrinks too, but music can still fill the liminal space.”View image in fullscreenGerson works in his own musical tastes, too. For a May rally, he drew inspiration from a song by the Chilean American electronic musician Nicolas Jaar’s band Darkside, using a Spanish lyric: si no funciona, no me diga si no funciona (translation: “if it doesn’t work, don’t tell me that it works”) – to set the tone for the rally speech Mamdani gave last month assailing Trump’s agenda. The campaign’s impulse to tie its populist ideas to musical references is a throwback to the community building and social activism that gave rise to hip-hop’s birth in the Bronx.Mamdani’s victory speech was not a universal hit, of course. CNN pundit Van Jones was among the critics who took issue with a speech he described as “sharp” and combative. “I think he missed a chance tonight to open up and bring more people into the tent,” Jones said.Gerson makes no apologies. “In response to Van Jones: this campaign and this mayoralty will absolutely be inclusive to every single New Yorker. Zohran had that final line in his long list of thank yous where he said: ‘Many of you voted for me, others of you did not and many didn’t vote at all – and I want to be the mayor for each of you.’ To New Yorkers, there’s a genuine eagerness to serve and prove that we’re going to follow through and that this is going to be a great four years.’”Mamdani and Gerson wanted New Yorkers to come away from the victory speech feeling as if they would also have an important part to play in the new administration, and that no suggestion was too small. That includes an Arabic line that made it into Gerson’s final draft – ana minkum wa ilaykum, which can translate to “I am of you and for you.” ” One of the “uncles” in Mamdani’s Astoria neighborhood pitched it to Mamdani while he was there shooting a campaign video in Arabic.“When you’re looking for inspiration, you have to look everywhere,” Gerson said. “Fortunately, we live in New York, inspiration is everywhere, and people are loud and eager to share it.” More

    • 213 Shares66 Views

      in US Politics

      In New York, Zohran Mamdani showed how it’s done: ‘identity politics’ can win elections | Nesrine Malik

