Why New Yorkers Chose Mamdani
One does not need to be a socialist sympathizer to understand why mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won the New York City election: society has failed to deliver on its own promises. For many young professionals in America’s great cities, the old compact - study hard, take on debt, build a career, and one day afford a home - has collapsed. A graduate degree now comes with around $70,000 in loans, and for many it’s far higher. In New York State, the average student-loan balance has risen above $42,000; nationally, graduate borrowers carry nearly $90,000 in combined debt. Owning property in the world’s cultural capital borders on fantasy: the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan sells for close to a million dollars.
This is not about Mamdani’s domestic agenda, ambitious as it is. New Yorkers voted for a socialist experiment, and they will live with its results. One hopes his idealism yields something other than decline. What demands scrutiny now are his foreign-policy instincts: the lens through which the new American left increasingly views the world.
A Foreign Policy Shaped by Ideology
Mamdani’s rhetoric reflects a worldview deeply skeptical of the Western-led order and sympathetic to its adversaries. He has denounced U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba, describing them as instruments of imperial cruelty rather than responses to authoritarian rule. He condemned the June 2025 U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites as “unconstitutional,” a reaction consistent with his broader opposition to American power projection. Yet his moral fervor stops at the water’s edge: he has offered no parallel outrage over Tehran’s repression or its proxy militias that sow violence across the region. He tends to champion his foreign-policy ideals only when the West finds itself in conflict with the Global South.
His hostility toward Israel is overt and ideological. Mamdani is a vocal supporter of the BDS movement, short for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions: a global campaign launched in 2005 to pressure Israel through economic and cultural isolation. Modeled on the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, BDS calls for consumers and institutions to boycott Israeli goods, withdraw investments tied to Israel, and urge governments to impose sanctions until Israel meets a list of political demands. Supporters frame it as a peaceful, rights-based effort. Critics, including most Western governments, see it as an attempt to delegitimize Israel entirely by insisting on a Palestinian “right of return” that would effectively dissolve Israel’s Jewish majority.
Selective Outrage as a Political Compass
His anniversary messaging on October 7 bypassed the massacre’s memory, centering instead on Gaza fundraisers and denunciations of “genocide” and U.S. complicity. The pattern is familiar: moral outrage when Israel or Washington acts, studied quietly when others do worse. In a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, such rhetoric is more than provocative. It signals how the new American left now calibrates its conscience.
Yet on Russia’s war in Ukraine, Mamdani has said almost nothing. His public record contains no condemnation of the invasion, only a passing lament for a detained Wall Street Journal reporter, occasional complaints about U.S. “geopolitical greed” driving energy costs, and even a celebratory post marking the anniversary of the 1917 Russian women’s strike as a socialist-feminist triumph while the invasion raged. In a world where Bakhmut’s ruins echo Mariupol’s, Mamdani’s reticence reads less as oversight than as selective solidarity. For a politician fluent in moral outrage, the absence is deafening. To audiences in Warsaw or Vilnius, it’s a familiar pattern: Western privilege mistaking moral symmetry for nuance. I saw firsthand what Russia’s revanchist ambitions look like in Ukraine: cities leveled, villages erased, children abducted in what the same International Criminal Court he champions has called a war crime. His silence is not neutrality; it is alignment. Mamdani belongs to a global ideological left defined by anti-Western and anti-NATO sentiment, and by a desire for a multipolar world shaped by the ambitions of China, Russia, and the BRICS bloc.
The Revolutionary Left Comes to City Hall
Mamdani’s rhetoric isn’t merely progressive; it’s revolutionary in the literal sense. When he tells voters that “if there was any system that could guarantee each person housing, whether you call it the abolition of private property or a statewide housing guarantee, it is preferable to what is going on right now,” (remarks from a May 2025 podcast now circulating widely on X) he isn’t speaking figuratively. It’s the language of a movement that seeks to invert the moral and economic order of the West.
Conservatives and centrist liberals alike have reason to worry about this new anti-Western international left. It channels legitimate grievances - inequality, colonial legacy, corporate greed - into reactionary policy experiments built on moral resentment. The result is always the same: policies that promise justice but deliver scarcity, and revolutions that claim to empower the oppressed while entrenching new hierarchies of control.
History rarely repeats, but it rhymes. The same self-righteous fatigue that once hollowed Europe’s defenses now reappears in America’s cities under new banners. If the West forgets what it stands for, others will be eager to remind it, at gunpoint.
Benjamin Reed
American Veteran
