The Dangers of Populist Politics: Zohran Mamdani

In an election cycle swept by a blue wave, Zohran Mamdani is surfing the crest. Mayor-elect Mamdani, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is New York City’s most openly socialist mayor. However, despite being the Democratic nominee in a staunchly Democratic bastion, he only received 50.8% of the vote. This wasn’t a resounding victory that a Democrat in New York City typically wins; in the 2021 mayoral election, Eric Adams won with 67.4%. And despite Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, being a disgraced former governor of New York, accused of sexually harassing 13 women and running as an Independent, he still came away with 41.3%.

But to his credit, Mamdani received a record 70% of the vote from those aged 18-44. That’s a massive amount of younger adult supporters, and combined with much of his rhetoric, I can’t see any other word to describe Zohran Mamdani than “populist”.

Populism, or the movement representing or claiming to represent the people against the larger enemy (typically the “establishment”), started on a large scale in the United States with President Andrew Jackson. He was renowned for his anti-federalist stance, instead empowering states’ rights (claiming it was in the best interest of the people).

The most prominent modern form of populism is President Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement. He has heralded the highest levels of polarization in the US since the Civil War, turning his millions of followers against the “radical woke leftist elites” and promising to “drain the swamp” in the name of rooting out the “deep state”.

However, his policies tend to hurt the people he’s claiming to represent, including tax cuts for only the rich, attempting to overturn the Affordable Care Act (leaving millions of Americans unable to afford health insurance), and championing cuts to Social Security and SNAP (leaving millions of Americans impoverished and hungry).

Zohran Mamdani is a different kind of populist than President Trump. While any sort of critical thinking exposes the fact that Trump’s policies go against the people’s interests, Mamdani’s policies would suggest that his interests are aligned with the people’s, on the surface. He has vowed to implement city-owned grocery stores, free public transportation, free higher education, and an increase in rent-controlled apartments. However, opponents claim his policies, if even able to be enacted, could actually lead to more debt in New York City and a rise in the cost of living for the average New Yorker.

Mamdani also claims to be grassroots, but a peek behind the curtain reveals there’s more to the story. According to Linda Sarsour, a pro-Palestine Muslim-American activist, one of Mamdani’s biggest donors is the Council on American-Islamic Relations Political Action Committee (or “CAIR PAC”). CAIR is a multi-million-dollar PAC and an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Trial, which exposes ties to the US-designated terrorist organization, Hamas. So not only is his campaign not exactly grassroots, but it also has a connection to antisemitic terrorism.

Populism isn’t fully a threat to liberal democracy until it demonizes and illegitimizes its opponents. Many groups are scapegoated as “opponents” by populists, but perhaps none more than Jews. There is a long history of antisemitism in American populist movements beyond Mamdani. As in Europe, many American populist leaders blamed Jews for the problems of the people. When blaming the Jews outright became taboo, they’d blame stand-in groups for Jews, such as the “socialists” (typically from the right) or “Zionists” (typically from the left), rather than actual economic and social issues.

Mamdani has fed into this trope, although from the “Zionist” angle. Beyond his ties to CAIR, Zohran Mamdani has consistently spread rhetoric deemed antisemitic, such as falsely stating that “the boots of the NYPD” are “laced by the IDF,” and releasing a song with lyrics in support of the terrorists convicted during the aforementioned Holy Land Foundation Trial. These comments, and many more, have led to major elements of the mainstream Jewish community of New York feeling unsafe—even being denounced by thousands of rabbis across the country in an open letter.

Populism, while claiming to represent the will of the people, completely ignores the pluralistic reality of not only modern-day America but of the entire world throughout history. Since the dawn of humanity, no one could ever fully agree on anything; that’s why we’re taught to share and compromise in elementary school. 

Populists seemingly forget those simple lessons; everything becomes “us” versus “them”. Political, economic, social, or religious opponents become “othered” and labeled as enemies.

And, as we see time and time again, the situation for these opponents becomes untenable until they’re at best forced out, and at worst, reflect the lives of Jews under Nazi Germany.

Democratic leadership should not take the wrong message from Mamdani’s tight mayoral win in New York City. They should not feed into populism and forget the lessons they learned as children: to compromise and appeal to the people in the middle, rather than abandon them for the fringe left.