      by

      It is inevitable that too much will be laid on Zohran Mamdani’s head. So large is the vacuum on the left of politics that his victory will occupy an outsized space for progressives beyond New York City. And so, before I lay too much on his head myself, some caveats. New York is a specific place. It has a specific demographic and economic profile. And Mamdani is a man of a specific background, racial, political and religious. But with that out of the way, I think the successful practice of “identity politics” during his campaign offers some universal lessons.I put identity politics in quote marks because the term now means little that is universally agreed upon. Broadly, it has come to mean something derogatory, kind of in the same way that “wokeness” has. It increasingly has negative connotations: a political appeal to race or other markers of identity that is shallow, rooted in perpetual victimhood, focused only on representation and disconnected from material reality. Seen this way, identity politics is not about universal goals, such as lifting people out of poverty and so mobilising broad coalitions of voters, but simply about visibility.But identity politics as an organising political force has its origins in precisely the opposite idea. Coined by the Black feminist socialist organisation the Combahee River Collective in 1977, identity politics was defined as a path to a liberation that could only come about through the understanding that systems oppress many different people along the lines of their identity, and so could only be dismantled if all groups worked together. “We believe,” the collective declared, “that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity”, but that “we also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.”That “simultaneous experience” is what I am talking about here. Mamdani tapped into that. He rooted his campaign solidly in the experience of being a New Yorker, and how the city needed to be made more affordable, then expanded that to include all the ways in which different groups live that experience. He released campaigning videos in Urdu, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic, and consistently made all of them about a retail economic message: rent freezes, free buses, universal childcare, making New York a place to raise your children and build small businesses. Then he threw in a bespoke little twist. In his Arabic message he quipped that something more controversial than his political message is his belief that the knafeh, an Arab dessert, is better on Steinway Street in Queens than it is in New Jersey. Talk about hitting a sweet spot.Including the languages of underrepresented identities is an exercise in enfranchisement. He quoted the Arabic phrase ana minkum wa alaikum – “I am of you and for you” – in his victory speech, and named those “forgotten by the politics of our city”, the “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties”.He combined that with being in the places that working-class people, many of whom are people of colour, occupy. Visiting those on the taxi ranks and working the late-night shifts, he forged a powerful metaphor of a city that is kept going by those who labour in the dark. And he drew that all together by bringing his own identity, as he himself put it, “into the light”. A Muslim who grew up in the shadows of Islamophobia, he suffered an outrageously racist campaign against him, but resisted the pressure to play down his identity in order to fit in, to succeed. “No longer will I live in the shadows,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThose shadows are vast and, in this moment, encompass not only Mamdani, but huge swathes of people across all identities living under a regime of fear, economic struggle, deportations, suffocation of freedom of speech and an entire political establishment that has made bullying and cruelty its modus operandi. The coalition that Mamdani built, across all ethnicities, became about closing the yawning gap between people and power. In a revealing contrast to establishment Democrat politicians, when Mamdani was heckled last week over his position on Gaza, he did not say, as Kamala Harris did when she was heckled, “I’m speaking”. Mamdani smiled and said: “I want you to be able to afford this city too, my brother.”But there is something else about Mamdani’s approach that reveals how identity done right is generative. His is a politics that is forged and defined by being on the margins, but not as a single individual who wants to escape alone. Those who see their identity as a way to become part of an establishment that can then hold them up as exemplars of inclusive politics will always have limited appeal, and therefore limited success as changemakers. To see those margins, racial, economic and political, as spaces in which a majority can be mobilised, as spaces where people don’t want to hear about victimhood but justice, is to create coalitions and escape together. It is to reveal to the voting public that the problem is not particular racisms or prejudices, but an entire system that excludes all those who don’t have capital in all its forms.That message resonates with the college-educated white parents who are struggling with childcare costs, as well as the immigrant taxi driver struggling to pay rent. But above all, ironically, Mamdani exemplified the virtues of the American “melting pot”, a nation of immigrants at the sharp end of capitalism who together increasingly recognise all the ways in which the country is failing to live up to its ideals. All the ways in which Mamdani has been fought, not only by the right but by his own party, prove that American liberal politics has long lost its way in its service to capital and its preening approach to identity. What works in New York doesn’t necessarily map perfectly on to the rest of the US and beyond, but Mamdani’s win is a reminder that the people, whatever their identities, all want one thing – leaders who are of them, and for them.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

