Mamdani’s Victory Over Fear

It’s been a summer of fear like no other in New York. This time, the fearful include the city’s richest residents, who see their dominance threatened by mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Fueling their panic is the mounting realization that the War on Terror politics they sought to use against him—in a city reshaped by 9/11—didn’t work.

The city’s power elite now have few viable options to defeat Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as he campaigns against the vastly unequal living conditions they’ve created. Mamdani’s 12-point victory over former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, the biggest political upset in the city’s history, marked the first warning sign for the collapse of Islamophobic politics as usual. Megadonors seeking to exploit post–October 7 anxieties among the city’s sizable Jewish community spent $20 million on nonstop attack ads and came up empty.

But the oligarchs are hardly the only New Yorkers experiencing fear. The city’s immigrant communities fear for themselves and their loved ones as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents grab law-­abiding people appearing at the city’s immigration courts for their mandated check-ins. Muslim New Yorkers fear masked ICE agents snatching them in their apartment lobbies or off the streets for their nonviolent activism on behalf of Palestinians. And beyond the warrens of the wealthiest, there is a radiating fear that New York will forever be too expensive for a dignified life.

Since Mamdani’s campaign began to gain momentum, the oligarchs and their allies in both parties have responded with more of the same 9/11 politics. Kirsten Gillibrand claimed that New Yorkers were “alarmed by [Mamdani’s] past positions, particularly references to global jihad”—a pure fabrication for which the Democratic senator had to apologize. Donald Trump openly muses about denaturalizing and deporting Mamdani. With New York’s one percent in disarray after Mamdani’s primary win, November’s mayoral election may herald a moment when the fearful politics of 9/11 is dealt its biggest blow yet. But if that proves to be the case, the president may turn his native city into the next domestic battleground of the War on Terror.

Capital’s big problem in the race is that it lacks a single, viable champion. The hedge fund magnate, Trump ally, and anti-­Mamdani fundraiser Bill Ackman posted a screed on X in which he offered “hundreds of millions of dollars of capital” to an imaginary “charismatic” and “centrist” Mamdani competitor—who at this stage of the election would have to run as a write-in. Former Bloomberg adviser Ester Fuchs lamented to The Wall Street Journal that the ballot box was “the only place in which people without money actually have the same influence in the outcome.”

Former governor Andrew Cuomo, undeterred by the shellacking Mamdani gave him in June, wants to be that champion, having procured a ballot line to offset his potential primary loss. So does Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels vigilante and GOP nominee, but the Ackmans of New York won’t throw money at a beret-wearing weirdo. With Cuomo now seen as a loser, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker reported that “fundraisers are being held in the Hamptons and uptown” for Eric Adams, the once-indicted mayor whose popularity hit an almost 30-year mayoral low in March. Sure, Adams has done plenty of self-dealing, but, Parker smirked, “What’s a little corruption in New York politics?”

Adams, whom federal prosecutors indicted last year, is the source of much more than “a little” corruption. In July, five former cops filed separate lawsuits against Adams for running a “coordinated criminal conspiracy” with the New York Police Department at its center. But more damning is how Hizzoner escaped prosecution. As soon as Trump was reelected, Adams rushed to curry favor so that his charges, which relate to illegal campaign donations from Turkish interests, would disappear. His overtures yielded a quid pro quo in which the mayor of the largest sanctuary city in the country agreed to cooperate with Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” gleefully humiliated Adams on live television in February, saying that he would be “up your butt” if Adams obstructed ICE. Adams tried to laugh it off.

That corrupt bargain unleashed state terror against New York’s immigrant communities. With Adams’s explicit blessing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, armored in a plate carrier, launched Trump’s mass deportation initiative by accompanying ICE on raids in upper Manhattan and the Bronx in late January. “Nobody’s in the streets,” Brooklyn cab driver Pierre Jean told The Haitian Times. “They’re afraid ICE will check their papers. And even with legal papers, they’re afraid ICE will deport them.”

These fears spread further after officers seized the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil in his Columbia University apartment vestibule. They gained renewed traction when Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, herself a billionaire heiress, defended the department’s collaboration with ICE in the detention of Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student at Columbia who had attended the protests for Gaza there. And they reached a fever pitch once ICE, shedding the fiction of targeting violent criminals, began grabbing immigrants at their court check-ins, sending immigration arrests skyrocketing. In July, a baseball coach in Manhattan’s Riverside Park had to fend off ICE agents asking if his middle and high school students were here legally. All of this suffering is invisible or acceptable to the real estate giants and financiers who are giving Adams a second look.

