"Você já conheceu o Z?"

O socialismo de Zohran Mamdani não é, como alguns críticos sugerem, uma coleção obsoleta de velhos credos, mas um sistema dinâmico com pequenas empresas em seu núcleo.

Dan Chiasson

The New Yorker

M10s/TheNews2/Cover Images/AP Images
Zohran Mamdani em uma campanha organizada pelo Clube Democrático Muçulmano, Astoria, Queens, outubro de 2025

Era quase estranho andar por Nova York e não esbarrar com ele. “O Z esteve aqui ontem mesmo”, disse-me a barista do Little Flower em Astoria, apontando para um recorte em tamanho real de Zohran Mamdani perto dos banheiros. Mamdani é chamado de Z por seus amigos, que agora somam milhões. “Você já conheceu o Z?”, perguntou uma jovem mobilizadora chamada Jasmine, insinuando que, para mim, para todos nós, era apenas uma questão de tempo. Sua companheira carregava uma prancheta, um donut de geleia, um burrito de café da manhã e dois matchas gelados enquanto Jasmine folheava fotos antigas de Mamdani em seu celular. Ela calculou que conheceu Z há cerca de dez anos, enquanto trabalhava em um projeto com a mãe do prefeito eleito, a cineasta Mira Nair. Ela imaginava que ele chegaria tão longe na política? Na verdade, sim: “Dá para ver que ele está te observando”, disse-me ela, um tanto enigmática. Mas eu sabia exatamente o que ela queria dizer. Mesmo de longe, aliás, era possível ver isso de perto.

Como outro trintão que percorria as ruas no passado, o próprio Walt Whitman de Nova York, Zohran Mamdani surgiu de repente, por perto. Ele não estava sob a sola de ninguém, mas mesmo assim estava lá, em todo lugar e em lugar nenhum, um homem que fazia política transformadora dentro de nossos telefones. "Não me encontrou em um lugar? Procure em outro", como dizia Whitman. Na reta final, Mamdani praticou tai chi e dançou salsa com idosos em um centro comunitário no Lower East Side. Em Richmond Hill, no Queens, participou de um Nagar Kirtan tradicional em um salão comunitário sikh, vestindo um dastaar amarelo-canário. Em um vídeo gravado na Steinway Street, no Queens, Mamdani — que fala, com "diferentes graus de proficiência", espanhol, hindi-urdu, bengali, luganda e árabe — cumprimentou apoiadores sírios em dialeto levantino e brincou dizendo que, embora se parecesse com "seu cunhado de Damasco", seu árabe precisava de prática. Numa mercearia no Bronx, a candidata dançou uma bachata sensual com uma gata tricolor extasiada chamada Coca. Esse espetáculo ardente deve ter arrasado o oponente republicano de Mamdani, Curtis Sliwa, um defensor de gatos resgatados que havia apelado para o voto felino, aparecendo na seção eleitoral na terça-feira com uma gravata temática de gatos e exibindo um bem precioso: um livro intitulado "Pawverbs for a Cat Lover’s Heart" (Patas para o Coração de um Amante de Gatos). (Sliwa "não era exatamente uma imagem de destaque", disse o presidente Donald Trump a um repórter. "Isso não é exatamente o ideal", lamentou Trump: "Ele quer transformar a Gracie Mansion... num lar para gatos.")

"Não adianta, nem em tempo nem em lugar", como disse o poeta. Mas, com a linha de chegada se aproximando rapidamente, os registros de tempo começaram a aparecer. No último domingo, amanheceu um dia ensolarado de outono, com tons de laranja e azul, na Nova Inglaterra, mas no meu feed ainda era noite anterior, 23h24 em Williamsburg, onde Zohran, prometendo “não dormir até o fim” e impecável como sempre em seu terno escuro e gravata, pegou o microfone no Gabriela, um bar lotado e abafado. Um instante depois, eram 23h41 e Mamdani dançava no Toñitas, um clube social caribenho. Pouco depois da meia-noite, o candidato, que já foi rapper profissional sob o nome artístico de “Mr. Cardamom”, estava atrás da mesa de DJ no Damballa, em Bushwick. À 1h da manhã, um influenciador do Instagram espalhou a notícia de que “Zohran acabou de aparecer no bar gay” — Mood Ring, na Myrtle Avenue, onde dançou “com as garotas, gays e eles”, como disse outro usuário. À 1h14, Mamdani foi visto no Papi Juice, uma festa itinerante de arte no Brooklyn que "celebra as vidas de pessoas queer e trans de cor", segundo suas redes sociais. Exatamente à 1h24, ainda bem-apessoado, mas tremendo de frio em um sobretudo de lã, Zohran repôs as energias em um food truck de comida halal e terminou a noite em um comício em Greenpoint.