    • 225 Shares41 Views

      in US Politics

      They flew to New York to help Mamdani – now they want to bring the hope to LA

      by

      While the excitement for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has radiated through New York, his win has also energized young activists across the country – particularly some in Los Angeles, who flew to the east coast to canvass for Mamdani and now want to bring their experiences westward.Standing near the poll site at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Neda Davarpanah – a screenwriter and actor based in Los Angeles – was inspired by Mamdani’s campaign for mayor so she flew out to New York in late October to canvass on the Upper East Side.Davarpanah had walked alongside the picket lines in Hollywood in 2023 as a newly minted Writers Guild of America member. Despite initial momentum, she felt the energy from the frontlines of the strikes had dissipated in the last year. That energy reignited when Mamdani entered the picture.“We felt so motivated and energized to help people in a city we don’t even live in because of the broader impact on the country,” she said.Many of the people interviewed are part of the 4,000 young members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles chapter who felt inspired by Mamdani’s campaign and its national implications. Looking ahead, they want to bring the hope and lessons from field organizing back to Los Angeles.New York and Los Angeles have very different geographies and spreads of power. In Los Angeles, city council members’ elections tend to have more weight compared to a mayoral race. And given the DSA-LA chapter has endorsed five candidates so far in the city council and local school board elections, there are plenty of volunteer efforts for these hopefuls to work on in the coming year.View image in fullscreenLeslie Chang, who serves as the East San Gabriel Valley coordinator for Democratic Socialists of America, flew out during the primaries to canvass for Mamdani. She volunteered to canvass in Chinatown, where she spoke the language, and the Red Hook public housing projects.“These were tough conversations,” Chang said, noting residents felt left out in the city’s development. “They would say: look at the condition of this place that I live in. We are still waiting for repairs from the hurricane. Why should I give a shit who is running for office if my life hasn’t gotten better?”During her volunteer field training, Chang met two New York City council members who were vouching for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. They told Chang to give out their phone numbers to start conversations with constituents.“I thought that was really powerful, because in almost all of the canvases that I do here [in Los Angeles], there isn’t that level of engagement,” she said. After canvassing, there was even a social event for volunteers to get to know one another and discuss what strategies worked best.Paul Zappia, an animator and illustrator who also serves in DSA-LA leadership, first met the mayor-elect in 2023 at the DSA national conference in Chicago, where Mamdani served as a keynote speaker. He flew out in late October to canvass with friends in Bushwick. At the beginning of his shift, the field lead asked why each volunteer had come out.“I shared with everybody that I was here from Los Angeles because the victory of Zohran Mamdani is bigger than New York City,” said Zappia, who attributes his involvement in politics to the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.View image in fullscreenEven walking to lunch a few blocks away, he encountered another canvassing group. “It’s just a bunch of people who are there on their free time and want to spend a couple hours on their Saturday together with other people that also care about their fellow working class people. And it was just such a blast,” he said.The geography and public transportation layout of New York’s five boroughs makes it easier to canvas in groups. Zappia said he could feasibly knock on hundreds of doors in a one-block radius there. In Los Angeles, a street could be filled with mostly single-family homes. And with the abundance of Ring doorbell cameras, people can easily decline a visitor from the comfort of their couch.Clayton Ryles, 31, only canvassed for one afternoon in Manhattan’s Chinatown in late October and felt the contrast between Mamdani’s campaign and others. In September last year, Ryles canvassed for Kamala Harris with his fellow United Auto Worker labor organizers in Las Vegas. Knocks on doors yielded intrepid voters who were “upset and suspicious”. Despite many people being pro-union, they felt that their cost of living was too high under Joe Biden.“Nobody was excited about the election. Everybody was like this is being inflicted upon us. We have to decide one way or another. For Zohran, most of the people were enthusiastic about what could happen with his mayoral tenure,” Ryles said.Davarpanah agreed, pointing to the call and response levels of Mamdani’s speech when crowds could clearly repeat phrases such as “fast and free buses” and “universal childcare”.“You can name them. Harris 2024 was not successful in articulating a vision,” she said. “A policy vision that materially impacts your constituents is something every candidate should take to heart. This is what actually inspires people to get involved when they actually see what you’re going to deliver.”View image in fullscreenAcross social media, users have been making posts about how California, and Los Angeles specifically, needs a Mamdani.For Zappia, that means bringing back hope after a tough year that started with the Altadena wildfires and has continued with ICE raids, cutbacks to Snap benefits, and rising inflation, among many other difficulties.“People are just really looking for a sort of sign that things can turn around. In order to actually affect the change that we want to see, we have to first believe that we can actually do it,” he said.“And what happened in New York City is proof that it can be done, it’s proof that organized people can beat organized money.” More

    • 163 Shares52 Views

      in US Politics

      How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

      by

      Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

    • 175 Shares59 Views

      in US Politics

      More than 1,000 flights canceled on second day of cuts tied to government shutdown

