Less than a year ago, few had heard the name Zohran Mamdani. Yesterday, everything changed. On the same day Dick Cheney’s Islamophobic soul reportedly left the earth, New York City elected its first Muslim mayor. At 34, Zohran Mamdani—Ugandan-born, South Asian, a graduate of Bronx Sci—is not just the city’s 111th mayor; he’s its youngest in more than a century, its first immigrant mayor, and perhaps its most poetic rebuttal to America’s prolonged sojourn into the abyss of authoritarian reality.
From co-founding his school’s first cricket team to organizing for justice in Palestine or fighting for tenants’ rights in Queens, Mamdani’s journey from immigrant son to Assemblymember—and now the city’s first South Asian, Ugandan-born, Muslim mayor—embodies a politics rooted in action, dignity, and the belief that power belongs to the many, not the few.
Welcome to a functioning democracy, New York!
The revolutionary surge in body-politic turnout was staggering, as more than 2 million New Yorkers cast their ballots—marking the highest turnout for a mayoral race the city has seen in over 50 years. In an era when cynicism in the American political landscape often wins by default, Mamdani’s victory felt like a global declaration that hope, against all odds, still has a pulse. So much so that many cities across the world tuned in to the NYC mayoral election results, watching as the empire struck out.
“I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life,” said Mamdani when he took the stage for his victory speech at 11:00 P.M. Many millennials like me saw the reverberations through the years and believed we were witnessing a reincarnation of the Bernie movement as Senator Bernie Sanders embraced Mamdani on stage. For many millennials, it was déjà vu of the “Feel the Bern” era—except this time, the revolution actually won!
It was, undeniably, the most beautiful moment in politics since we elected President Barack Obama.
” … Mamdani’s win feels like the first tremor in the collapse of America’s modern-day imperial edifice—the one built on Trumpism, white grievance, and corporate greed. Like all empires, it was never sustainable. It was just really, really loud. Last night, that empire cracked.”
Last night, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) handed out yellow and red roses at Zohran election parties to echo the significance of “Bread and Roses,” one of the most powerful and enduring symbols in labor, feminist, and social justice history. If you are not familiar with “Bread and Roses,” this term originated in the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, where immigrant women demanded not only fair wages (“bread”) but also dignity and beauty in life (“roses”).
Politically, “Bread and Roses” expresses the dual demand for material (fair wages, money, healthcare, housing) and emotional justice (access to art, opportunity, and a life of flourishing). It became one of the first major multiracial, women-led labor movements in the United States, reshaping how unions framed their struggles: “We are not just fighting for survival, we are fighting for the fullness of life.” The same kind of flourishing that people who live in the greatest city in the world deserve. We must insist that progress is incomplete if it only feeds the body, yet starves the soul.
We must understand the current democratic socialist movement as a universal symbol for justice that nourishes both body and soul—a reminder that true progress must provide a life of flourishing for all Americans. Mamdani shaped one of the most revolutionary campaigns the world has ever seen, with many likening his ascendancy to victory to India’s liberation movement. In Mamdani’s victory speech, he quoted India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech, saying, “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old into the new; when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”
It was a fitting invocation. For just as India’s liberation marked the slow, inevitable unraveling of the British Empire, Mamdani’s win feels like the first tremor in the collapse of America’s modern-day imperial edifice—the one built on Trumpism, white grievance, and corporate greed. Like all empires, it was never sustainable. It was just really, really loud.
On Tuesday night, that empire cracked.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Elaine Joy Edaya Degale is a Black-Filipina writer and lecturer at community colleges within the City University of New York (CUNY) and has an Ed.M. and M.A. from Teachers College, Columbia University.
She graduated cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, where she studied International Relations and Development, and continues to support literacy and food programming efforts in Indigenous communities through her Community-Based organization, OperationMerienda.org.
