One Thing People Are Missing About Mamdani

Young people are fighting fatalism

The race for New York City’s next mayor is drawing to a close, and if polls are correct, 34-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani will be the victor.

This mayoral race has been well covered and well analyzed, but I still believe one aspect of it deserves more attention.

It’s true that Mamdani’s economic message resonated, his opponent was hapless and tone-deaf, and the Democratic establishment slowly started to come on board after their resistance grew futile.

But it’s also important to recognize the degree to which young people — who do not make up all of Mamdani’s supporters but are a crucial and sizable portion of them — are desperately fighting fatalism, bracing themselves against never-ending waves of cataclysm and depression. The world as they knew it is crashing around them. Hope is a vanishing commodity. Darkness reigns.

Still, it’s in our nature, particularly in our youth, when there are more days ahead of us than behind us, to cling to optimism — to ferret it out. Pessimism runs counter to the very spirit of youth.

As a young James Baldwin once put it:

“I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.”

And so, Mamdani is a bright, passionate candidate to believe in. He is not only a politician; he’s also a symbol — the embodiment of an idea, proof that hope remains, that new things can still be born, that change is still possible and history can still be made.

Think about what young people’s lives have been like.