      by

      US airlines again canceled more than 1,000 flights on Saturday, the second day of the Federal Aviation Administration’s order to reduce air traffic because of the government shutdown.So far, the slowdown at many of the nation’s busiest airports hasn’t caused widespread disruptions. But it has deepened the impact felt by what is now the nation’s longest federal shutdown.“We all travel. We all have somewhere to be,” said Emmy Holguin, 36, who was flying out of Miami on Saturday to visit family in the Dominican Republic for the week. “I’m hoping that the government can take care of this.”Analysts warn that the upheaval will intensify and be felt far beyond air travel if the cancellations pick up and move closer to the Thanksgiving holiday.Already there are concerns about the impact on cities and businesses that rely on tourism and the possibility of shipping interruptions that could delay getting holiday items on store shelves.Here’s what to know about the flight reductions:Both of the first two days of the FAA’s slowdown have seen more than 1,000 flights canceled, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight disruptions.On Saturday – typically a slow travel day – the airport serving Charlotte, North Carolina, was by far the hardest hit, with 120 arriving and departing flights canceled by midday.Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver and Orlando, Florida, were among the others with the most disruptions. Staffing shortages in Charlotte and Newark, New Jersey, slowed traffic too.Not all the cancellations were due to the FAA order, and those numbers represent just a small portion of the overall flights nationwide. But they are certain to rise in the coming days if the slowdown continues.The FAA said the reductions affecting all commercial airlines are starting at 4% of flights at 40 targeted airports and will be bumped up again on Tuesday before hitting 10% of flights on Friday.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has warned that even more flight cuts might be needed if the government shutdown continues and more air traffic controllers are off the job.Air traffic controllers have gone without paychecks for nearly a month as the shutdown continues, leading many to call in sick and add to already existing staffing shortages.Most controllers are working mandatory overtime six days a week during the shutdown without pay, and some are taking second jobs to pay their bills, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) has said.Most travelers were relieved to find that airlines largely stayed on schedule on Friday, and those whose flights were called off were able to quickly rebook. So far, longer international flights haven’t been interrupted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere’s still a lot of uncertainty about what flights will be canceled next.And not everyone has the means to pay for a hotel or deal with a last-minute disruption, said Heather Xu, 46, who was in Miami on Saturday after a cruise and flying home to Puerto Rico.“Travel is stressful enough. Then you put these disruptions in place and it really makes everything more challenging,” she said.Rental car companies reported a sharp increase in one-way reservations on Friday, and some people are simply canceling flights altogether.Other repercussions from the air traffic slowdown might also include higher prices in stores, as nearly half of all US air freight is shipped in the bellies of passenger aircraft.Major flight disruptions could bring higher shipping costs that get passed on to consumers, said Patrick Penfield, professor of supply chain practice at Syracuse University.More losses will ripple through the economy if the slowdown continues – from tourism to manufacturing, said Greg Raiff, CEO of Elevate Aviation Group.“This shutdown is going to impact everything from cargo aircraft to people getting to business meetings to tourists being able to travel,” he said. “It’s going to hit the hotel taxes and city taxes. There’s a cascading effect that results from this thing.’’ More