O homem claramente precisava comer, e isso irritou seus oponentes. Em uma entrevista de 2023, Mamdani foi filmado comendo biryani para viagem do restaurante Boishakhi, em Astoria, com as mãos, como se faz em sua terra natal, Uganda. "Volte para o terceiro mundo", exigiu o deputado Brandon Gill, do Texas, no canal X, quando o vídeo ressurgiu neste verão. (A esposa do congressista, Danielle D’Souza Gill, filha do provocador indiano-americano de direita Dinesh D’Souza, acrescentou: “Eu não cresci comendo arroz com as mãos e sempre usei garfo. Nasci na América. Sou uma patriota cristã MAGA.”) Mas por que ir até o “terceiro mundo” quando se pode ir ao Queens, comer paya de cabra no Kabab King, antigo ponto de encontro de Mamdani no ensino médio, ou orata no Abuqir, ou adana laffa de cordeiro no Zyara?

Vários escândalos gastronômicos surgiram e desapareceram, sem afetar em nada a imagem do ambicioso candidato. Quando ele foi flagrado em um jantar de sushi com sua esposa, a artista Rama Duwaji, o New York Post descreveu o “socialista radical” como um esnobe secreto; Quando ele devorou ​​um burrito no metrô da linha Q, os “verdadeiros nova-iorquinos” — isto é, os leitores do Post — de repente se indignaram como verdadeiros esnobes. Aí, os sinais se cruzaram: na Fox News, um ex-congressista apoiador de Trump acusou Mamdani de comer um burrito com os dedos. (“Como diabos se come um burrito?”, questionou um comentarista.) A pergunta que não saía da cabeça de ninguém foi feita por um influenciador hiperativo que entrevistou Mamdani em um evento de campanha: “Você comeu hoje?”. Ele respondeu: “Um shawarma de frango”. E acrescentou: “Também comecei a comer muito disso”, tirando do bolso do paletó um pacote de Premium Rajnigandha Silver Pearls, uma marca de sementes de cardamomo polvilhadas com açafrão. Faça um favor a si mesmo: “É como uma bala de menta”, disse Mamdani, radiante, como um vendedor. “Perfumes que você pode comer!”.

“Roti and Roses” was the cheerful slogan of Mamdani’s 2020 campaign for state assembly. It neatly captures his socialism, which is hardly going to starve us or serve up bland bummers. His three signature proposals—free and fast buses, universal childcare, and a freeze on rent hikes for the roughly 2.5 million New Yorkers in rent-stabilized apartments—are far from revolutionary, although the devils lurking in the details could bog him down. If he makes too many trade-offs, he’ll be branded as a classic “sewer socialist” who clung to power but lost sight of the horizon. If his rhetoric exceeds his results, he’ll enter the wax museum of lost causes.

The rickety socialist motto “Bread and Roses” brings to mind not striking millworkers dusty from the looms but banjo-pickin’ PBS telethons hosted by folk singers in suspenders. On election day I saw no suspenders along Steinway Street, where, if you can locate it anywhere, in any one place and not another, Mamdani’s socialism comes together. It is not a stale pocketful of old creeds but a dynamic system with small businesses, many of them family businesses, at its core. Anxiety about the “future of the Democratic Party,” like every other op-ed abstraction, vanishes on these blocks sometimes known as Little Egypt. If you’re too busy worrying about the name for this energy, the energy will devour you; you will be crushed under an avalanche of bags of onions or sucked down a cellar hatch to live out your days in the sub-basement of a bakkal. The mayor-elect took this neighborhood by fifty-five points.

In an election that has figuratively “redrawn the city’s electoral maps,” as the analysts say, one actual map became a trusted guide. Late in the campaign, the analyst Michael Lange posted an intricate, and mostly dead-on, prediction of Tuesday’s outcome on his Substack. Elections like yesterday’s lift a lot of boats: get ready to see plenty of Lange, your local lanyard-bearing Carville or Kornacki. Lange had broken the five boroughs into eleven categories, color-coded and tartly labeled. On Staten Island, “Archie Bunker’s Descendants” grimaced and taunted Mamdani from their solid block of blood red, though the borough, heeding the endorsement of their man in the White House, voted for Cuomo over Sliwa. Across the narrows, in places like Gravesend, Manhattan Beach, and Midwood (where Bernie Sanders grew up, but we’ll get to him in a moment), Lange identified the “Anti-Commie Corridor” of Eastern European immigrants whose American Dream did not exactly foresee any of this, balancing out the adjacent “Commie Corridor, Sr.,” comprising a swath of neighborhoods through central and north Brooklyn and into Mamdani’s stronghold of Astoria.

