Zohran Mamdani And Post Populism

TITLE: Zohran Mamdani and Post-Populism CHANNEL: Void Productions DATE: 2025-11-05 ---TRANSCRIPT--- You have never had a job, you’ve never accomplished anything. No reason to believe you have any merit or qualification. Your failures could fill a public school library.

Who was leading the state? Got to ride the subway. I’m going to be doing it for 24 hours. That’s why I created the Guardian [music] Angels. He’s actually hurting If you want to be in government From corrupt politicians and the billionaires that fund Let our voice ring out so loud tonight and say it clear. This election has been a whirlwind so far. The June Democratic primary was a major upset in which Zohran Mamdani entered the race pulling at 1% and ended up blowing out disgraced former Governor Cuomo by double digits. And my resignation will be effective in 14 days. Zohran’s meteoric rise through the [music] spring and summer exposed major cracks in the Democratic coalition as his own party leaders held back on endorsing him even after he clinched the nomination by a wide margin. As I’ve said, I will have more to say about the mayor’s race when I have more to say about the mayor’s race. And the calamity didn’t stop after the primary. The general election became a four-horse race between current mayor and Turkish puppet Eric Adams, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani, and Curtis Sliwa. Zohran was able to maintain a large lead through the general even after Adams dropped out, who then endorsed Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opposition. And somehow, through the Democratic establishment dragging their feet, through the Trump administration interfering, [music] through the billionaire-funded attack campaigns, through the accusations of anti-Semitism, [music] Zohran was able to pull through. In the aftermath, a giant question is now floating in the ether. How? What does it mean that a self-described democratic socialist, a Muslim man born in Uganda, has become the most public, most influential example of a Democratic victory since Obama? How did he do it? And why did it work? In order to understand this election, it’s first essential to understand Zohran Mamdani. [music] In preparing for this video, I came across an interview with Mehdi Hasan in which Mehdi correctly points out that Zohran is the actual boogeyman Republicans painted Barack Obama to be during his ascension. We had another popular Democrat with a funny name, Barack Obama, who was constantly smeared by Republicans. He was falsely accused of being a Muslim socialist from Africa. You literally are a Muslim socialist from Africa. Zohran was born in 1991 in Kampala, Uganda, the son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. When Zohran was seven, his family emigrated to New York City and Zohran was raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Zohran has described his upbringing as privileged, stating that he never had to want for anything, and acknowledging that this was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers. Zohran doesn’t hide this fact. He just owns it and understands the position it puts him in. But Zohran’s policy isn’t for the people in the tax bracket he was raised in. This makes him politically authentic. He’s saying, “Yeah, I grew up wealthy, [music] but that doesn’t mean I’m going to fight for wealthy people. I’m going to fight for all people.” In middle school, Zohran ran as an independent candidate in a mock election on a platform of anti-war policy that proposed spending money on education over the military. Zohran attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he founded the school’s first cricket team and played soccer in the West Side Soccer League. After graduating high school, Zohran attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and received a degree in Africana studies. After graduating, Zohran worked as a foreclosure prevention and housing counselor in Queens. But what’s far cooler is his moonlighting as a hip-hop artist under the name Young Cardamom. In 2019, Zohran entered electoral politics as a state assembly candidate for New York State’s 36th District, [music] running on a platform of housing reform, policing reform, and public ownership of utilities. In this race, Zohran successfully primaried four-term incumbent Democrat [music] Arabella Simotas and breezed through the general election facing no Republican opposition. After serving three terms in the State Assembly, Zohran announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. Thousands of commentators, journalists, and political actors have attempted to summarize Zohran’s campaign, identifying [music] key policies and themes, breaking down the demographic composition of his coalition. And while Zohran’s platform is comprehensive and the noise around him is deafening, ultimately, all of it can be reduced to one goal, affordability. In one of Zohran’s earliest campaign videos, [music] you can see this in action. Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? I didn’t vote. And why did you not vote? Because I don’t believe in the system anymore. And did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday? Yes, Trump. Trump? Uh Trump. Donald Trump. early voted. I voted for Trump. People want lower prices, they probably believe that Trump would give them that. Most of these people are working families. Rent is expensive. Zohran has referenced these moments time and time again on the campaign trail, going into the neighborhoods of New York [music] that saw the largest swings from blue to red in the last election and just straight-up asking people [music] why. And time and time again, these New Yorkers cite affordability, the rising prices of food and gas, rent increasing, utility bills increasing. New York is simply becoming too expensive to live in. So, this became Zohran’s theme. Of all the things you can say about the issues he’s brought up during the campaign, the ideas that have been dissected, celebrated, demonized, say what you