Thinking Zohran Thoughts

My own personal Zohran story

I’ve known Zohran for eighteen years, since I taught him 10^th grade Social Studies at Bronx Science. During parent-teacher conference, his father came in to see me. (Now I know that Mahmoud Mamdani is an influential scholar of colonialism, but then I probably just thought he was one of the many Bronx Science immigrant parents striving for their child to succeed.) Dad was grousing at Zohran’s grade – his 95. Not grousing at me – why didn’t I give Zohran a better grade? – but at Zohran – why wasn’t he applying himself more, working harder?

And I said to dad, never mind about the grade; the wheels are spinning in your son’s head. That turned out to be the perfect thing to say to Dad, who just floated out of the room.

And maybe the perfect thing to say about Zohran. Close to everything about this campaign reflects those spinning wheels. His vision and his ability to articulate the vision, and his ability to control the narrative and not get distracted shows he possesses one of the two key requirements to be Mayor. And here’s the other: his ability to gather around him a staff that knew how to translate those gifts into an amazing and inspiring, but also organizationally adept political campaign – just think about the completely counterintuitive but strategic brilliance of raising funds for Adrienne Adams. Watching their deftness makes me confident Zohran will assemble a team capable of administering and implementing that vision. Campaigning isn’t governing, but in this case, we’ve already seen many of the skills necessary to govern well.

Two views on the last days of Zohran’s campaign

You should absolutely read this entire article by labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. But here’s a taste, about a visit to my neighborhood just a few days ago:

There was a very Bobby Kennedy vibe to it all. A young politician, exciting, relatable, idealistic, kind, creating a growing center of political power by attracting people to his cause. (Zohran has better politics than Bobby Kennedy, though.) … The likable young believer who wants affordable homes and free buses and seems to actually enjoy the presence of his fellow humans, enough to inspire forty thousand people to go fan out across the big city knocking on doors for him…. Is it possible to have nice thing[s]? We shall see. Somehow Zohran’s penetration into the public consciousness has peaked exactly, on the very day, of the election, with the polls drawing even at the last moment, so that anything seems possible.

And here’s Michael Lange, talking about “the first one hundred blocks” of Zohran’s fourteen-mile walk down the length of Manhattan, which,

stretches from Dyckman Street in Inwood (half upper middle-class and predominantly white; half supermajority Dominican and working-class) to 125th Street in Manhattanville… When many people say “Manhattan,” those are not the blocks they think of. But in many respects, that five-mile stretch is more commensurate with New York City as a whole — young, diverse, working-class — than the glitz and glam that awaits one farther south… Block after block, street after street, Zohran Mamdani was stopped by passersby, many of whom wanted a picture with “the next Mayor.” Cars rolled down their windows and honked their horns. Everyone wanted a piece of him. These scenes played out along St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights and Inwood, some of the most densely rent stabilized precincts in New York City, where more than two-thirds of residents only speak Spanish. [To be a NYC technicalist, St. Nicholas ends south of Inwood.}

“I have ideas” – we can dream a new New York

Leafleting in the brutal heat at a polling site in Brooklyn, a guy stopped to talk and talk. I’ve lived in this country for thirty years, and became a citizen, but never registered to vote until this year. Then he explained his idea to make New York better; it turned out to be a modern variant of 1886 Mayoral candidate Henry George’s “single tax,” proposal, which in part argued for the taxing of vacant land at a high rate to encourage the building of housing to address overcrowding. Sound familiar? Anyway, this guy wanted me to “tell Zohran” to tax vacant storefronts at a higher rate to encourage landlords to rent them out.

Now, I don’t really know if that makes sense or not, but when my relief came along, I told him about “the guy with the idea.” He got enthusiastic: “I have ideas too!” And me too – mine concerns how the city lets contractors working on construction projects let them sit unfinished, inconveniencing thousands of people. (See: the 79^th St. Boat Basin, the stretch of Riverside Avenue between 152^nd and 161^st, the Major Deegan between 138^th and 149^th.)

The point is, we can begin to think, in a thousand ways, about how we can make this city better, and not just capitulate to the business-as-usual regime of finance, real estate, and pay-for-play politics.

The end of neoliberalism?

Okay, not yet. But I wrote yesterday how American neoliberalism was born in New York City fifty years ago this summer. At the time, we didn’t know that – the fiscal crisis might have just been a weird blip, not the starting gun for decades of working-class austerity. Maybe Zohran’s victory will be a blip – or maybe we can dare to dream that one day we will look back and point to this moment in New York City. That would be an uncanny closing of the circle. My academic mentor Josh Freeman once said that we’ve spent decades fighting to protect things that aren’t good enough. Maybe now we can fight for better things, or nicer things, as Zohran says.

Brad Lander - Thank you

How many kind things can we say about Brad Lander? While Adrienne Adams refused to say a kind word about Zohran, and Jessica Ramos – his putative rival last fall for the DSA endorsement – actually stuck a knife in his back, Lander embraced Zohran’s candidacy, perhaps at the expense of his own, to help head off Cuomo, and Cuomo surrogates’ spurious charges of antisemitism. Meanwhile, it turned out he had been going to immigration court for weeks (without any attempt to capitalize on it politically) because it was just the right thing for an elected official to do. Brad Lander – a mensch.

Not a cure for the horror and misery of the past six months, but…

…it sure feels good today to have something to feel good about for a change. Take two Zohrans and call me in the morning.

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