Some of those grizzled seniors are barely thirty, and, like their candidate, rose up within the ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). An insurgent “Commie Corridor, Jr.” represents, for Lange, “the next era of progressive and socialist electoral expansion” in Manhattan neighborhoods like the East Village and Central Harlem. Lange’s light blue “Capitalist Corridor” is right where you’d imagine it, as are the “No Kings Marchers” and “MSNBC Viewers.” A few spots of emerald green mark the “Swing States,” including puny and remote City Island, “the New Hampshire of the Bronx,” where Lange found an electorate that mainly wanted Michael Bloomberg back. City Island ultimately picked Andrew Cuomo, who was seemingly loathed even among his tepid supporters. But Mamdani placed second: in the taffy shops and bait shacks, they appreciated the fact that the mayor-elect, alone among the candidates, had swung through for selfies and smiles.

Driving over from MSNBC Land to Commie Corridor yesterday, through the crazy-straw tangle of on-ramps and off-ramps that lead across the East River and into Astoria, I tuned into Daniel Denvir’s podcast “The Dig” for an interview with two of the main Commies from the Corridor, the young cochairs of New York City’s chapter of the DSA, a group I had joined to get some skin in the game from my distant aerie in New England. Grace Mausser and Gustavo Gordillo described the organization’s nimble, decentralized structure, its all-hands-on-deck ethic of empowering volunteers to rise through its ranks, and, notably, its claim upon the career of Zohran Mamdani. The DSA made Mamdani, who has now made the DSA.
In the two dozen or so campaigns it has run since 2018, the DSA developed a “leadership layer…right out of the gate,” according to Mausser. Zohran’s first three hires were “cadre DSA members,” its core personnel, she explained. Everything flowed out of those hires: field coordination, volunteer coordination, strategic comms, coalition building, policy writing, endorsements, social media. “The structure was iterative as it grew, and it grew in ways that were beyond expectations”: door knockers became field leads became field coordinators, and on it went. The New York City DSA and the Zohran campaign “were two different entities, and remain so,” Gordillo clarified, but “our members were embedded in every aspect of the campaign.” Mausser neatly summed up the astonishing opportunities and risks of this moment: “You can’t disentangle Zohran from DSA. Even if he wanted to step away from us, which to be clear he does not, but even if he did I think it would be impossible at this point.” It wasn’t meant to be ominous; it was a simple statement of fact.

Once in Astoria, I stood with a group of newly recruited canvassers in a tidy park on Crescent Street. A DSA volunteer gave out marching orders and then yielded the top of the picnic table to Tiffany Cabán, the DSA-aligned city council member for the neighborhood. “This campaign has been about solidarity,” Cabán told the raucous group. “How often can you go out and campaign, and feel this good in your body?” I was feeling hungry in my body, so I pulled up to an incredible plate of Uzbek pulao at the Afghan restaurant across the street, Sami’s Kabab House.

As it happens, Sami’s was the site of the “Mayor to Mayor” beer summit in September—I think they drank iced tea, but someone found some ersatz steins for an amber liquid—between Zohran and Bernie Sanders. “We’re sitting here in one of my favorite restaurants in Astoria, in the heart of my district,” Mamdani told Bernie, who seemed unusually moved but typically eager to deflect. “My journey in running for office in the first place,” Mamdani said, began at Sanders’s Queensbridge rally in October 2019, his first after suffering a heart attack, and the largest rally of that election at the time. “I remember the excitement, the elation we had at the rebirth of that campaign”—Bernie’s 2020 presidential campaign, which the Democratic establishment magically made go away as Covid spread in March 2020. But it was also “the birth of all of our campaigns.”
By “our,” of course, Mamdani meant the candidates endorsed and supported since then by the DSA, which, in its new, adrenalized instantiation, also claims Sanders as a kind of founder. Those who attended Bernie’s enormous rallies in the first two weeks of March 2020 did not hallucinate that energy. It was merely forced underground, where, judging by Tuesday’s results, it found ample nourishment for a renewal.