will about the merits of the policy, but it’s undeniable that they are aimed at making New York more affordable. There’s his rent freeze proposal that he outlines in this really digestible [music] video. I’m freezing your rent. Eric Adams’ board has raised the rent every year he’s been in office. Currently, eight of Adams’ nine appointees’ terms are up and could be replaced tomorrow. And that’s exactly what I would do, only appointing those who understand that landlords are doing just fine. The median income for a rent-stabilized household is $60,000 a year. Any rent hike could push them out of the city. For those landlords who need a little extra help, there’s a city fund they can apply to. So, here’s to a new year, a new mayor, and the same rent. There’s his plan to introduce a city-owned and operated grocery store in each borough [music] with set prices. There’s his universal child care proposal. There’s his plan to eliminate bus fares on New York public transit, which he already created a pilot program for on five bus lines during his time [music] in the State Assembly. While from an outside perspective, you may think this race is a referendum on anti-Semitism or an esoteric debate over socialism, it is much more about a candidate proposing policies that very well may work [music] and tackle the biggest issue that his potential constituents have, the unaffordability of New York. There’s a ton of analysis on these specific policies and plenty of examples to look at. Kansas and Wisconsin have already piloted their versions of city-owned grocery stores that have seen some serious success. [music] In previous case studies, making citywide bussing free has not only increased ridership, but has also made riding buses more safe. Eliminating the payment interactions between drivers [music] and passengers reduces overall friction. I think these policies are good ideas. [music] And now we actually get the chance to see if they solve the problems millions of people throughout the country have. But what’s fundamentally new and refreshing about this is not just the policies themselves, but how Zohran talks about them. In doing research for this video, I came across an interview Zohran did on The Breakfast Club where he describes [music] his bussing policy clearly and succinctly. So, as a state assembly member, I won the first of its kind fair-free bus pilot. We made one bus route free in every borough of New York City and it showed that ridership went up by up to 38%. Assaults on bus drivers went down by 38.9%. It’s not just about economic [music] access, it’s also about public safety. It’s also even about environmentalism. And the cost of doing all of this is about $700 million a year. Now, that sounds significant, which it is, but I just want to put it into context. We’re talking about that in the context of a city budget that’s about a $113 billion a year. State budget about $252 billion a year. There is money. The question is what we spend it on. And [music] we will do so in two key ways. The first is to match the state’s top corporate tax rate to that of New Jersey. We are at 7.25%. They’re at 11.5%. Corporations can pay it over there, they can pay it over here. Wherever you are headquartered, as long as you do business in the state of New York, you are taxable for that corporate tax. And the second is taxing the top 1% of New Yorkers. We’re talking about people who make a million dollars a year or more. Taxing them just by a flat 2% tax increase. And all of these things together, they make every New Yorker’s life better, including those who are actually getting taxed. That was like 60 seconds. And in just that time, Zohran is able to explain the policy he wants, present three clear pros to the policy, safety, access, and environmentalism, demonstrate that the policy has already worked on a small scale, anticipate and openly acknowledge the main criticism towards the policy, funding, and deal with it by explaining his funding mechanism. And he doesn’t use platitudes and vague statements to do any of this. It’s all just policy specifics. That’s incredible. But more importantly, we haven’t seen [music] this in a while. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just biased by Zohran’s charisma, so I went back in The Breakfast Club’s catalog to when they had Harris on before the election. Granted, these were two different campaigns. One was national, one was local. The issues at stake in the 2024 presidential election were by definition larger and more global in nature. But here she is, also speaking to Charlamagne. You know, what is at stake is truly profound and almost and historic, many would say. And it’s about, you know, some people would say this lofty notion of of of supporting and and preserving our democracy. Mhm. But it it is about real issues that affect people every day like whether we’re going to maintain a $35 cap on insulin for our seniors, whether we’re going to continue to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices to bring them down, or whether we’re going to admire dictators and send during the height of COVID in the pandemic COVID test that nobody could get to the president of Russia for his personal use when black people were dying every day. It’s not that the policies that she lists are bad. I actually support them. But that’s all she does. She lists them off and the thing she does choose to go into is the fact that Trump sent a COVID test to Vladimir Putin. Like that is just tactically and spiritually the opposite of what Zoran is doing, of what it looks like to run on affordability. And this isn’t just about the policies that Zoran has selected. It’s that he talks about policy in a fundamentally different way than what we’ve all gotten used [music] to. Like look at how he talks about housing. You have a property tax system that’s broken in New York City. One that effectively penalizes rental apartments and the owners of those rental apartments. [music] And if you had a system that incentivized the construction of rental apartments, you