    • 150 Shares71 Views

      in US Politics

      Zohran Mamdani’s win shows the power of mobilizing non-voters | Ben Davis

      by

      One of the main media takeaways from the 2024 election was the much-discussed “vibe shift”. That is, a resurgence of cultural conservatism and a backlash to the shifting cultural attitudes on race, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and the “wokeness” of the Obama and first Trump eras. The conservatives were in control not only of the White House, but, more importantly to them, the culture. Corporations, media outlets, and even Democratic politicians who had sought to portray a tolerant, inclusive image rushed to match this new vibe.Of course, the evidence for this shift was scant. Trump had won the election without a popular vote majority, and a closer look at the results showed a more conventional explanation: voters, rather than yearning for the days before there were interracial couples in television commercials or demanding a military crackdown on their cities, thought that they were working too hard for too little and maybe Trump would change it. They wanted lower prices, higher wages and a feeling of security. A year into Republican government and its top-down imposition of a new vibe, perhaps the reaction shows there finally is a vibe shift. Just not the one they planned on.The first electoral message of the second Trump era was an extremely strong one. Democrats beat Republicans up and down the ballot by shocking margins. In blue cities, progressives and democratic socialists beat moderates. Turnout was unprecedented for an off-year election. Democrats won the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia by significantly more than both the 2024 results and the polls projected. Democrats won 64 out of 100 seats in the Virginia house of delegates. They also won over 60% of the vote in statewide races in Georgia and Pennsylvania, states that went for Trump in 2024.Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in Mississippi. Colorado voted by massive margins to increase taxes for free school meals. Maine voted for new gun control measures and against restrictions on absentee voting and new voter ID requirements by over 25%. Even scandal-tarred Democrats like Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, who joked about murdering Republicans, won easily, by more than Harris carried the state a year ago.In California, voters passed a proposal essentially nuking most of the state’s Republican house delegation. Counties that voted for Trump last year voted by double digits to eliminate their own Republican representatives in response to Trump’s demands that Republican states eliminate their own Democratic seats. And in New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani followed up his shocking primary win by winning a majority of voters in the general election, winning over a million votes, nearly as many as voted at all in the last mayoral election.Will this send a message to the White House and the right? Will it send a message to the Democratic establishment? While the Trump administration is clearly taken aback by the scale of the rejection, it is unlikely they will change their behavior. Indeed, they may even increase their aggression toward most of the country. For the Trump administration, backlash was anticipated. They knew everything they did would be unpopular, and they made the calculation that what they could do in two years with control is more valuable than whatever they lose.Their assault on the government and constitution cannot easily be rolled back. The entire political project is based on winning with minority support and using that power to further entrench minority rule. All of their actions have been aimed toward cementing minoritarian rule, and if anything, the scale of electoral backlash will cause them to accelerate their project. There’s a reason it’s called Project 2025, not Project 2027.What they’ve brought to the country is chaos and authoritarianism. Masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight, sending them to prison camps for life without charges or trial. Armed troops occupying major cities. Massive cuts to science and academia, even cancer research. Open graft and corruption. Gleeful cruelty, videos of immigrants and protesters being brutalized shared with pride. Under Republicans, even the air and the water are less clean. It’s no wonder people are upset, from base Democratic voters to working-class Latino voters who pulled the lever for a Republican for the first time in 2024.How do people resist a regime that is overtly anti-democratic as a principle? And why didn’t polls catch the scale of the Democratic wins? The answers to these questions are connected and can be seen in the historic Mamdani campaign. The Democrats won, in large part, from voters who do not like the Democratic party. The party’s favorable ratings are at historic lows. Huge majorities disapprove of the party’s leadership, and in particular, their lack of resistance to Trump.This is a wholesale change from 2017, when angry and upset Democrats rallied behind their party and its leaders. The second wave of resistance is far more anti-establishment, strident and left-wing. Rank-and-file Democratic voters now have far more positive views of democratic socialism than party leadership. These feelings opened the door for the Mamdani campaign, but the campaign showed how to harness them and provide real resistance.Trumpism is built on the disintegration of working-class institutions and civil society. Only a society with fraying bonds can produce a movement built on fear and resentment like this. The key to stopping it is rebuilding these institutions and this community. While many have known this for years, actually showing a path was easier said than done. Many campaigns have sought to bring the disaffected back into the political process in huge numbers. Mamdani’s was the first to succeed.In both the primary and the general, Mamdani reshaped the electorate, bringing hundreds of thousands of non-voters out to the polls, from young people to left-behind immigrant communities. For the first time, the electorate who came out to vote actually reflected the city’s demographics, rather than being predominantly older homeowners. Mamdani also built a coalition based on class, winning the city across races, powered by the lower-income renters and public transit users who make the city run, while losing among wealthy liberals and conservatives alike.But the most important number from Mamdani’s campaign is 100,000. That’s the number of people who actively volunteered for the campaign, knocking on doors, talking to their neighbors and co-workers. That’s one in every 10 people who even voted for Mamdani. They recognized politics as a living, breathing act of being in community, beyond just showing up to tick a box every few years. This has been foreign in this country for decades, but the Mamdani campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America are trying, and succeeding, in rebuilding this community and solidarity – in rebuilding working class political agency. To defeat Trump and the far right, this is what is necessary, across the country and on a massive scale. That’s the vibe shift we are just starting.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and is an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America More

