If there’s one city in the western world that has equally captured the imagination of the literary world, finance barons, as well as the artists and auteurs, it is New York, one of the only two megapolises of the world till the 1960s. The popularity of Zohran ‘Kwame’ Mamdani as the front-runner Democratic Party mayoral candidate for the city has once again brought into focus the sharp wedges and fault-lines of this multi-ethnic ‘melting point’, the city’s changing demographics over the years, and the widening inequality between the cabbies and the Wall Street Bros. The Indian writer Arnab Ray has wonderfully portrayed all of it in a Times of India column.
Since generations New York has attracted fear and loathing, as well as envy and awe. Joan Didion most memorably described it as an Urban Xanadu, “a place where the mundane meets the miraculous”, with the caveat that one doesn’t live in Xanadu. Anti-establishment discontent and rage is catapulting this moment, which is not something new.
Pop Elite Roleplays
The poet and civil rights activist Langston Hughes wrote in the 1960s ‘I know no American dream, only an American nightmare’. So the ‘shining city on the Hill’ does have its problems. Always had. The contradictions & antagonisms have always been there, along with winners & losers, and the lucky and the unlucky.
There has always been a conscious recognition of it, as well as the need to rise above circumstances in the USA, that’s why the country leads in both entrepreneurship as well as private philanthropy.
To paraphrase what Indian economic columnist Swaminathan Aiyer once wrote, the thing with capitalism is that it allows the smartest and the luckiest to move further ahead than anyone. The distribution of both of these attributes is, just like nature, very unfair and grossly unequal. But there’s no social engineering remedy for that. The world is what it is.
There are no free lunches and no silver bullets. One has to be either willfully blind or utterly indifferent to repose their hopes in a 33 year old ex-rapper bro who has AOC and the Squad shilling for him, and Emily Ratkajowiski wearing ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’ T-shirt. This is a postcard perfect celebrity ‘No-Nothing Left’ campaign. For most of these famous left-libs, the poor is either an abstract textbook category, or a lego block, or the object of their sympathy, which allows them to burnish their own creditionals in the marketplace.
The non-immigrant voters of this Bollywood-Kampala hybrid with Accra tango, who became an American just 7 years ago, living in plush neighbourhoods are mostly do-gooder virtue signallers and cosplayers. These are the same folks who imposed the Islamophobia gag, and shoved DEI and other woke trappings down everyone’s throats.
Mimic Activism All the Way
This New Pantomime Left is more a psycho-social-cultural phenomenon, rather than an economic one. And should be addressed in those terms. Some of its most adept practitioners are not street fighters of the 1970s, or Greenwich village hipster intellectuals writing for Partisan Review, but credentialed Wokes and Wannabe Elites in Fortune 500 Inc who roleplay as disruptionists, but are actually wedded to the status quo. Mamdani is not different.
The thing with most of these South Asian marginals and arrivistes, Hindu & Muslim alike, is akin to what Naipaul of Black Power, calling it a ‘sentimental camaraderie of skin colour’. Instead of skin colour, there’s a common origin story and culture, and a resistance to get absorbed in the cosmopolitan melting pot. That’s why the bollywood song, dance, Amitabh Bachchan Deewar dialogues, and discredited populism.
Bholenath Vishwakarma, a Columbia alumni and former resident of New York, speaks about the interesting history of middle Manhattan before the 90s as rife with gangs, prostitution, and drugs, where the working class poor as well as the Wall Street super rich were equally afraid to venture.
It took Rudy Giuliani’s tough policing to make that area ‘accessible to all New Yorkers’.
While Mamdani’s Gen Z voters may not remember all this, Vishwakarma rues that his policies, which include support for ‘defund the police’ movement, will end up “choking the entire city with Harlem and Jackson Heights”.
“Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu”, wrote Edward Said, the Columbia University Prophet of Multi-culturalism and Orientalism, in his 1993 book Culture and Imperialism.
Mamdani and 60s Ghana in Brooklyn?
In the age of ‘choose your identity’ and hybrid intersectionality, it holds absolutely true for the South Asian-Afro-American-Muslim-leftist mayoral front-runner as well his acolytes.
The Middle name of Mamdani is borrowed as a tribute to Kwame Nkrumah, the Comrade leader of Ghana who wrote ‘Capitalism: the last stage of Imperialism’, title inspired by Lenin.
The rot in America is very deep. And no plot against it is needed. Basically, the left drifters and grifters are interested in activism signalling brand value, and those on the right are led, or misled, by those interested in business brand value and pocketing margins made.
Between Woke firebrands and cigar chomping indifferent fatcats, it won’t be long before NYC turns into Gotham City.
The right needs to find itself, do hard reckoning, broaden its horizons. And the left needs to distance itself from exotic nomenclatura elites cosplaying anti-establishment crusaders.
Unlucky is the city that needs a Hero. A child of privilege born to an Ivy League academic and a famous Indian filmmaker, who mimics and channelises proletarian angst, frustration, and rage by offering free city bus rides, is nothing but an entertaining spectacle.