could have a very different landscape of housing. So to me it’s freeze the rent and [music] take on the cost of insurance and fix a broken property tax system and streamline development and have the city produce 200,000 homes. At the same [music] time, there’s the incentive through 421A that has since been renewed to become something called 485, which is a tax [music] incentive for the construction of new housing. And most New Yorkers don’t have time to know every single set of numbers and letters and one. Right? It’s But but that’s representative of more New Yorkers than than those who know. Zoran’s agenda is distinctly progressive, but not in the traditional ideological way that that word is used. It’s progressive in the sense that progress takes concrete specific steps. And Zoran has identified them and can explain them clearly. Zoran gets associated with Bernie Sanders a lot and I get why. They are both vibrant popular [music] left-wing leaders. This could be a dynamic where the mantle is passed to Zoran at some point. [music] But even going into Bernie’s style, his rhetorical approach is completely different from Zoran’s. Again, I like Bernie’s policy set, but look how he presents stuff when he’s on Flagrant. How we doing this edition? I would say we’re struggling financially. That’s right. I think yeah, quality of life No, no, no, that’s exactly right. think that there we are disillusion with the institutions that should be supporting and protecting us. Excellent. All right. All right. So let’s That’s right. All that’s right. So to start off with, in one sense, we are the richest country in the history of the world, right? We have enormous wealth. Yep. Is that wealth does that wealth apply to the vast majority of the people? Absolutely not. Bottom line is you got millions and millions of people, working class people, lower income people struggling to put food on the table. Do you notice what that is? I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Bernie interviews and Bernie’s way of presenting his policies [music] is basically like this. He asks an open-ended question that he wants a specific answer [music] to. If you nail the question, he says good and goes on to the next point. [music] If you’re off, he’ll be like, you’re close, and then fill in the answer. This eventually leads you down the Sanders dialogue tree [music] in which it’s revealed that billionaires are hoarding money and poor people are suffering. The thematic thread of the whole process is that this information is supposed to blow your mind, that [music] you were not aware of how bad the issue is. And like yeah, Bernie’s right about these problems, but his whole approach is heavily reliant on you learning facts that you don’t know about the extent of the problem and then being hit with the same solutions [music] he’s been giving for decades. And that’s cool, I guess. But one thing I have noticed is that as Bernie has had more airtime in the last 10 [music] years, people have become aware of what he’s talking about. So it’s not as effective at actually talking to people and it doesn’t evolve. He’s not actually asking questions about the new ways [music] these eternal inequalities manifest. One thing Zoran points out early in his Flagrant interview [music] is the classic line that Democrats have been doing too much lecturing to voters. There’s been a lot of lecturing and not much listening. This is a pretty agreed upon concept, but Zoran’s approach is the first I’ve actually seen that transfigures this issue into something new. Sanders and Harris have differing politics and they are both national figures, [music] but they do have a kind of similarity in their rhetoric. It’s about raising the stakes of everything [music] to such an epic proportion that it’s almost inaccessible to touch. Whether it’s Harris’s fears of democracy [music] dying in some sort of existential way supporting and and preserving our democracy or Sanders’ diagnosis of the billionaires [music] having too much power and wealth and needing to pay more in taxes. We are the richest country in the history of the world. It’s not specific. It’s not accessible. It’s not relatable. [music] The other approach I’ve seen from guys like Buttigieg or Ossoff is to simply treat the listeners like children, [music] to dumb down their politics to the level that Republicans can understand them. [music] And that’s just insanely insulting to me. What Zoran does is totally different. He’s not an ideologue or a grand orator. He’s just a politician [music] who knows how systems of government work, which makes his solutions seem attainable. Like you can see him actively [music] go into how we will legislatively accomplish this stuff, not just the implementation of it. When we talk about raising revenue, you know, raising [music] taxes on the top 1% by 2%, the top corporate tax to match that of New Jersey, that’s something we will do in Albany. And [music] that’s partially why the endorsements of Governor Hochul, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, you know, majority leader of the state Senate Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the these are endorsements not just of me, but of the agenda. [music] My strategy is to build the political will such [music] that Governor Hochul has a partner. Zoran doesn’t have slogans. There is no I’m with her or drain the swamp or defund the police or tax the rich or make America great again. He doesn’t even have go-to phrases to sum up his policies. And I think this is politically brilliant because what it does is it allows his supporters to understand his policies on their own terms. If someone asks you what Zoran’s housing plan is, it’s not as simple as a three-word bumper sticker that can get stuck in a linguistic web. You have to actually talk about it, which opens a conversation, which opens people’s minds. This approach is refreshing and respectful. And it’s just not dogmatic. It’s barely even ideological. He openly acknowledges there are drawbacks to some of his ideas and he’s