A New Yorker’s Honest Take on the Mamdani Win, and a theory of aesthetics (Since No One Asked)
It usually happens at a birthday party or a get-together—maybe the kind of night where everyone is squeezed into someone’s living room or a sparsely lit bar—half talking about whatever play we’ve just seen or catching up as friends do, half planning our escape routes to our respective trains. Someone mentions politics in one way or another, and the French goodbye begins. In the most recent case, it was the mayoral race that came up this past June. That was just around the time the name Zohran Mamdani became a household name in this city. He had the air of someone who had stepped in from a more functional place and taken pity on the rest of us.
Some of the people I heard talking were the same people I spend much of my life around: performers, actors, artists, nonprofit sleuths, bartenders, admin junkies, and the occasional lawyer-type orbiting the cultural world. I know their sensibilities because I share a lot of them, even if I’m also one of those people who always seems slightly out of step with the consensus. The support didn’t surprise me. Their tone didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was realizing that something in me had shifted—and that his near-universal adoption in my circles revealed sensibilities I no longer felt compelled to affirm.
The contrast snapped into focus when I compared these conversations to the ones I have with neighbors I see all the time. These are New Yorkers raising families, working odd hours, wrestling with rent and commutes and the daily grind. They don’t call themselves “working class,” because real people don’t label themselves or their friends like a campaign flyer. The contrast was obvious. My neighbors weren’t competing in any moral Olympics or worrying about being in sync with whatever candidate was trending. They weren’t chasing popularity; they were talking about outcomes. Their questions were direct: Who feels real? Which candidate projects leadership? Who can actually help New York City and its myriad problems? And they were among the few who admitted their disappointment over Mamdani’s win. They assumed very quickly I was happy with the results since they know the milieu I inhabit.
This split between worlds held my attention. I’d spent the last few years fancying myself a “recovering populist.” Populism—which can feel like its own kind of modern sociocultural narcotic—seemed saturated in a cynicism that no longer appealed to me. Not because it’s wrong to scrutinize the people in power, but because the oversold idea that all our problems come down to a monolithic villain or a single structure becomes an addictive story—and is increasingly unflattering on the wrong side of forty. It seems like one reason conspiratorial thinking is spreading on both the left and the right. When people feel powerless or overwhelmed, it becomes almost natural to pin everything on a single figure and project our frustrations onto them instead of confronting the more difficult truth that society is built from overlapping systems, compromises, and human limitations. No one wants to think they might have anything in common with the public consciousness or the leaders they criticize, but that’s what we’re seeing now. Among millennials—my own crowd—there’s a near-instinctive need to avoid sounding anything like their parents, older siblings, or anyone from “the rest of America,” even when their actual views overlap far more than they’d ever admit.
We almost always prefer believing the aesthetically pleasing notion rather than confronting the utilitarian pragmatism that running a massive, imperfect city actually requires. We would rather feel rescued than be reminded that cities, like people, are built on friction, failure, improvisation, and compromise. Cynicism isn’t expecting little. Cynicism is knowing something is impossible and promising it anyway. The quieter half of cynicism is an electorate that knowingly buys the impossible because accepting the limits of political reality feels unbearable.
Free buses were something I believed in deeply when I was younger. I’m less convinced now, not because I oppose the idea, but because the trade-offs don’t seem worth the cost, and the people who would benefit most are often those already relatively advantaged. It’s not popular to point out that targeted improvements, combined with increased subsidized ridership, make more practical sense. The same pattern shows up in housing. A friend of mine who works directly in that sector told me that rent freezing would be disastrous. This friend is firmly on the left and almost certainly voted for Mamdani. That isn’t a contradiction. It’s simply the reality that rarely makes it into conversations shaped by enthusiasm rather than feasibility.
I think about this constantly in my creative life. I’m a working actor and performer. I’ve produced my own work. I’ve had years when everything feels like it’s finally taking off, and others when the path dips so sharply that the old familiar dread creeps in and I start wondering whether this life I’ve built is finally out of road. Artists live with those huge swings in perspective. We read our careers like weather patterns, and we project that same feast-or-famine instinct onto the city, or the country, and even our own households.
