Kathy O’Connor on Mamdani’s victory.
It is an occupational hazard for anyone interested in American politics to become overwhelmed by rhetoric. The national conversation is so often conducted in italics and capital letters—TREASON, LOW-IQ, DEEP STATE—that the essential banality of governance, the stuff that determines whether your rent goes up or your subway runs on time, often vanishes entirely. This, I think, is why the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral race feels less like a grand political coronation and more like the successful conclusion of a very meticulous, necessary scientific experiment. It is, to borrow from our previous discussion, the first successful floor built upon the New Realism.
If the previous essay lamented the “architectural collapse of the future”—the systematic dismantling of rights that left the young, the poor, and the marginalized with only a deteriorating blueprint—Mamdani’s win is the material proof that you can, in fact, begin rebuilding. What does this mean for working-class New Yorkers? It means that a politician was elected not because he shouted the loudest abstract grievance, but because he spoke with specificity about eviction prevention, about turning affordable housing into a right rather than a precarious lottery, and about a public transit system that doesn’t treat low-income riders as a criminal class. It is a victory for the sheer, unromantic substance of life. It demonstrates that the most effective counter-narrative to chaos is a detailed, cost-effective plan for a functional existence. This is the true heart of the fight back: not just resisting the bad, but aggressively instituting the good, on the ground, where the rent is due.
The larger national significance lies precisely in how this local, material victory combats the dark ideological fog emanating from the Trumpist, MAGA-sphere. We spoke earlier of the terrifying prospect of the “militarization of the streets,” the constant, low-grade thrum of conflict and institutional aggression aimed squarely at dissent. Trump’s political project thrives on confusion, on the conspiracy theory that insists all systems are rigged, all politicians are corrupt, and therefore, the only solution is spectacular, violent rupture. This is why the constant propaganda against democratic socialists—that they are “Communists,” that they seek radical, destructive change—is so crucial to the right-wing narrative.
Mamdani’s victory short-circuits this engine of cynicism. When a democratic socialist candidate wins by delivering concrete, measurable, utterly non-conspiratorial improvements—like funding for public schools, or a successful community land trust—it becomes infinitely harder to convince a struggling voter that the entire system is a hopeless delusion. It offers a tangible counter-proof: the democratic process, utilized by activists like Mamdani and supported by figures like AOC and Crockett (on a reciprocal loop as each will need support), can produce results that alleviate suffering.
This is the ultimate confrontation with the Trumpian aesthetic. It is a choice between a politics that promises a glorious, vengeful fiction (the MAGA reality) and a politics that offers difficult, but verifiable, reality (the New Realism). The movement supporting Mamdani—and, by extension, the broader youth energy backing leaders who prioritize the material well-being of the working class—is demonstrating that the fight for democracy is not an abstract battle for the soul of the nation; it is the mundane, grinding, unceasing effort to make the water run and the lights stay on. It is a glorious kind of tedium, this resistance. It is the work of turning the architectural collapse into a construction site.