From its inception, Mamdani’s campaign has focused on New York’s affordability crisis. But the crisis created by mass deportation has prompted him to adopt a more militant anti-­ICE posture than that of almost any other US politician. After Homan testified in Albany on Khalil’s abduction, Mamdani yelled at him, “How many more New Yorkers will you detain?” and indicted the “cowardice” of city officials who “collaborate” with ICE. “ICE has no interest in the law,” Mamdani said in June after ICE detained New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for escorting a migrant away from his check-in. “It only has an interest in terrorizing people.”

Mamdani’s confrontational stance is a departure not only from Adams’s policy of accommodating Trump but from nearly 25 years of post-9/11 demagoguery in New York politics. It’s been standard practice for the city’s political leaders to embrace or acquiesce to law enforcement repression, first in the name of fighting terrorism and now in the name of fighting “illegal” immigration. Mamdani grew up in the New York they shaped.

During that reign of terror, the bureaucratic forebears of ICE slipped business cards under Pakistani immigrants’ doors directing them to come in for interviews about what they might have known about 9/11—or about some unspecified future terror attack. The NYPD joined forces with a CIA officer to spy on entire Muslim neighborhoods. That sort of unfounded surveillance was so normalized that the NYPD sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip taken by Muslim City College students. The mayor who presided over all of this, Mike Bloomberg (now an anti-Mamdani megadonor), aggressively promoted gentrifying the city, touting the transformation of New York into what he called “a luxury product.”

That luxury product, engineered to be so unfree and so unaffordable for so many, has now produced a Muslim socialist political leader determined to upend Bloomberg’s legacy. A key element of Mamdani’s success is his refusal to pay the typical Democratic fealty to the predatory political and economic order that grooms and vets New York’s leadership caste. Because so few in power confronted the War on Terror as it preyed on Muslims, the mechanisms it created now prey on all immigrants. In practice, that has led to the detentions and renditions of restaurant cooks, delivery drivers, day laborers, and other members of New York’s working class. Mamdani, without necessarily meaning to, has illuminated the way that the tools of the War on Terror are the tools of class war. And his victory in the primary illuminates the way to both end the War on Terror and triumph in a class war: organize.

It was inevitable that capital would go all out to portray Mamdani as an antisemitic apologist for jihad. Smears like that usually work, and the anti-Mamdani forces were confident they would succeed in the heavily Jewish city after October 7. Yet the accusations came off as panicky and desperate. Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but the Israeli site Ynet estimates that Mamdani won 20 percent of New York’s Jewish voters.

What’s happened since in the traditional sanctums of New York power is a case study in cognitive dissonance. Addressing a synagogue in late July, Cuomo simultaneously accused Mamdani of “fueling antisemitism” and lamented that “more than 50 percent of the Jewish people voted for Mamdani…. They are pro-Palestinian, and they don’t consider it being anti-Israel.” Cuomo’s baseline confusion here, no less than his defeat, reveals how brittle the politics of 9/11 fearmongering has become.

The institutions of the War on Terror are stronger. In June, Trump—manufacturing a threat from anti-ICE “insurrectionists” in southern California—federalized units of the California National Guard. Then he deployed US Marines to backstop ICE raids in Los Angeles and further militarize the repression of dissent. Gleefully ignoring the objections of city and state elected leadership, he treated LA as an occupied territory.

Trump has already signaled that he’s eager to apply that precedent to New York City. “If a communist gets elected,” he said, “we have tremendous power…to run places when we have to.” Making good on that threat, Trump has sued New York City for “interfering with enforcing this country’s immigration laws.” Homan has dared Mamdani to defy ICE raids, and when the New York City Council blocked ICE’s access to local jails in late July, he threatened to “flood the zone” with ICE agents. And since Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” triples ICE’s budget, that flood could be biblical.

If Trump stages more brutal raids in New York in response to a Mamdani victory in November, he’ll be ratcheting up the fear-driven politics of the city’s anti-Mamdani power brokers. Suddenly, the lords of capital in New York are seeing that 9/11 politics are no longer enough to stop the multi-­ethnic working class from winning power. They may find common cause with Trump to endorse new crackdowns using the tools of the War on Terror. But even such a violent show of force would likely do little to deter a newly galvanized coalition of working New Yorkers who are sick and tired of living in fear.

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