Sure, I still want to hit it big, to see the next project land, to reach whatever horizon I’ve been chasing. But most days, the goal is simply to get the next job. I’ve had real successes, even if they’re fragile and always in motion. And underneath all of it is a simple truth: I’m a new father with limited time, limited energy, and the same structural constraints everyone else lives under. Some days I can move forward. Some days I can barely get to anything at all.
So much of modern politics is built on promising the sky and whatever riches supposedly lie beneath it. I’ve always preferred pragmatic populists—those who sincerely want to improve people’s daily lives. The aspiration is noble, and often possible. But the language we hear still feels misleading because it frames progress as if it’s only blocked by villains and bad actors rather than the unavoidable challenges and negotiations any real solution requires. Those obstructive forces exist, but they’re only part of a much bigger system—one that, for all its frustrations, produces a city and economy that remain wildly successful and endlessly compelling to live within.
That tension between the dream and the daily reality is the same tension we refuse to acknowledge in politics. In our sober moments, we’ll admit there are limits, but tribally we don’t dare attach anything less than grand scope to our words or our visions. We insist on being told that everything can change if the right person wins. We want boundless possibility without facing the constraints. And even when we acknowledge those constraints, we cling to the idea that a political savior might still be waiting in the wings.
We apply the logic of fairy tales to a city held together by budget math, agency staff, union negotiations, and a public that’s tired before noon. Our hopefulness in leadership is what actually needs reform—not in a way that collapses into resignation, but in a way that sharpens our vetting and makes us more shrewd about who we elevate. It might even change the kind of people who choose to run for office, which deserves just as much scrutiny as any campaign promise.
Whenever I speak honestly about Mamdani, I usually feel the need to clarify that my position has nothing to do with his race or religion—and for good reason. Plenty of his detractors leaned into nativism, jingoism, and outright bigotry, and that noise hasn’t stopped since he won.
My concerns were simpler. I just thought many of his ideas were not serious. There’s a tone he has that reminds me of the overly earnest college activist who’s read some Howard Zinn and a lot of Eugene Debs and thinks that counts as a governing philosophy. And I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who insists that “intifada” should be interpreted by its literal dictionary meaning rather than its widely understood historical one.
More than that, I worry that the day-to-day management of this city is not something he is prepared for. That doesn’t mean he is incapable of doing good. I actually find some of his views, like his stance on licensure, refreshing. It’s just that the story he’s selling feels out of proportion to what the job actually allows. Maybe that is just politics.
And let’s be honest: the field was so widely disliked that almost anyone who spoke coherently was going to rise. Curtis Sliwa, of all people, ended up being oddly palatable compared to some of the others. That alone tells you everything about the state of this particular election.
The larger point I mean to make is that we pretend we choose leaders based on logic when we are really choosing the narrative that feels least painful to believe. We claim to reject aesthetic politics, yet we cling to aesthetics in every other part of our lives: where we live, who we date, what institutions we claim, which politicians feel emotionally legible to us.
New Yorkers do not elect mayors to change the city. They elect mayors to change how they feel about living in the city. The city itself is indifferent. It has survived machine bosses, economic disasters, crime waves, terrorism, technocrats, reformers, charismatic figures, disappointing figures, and more than a century of people predicting its demise.
It will survive this administration too. And the next one. And probably the five after that.
I don’t support Mamdani the way many of my friends do, but I genuinely hope he proves me wrong. I’m giving him a year—not because I’m generous, but because that is the civic rhythm of this place. Giving every new mayor a year before deciding what comes next is a good habit for this city. It is our political superstition.
Hope is cheap. Governance is not.
And in a city built on contradiction, improvisation, delusion, survival, reinvention, mythmaking, and self-deception, it should not surprise anyone that our politics look exactly the same.