willing to own that and propose solutions in real time. How was it affecting business? You know, especially small businesses. You know, the main businesses, yeah, you know, they they can get over, but you know, you got that mom-and-pop store that just can’t do it. Small businesses are struggling in New York City. They employ a majority of all New Yorkers who are working in the private sector. We put forward a small business proposal where we would cut fines and fees for those businesses by 50% across the board. We’re also going to make it easier to open them. You want to open a barber shop in New York City. You got to go to seven different agencies, fill out 24 forms, and then attend 12 activities. That does not make it easy. We need to actually follow the example of Pennsylvania where they took an 8-week permitting process and made it just a couple days because we have to make it easier. And there’s no animus to this. Even when Zoran is talking about policing or landlords or wealthy people, the way he talks about it is complete and humanizing and full of empathy. He frames his policing reform policy not as a bludgeon against cops, but as a vehicle for them to focus more on violent and unsolved crimes and let mental health crises be redirected to workers who want to do that and who have actually been trained in these areas. I want to be very clear, we are not defunding the police. What we are talking about is sustaining the number of police that we have within the police department. And when I talk to those police officers themselves, they tell me they signed up to tackle serious crimes. And yet what they’re being asked to do today is serve as mental health professionals and social workers. He makes fun of the billionaires who spend money against him, but he also makes active appeals to quality of life as a reason for why they are not going to leave even if he taxes them more. In watching this election and people’s perspectives on it from social media and through public discourse, one thing I’ve noticed is that there is broad approval around Zoran in my generation that sort of bridges the political divide. Young conservatives give him respect and young socialists love him. This is both because his message is universal. It’s about improving quality of life by using real intelligent ideas to tackle affordability. And it’s because he doesn’t want to make enemies of real people. It’s not part of his mission and it’s also just not part of his strategy. He’s genuinely appealing to all people. He makes concessions where he needs to. He finds fixes for his policy setbacks and he does it all while being a normal person. [music] He laughs at himself. He allows criticism. He’s authentic. He admits his privileges and acknowledges his faults. I looked into Donald Trump’s podcast circuit in the run-up to the last election and I found this fascinating nugget in his Andrew Schulz interview in which he lays out his border policy. We’ve allowed 21 million people into our country in the last three and a half years and I think you have support on this though. I think everybody regardless I think I’ll let you know on I’ll let you know on November 6th Yeah. if I have support. No, I’ll people agree and they want a strong border. I think I don’t think that’s an issue that’s like tearing the country apart. The average American I don’t think is going to Well, they hate our open border. I think only a person that hates our country, maybe it’s a down deep hatred can want open borders. Did you see that there? He can’t let Schulz get away with saying that a policy he has is universally supported. I mean, it’s not. [music] But why not just embrace that? Why do you need to highlight people who disagree with you as people who hate our [music] country. Just 8 years after Hillary’s basket of deplorables comment, her logic is now universal and cross-spectrum. Zoran is doing something else. What sets him apart is that he’s not looking to paint any group as evil [music] or wrong. He’s trying to create solutions that factor in everyone’s well-being. And this is exemplified in the way he talks about policies that impact different groups of people. He talks about increasing taxes, not to punish the rich, but to [music] make life better for everyone. Increased taxes will help out the lower class, but also make city life more desirable for wealthier individuals. I’ve seen Vivek make this point before, that the reason Trump won is that Americans were tired of the same old scripted cookie-cutter politicians. They viewed them as inauthentic and corrupt and full of [music] bland platitudes. And that’s a pretty common sentiment. But that’s not the era I grew up in. The era that my generation knows as our political status quo is one of left and right populisms that speak [music] in apocalyptic statements, highlight enemies among our population, and present their own rigidly ideological views as perfect [music] solutions. We’ve heard of this former era of bland and boring politicians running on nothing. And we’ve [music] lived through an era of populist demagogues stoking fears and presenting half-baked ideas. Zoran is neither of these things. He’s what comes after. On one level, what Zoran is doing is just [music] politics done right. It’s talking to voters, learning what people want, and actively representing them. But on a deeper level, what Zoran Momdani’s win means is that this is the new era of politics. It will manifest differently in different states [music] and parties and through different messages and mediums. But I think this is what people are hungry for. Post-populism. Not a return to the establishment, but a synthesis of the complexity of the world [music] we live in, and a unity among all people to live in a better world. Politicians who are active in the community and talk like regular people because they are regular people and can acknowledge that not everything is as simple as we thought, that it’s not about heroes and villains. It’s about us working collectively and intelligently. [music] And that’s Zoran.