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.