The last time anything like this happened, the world had to squint to see it. Around 9:00 PM on the night of March 3, 1981, a down and out, snow-locked city of 38,000 elected as its mayor a political has-been, the notorious former “perennial candidate” of a petering-out Vietnam-era fringe party, Liberty Union. Bernie Sanders was a four-time bottom-dweller in statewide elections who, a few years earlier, had retired from politics rather than become a punch line. At thirty-nine, he seemed on his way to becoming a familiar Burlington street type: the dusty heckler or lost-cause pamphleteer, his zone of influence extending from the pick-up basketball court to the library periodicals room. An alternate timeline can be imagined where Sanders eventually found employment not as the mayor of Burlington but as an airport taxi driver, a shop teacher, or a shift supervisor at the Onion River Co-Op, refilling the bins of banana chips and carob-coated raisins. If podcasts had existed, it is a near certainty that he would have started one.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Bernie Sanders after winning reelection as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 1983

But Sanders, running as the standard bearer of the “independent coalition”—its core membership was perhaps ten at most, and included a philosopher, a nutritionist, an unruly tenant’s advocate, and an elderly church lady with a political score to settle—had somehow eked out a victory against a five-term incumbent who controlled the city’s Board of Aldermen and its dense thicket of municipal commissions. The issues were Playmobil-small compared to those facing New York City, but the Mamdani campaign makes them feel familiar: a regressive property tax increase, a mustache-twirling developer with his eyes on the sunsets over Lake Champlain, a working-class French-Canadian community that had slid, over two generations after the local mills closed, into grinding poverty, and an electorate resigned to stagnant, discouraging Democratic machine politics.

Mayor Gordon Paquette immediately headed to Florida to golf among the pelicans, confident that the Sanders “fluke” would be corrected after a recount; the recount, run by his allies, narrowed but preserved Bernie’s victory, and a political annus horribilis ensued. Sanders was besieged inside his own office by a city clerk who ransacked his mail, by aldermen who refused to allow him to hire a staff, by an anonymous gazetteer who circulated a weekly slander sheet, written partly in competent ballad stanzas, and by a badge-flashing FBI agent who turned up in Vermont the day after Sanders was inaugurated, looking to ask, as they say, a few questions about our mayor. By that time, Bernie’s epithet in the papers had already shifted from “perennial candidate” to “avowed socialist.”

These Lilliputian events of the distant past will now no doubt be scaled to a city of eight million; for the single, feckless FBI agent, substitute unprecedented, unimagined presidential power summoned in its entirety, expanding out to a federalized national guard and ICE stormtroopers carrying 9mm Lugers. The good stuff will be scaled too: as a teenager growing up in the People’s Republic of Burlington, I helped plant trees and clean up the parks and performed in little circuses and cheered on my friends at the battle of the bands because, as we understood, we were part of something, an experiment in human happiness in an American city.

The analogies are tempting, but they spotlight a difference. After retiring from Liberty Union in 1977, Sanders never again joined a political party; even the Progressive Coalition, which formed during his mayoralty and holds city hall still today, was kept somewhat at arm’s length. “Socialism” never really stuck to him; he often presented himself as a kind of flinty Yankee figure, at his core a libertarian hill farmer. And anyway, socialism was good business for Burlington: the downtown merchants thrived in our new, bustling city, with its telegenic mayor and smart, young administration.

Zohran Mamdani won the support of over one million New Yorkers, but now the New York City DSA, invigorated by his landslide, has risen along with him and promises to hold him to account. At a DSA watch party on election night in Tribeca, the mantra in the crowd was “affordability,” to be sure; but the hope, the buoyancy, the romance was that an expanding socialist movement, managed by the brilliant and passionate young activists who brought this moment to fruition, might recalibrate nationwide what progressives sometimes call “the left wing of the possible.” In Burlington the Sanders win played out as a series of apparently small-ball measures. Some were “socialist”—a modest housing trust for low-cost home ownership, new protections for tenants, a community and economic development fund, a new network of neighborhood groups empowered by city hall—and some, like the arrival of a minor league baseball team, a jazz festival, a fishing derby, a snow shoveling program, a teen center, were not. Maybe the crucial lessons of the Sanders years are in essence entrepreneurial. As Bernie told Mamdani at their iced-tea summit: with everybody chipping in, with a sense that a city can be perfected by the contributions of its citizens, “you’d be surprised that small amounts of money can really go a long way.”