    • 150 Shares50 Views

      in US Politics

      Passengers start to feel bite of flight cuts amid US government shutdown

      by

      A US government order to make drastic cuts in commercial air traffic amid the government shutdown has taken effect, with major airports across the country experiencing a significant reduction in schedules and leaving travellers scrambling to adjust their plans.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said the move is necessary to maintain air traffic control safety during a federal government shutdown, now the longest recorded and with no sign of a resolution, in which air traffic controllers have gone without pay.While airlines have started to reduce domestic flights, global hubs such as JFK in New York and LAX in Los Angeles will be affected, meaning delays and sudden changes that could have a cascading effect on international air traffic. The FAA said the reductions would start at 4% and ramp up to 10% by 14 November. The reductions are set to be in effect between 6am and 10pm and impact all commercial airlines.“We are seeing signs of stress in the system, so we are proactively reducing the number of flights to make sure the American people continue to fly safely,” said Bryan Bedford, the FAA administrator.As of Friday morning, more than 800 US-linked flights had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. The data showed about four in five cancelations globally were related to the US.Transportation secretary Sean Duffy warned on Friday that cancellations could rise to 15% or 20%. “If the shutdown doesn’t end relatively soon, the consequence is that more controllers don’t come to work,” he told Fox News, as US airspace became a potent proverbial weapon in the political standoff.Since the beginning of the shutdown, which began last month after a breakdown between Republicans and Democrats over spending plans, air traffic controllers have been working without pay, which has already caused delays.A potential agreement between the parties to reopen the government appeared to crumble again on Friday after Democrats in the Senate, emboldened by Tuesday’s favorable election results for them, rejected an emerging proposal that would have linked a stopgap funding bill known as a continuing resolution to three full-year appropriations bills.The US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, has announced 40 “high-traffic” airports across the country that would need to reduce flights. A 4% reduction in operations at those airports has taken effect but this will increase to 10% over the next week.Duffy has accused Democrats of being responsible for any “mass chaos” that ensues, even though the shutdown is the result of both Republicans and Democrats refusing to agree to a deal.The director of the National Economic Council​, Kevin Hassett, told Fox Business on Friday that he did not discount a broader impact on US economic activity from the air space restrictions.“Business travel is a really big, important part of air travel – and if business travel isn’t happening then those are deals that aren’t being cut and hotel rooms that aren’t being filled,” he said.“Travel and leisure is a place that’s really being heavily hit right now and if it continues to get hit, if the air travel thing goes south for another week or two, then you could say that they would have at least a near-term downturn,” Hassett added.View image in fullscreenThe cuts could represent as many as 1,800 flights and upwards of 268,000 seats combined, according to an estimate by the aviation analytics firm Cirium.With deep antagonism between the two political parties, Donald Trump’s government has beaten the previous record for the longest shutdown, which was set during his first term in 2018-19.United, Southwest and Delta airlines began cancelling flights on Thursday evening.Affected airports cover more than two dozen states including the busiest across the US – such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas/Fort Worth, Orlando, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco. Flight schedules will be reduced in some of the US’s biggest cities, including New York, Houston and Chicago.Scott Kirby, the United Airlines CEO, said in a statement that the airline “will continue to make rolling updates to our schedule as the government shutdown continues so we can give our customers several days’ advance notice and to minimise disruption”.Delta Air Lines said it would comply with the directive and “expects to operate the vast majority of our flights as scheduled”.The airspace disruption comes two weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday – typically the busiest travel period of the year – and raises the pressure on lawmakers to reach a deal to end the shutdown.Politically inspired flight chaos, with its potential to continue into or beyond the Thanksgiving holiday later this month, has exacerbated pre-existing structural issues in air travel scheduling, airspace constraints and safety considerations, including outdated air traffic control equipment and a long-term shortage of air traffic controllers.“The FAA is a slow-moving bureaucracy,” said Michael Taylor, a travel analyst at JD Power. “It has a daunting task keeping planes from colliding with each other, and they do a really good job with that, but it makes them ultra-conservative in terms of the technologies they could be using. It’s not like your living room where everything is digital. The FAA still relies on technology invented for the second world war.“Under-staffing is long-term problem and that’s not going to change with a political solution to the shutdown,” he adds. Coupled with underlying technological issues, politicians have learned that travel is an unique opportunity to apply pressure. “This is a leverage point that politicians can use to try to drive public opinion towards one party or the other. It’s a shame but that’s where we are today,” Taylor added.In a statement, American Airlines said most customers would be unaffected and long-haul international travel would remain as scheduled. Customers could change their flight or request a refund. “In the meantime, we continue to urge leaders in Washington to reach an immediate resolution to end the shutdown,” the airline said.The government shutdown has left shortages of up to 3,000 air traffic controllers, according to the administration, in addition to at least 11,000 more receiving zero wages despite being categorised as essential workers.“I’m not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we’ve had a situation where we’re taking these kinds of measures,” Bedford has said. “We’re in new territory in terms of government shutdowns.” More