Mamdani

Socialist excellence

My photo, not the shop I've been going to since COVID inflation made haircuts equally unaffordable everywhere, but mine is also called "Excellence". My shop has Arab barbers, but I go there not just because they're Arabs but also because they straight-razor shave the back of my neck and give me a great hot towel.

Happy New Year! The New York City news, of the inauguration of my borough president Mark Levine as city comptroller, Jumaane Williams as public advocate (a New York institution in which he has served since 2019, preceded by Attorney General Letitia James and former mayor Bill de Blasio), and our new mayor Zohran Mamdani, really feels like a beginning of something in a way New Year festivities rarely do (I don’t know but I think January 1 is a pretty unusual date for holding inaugurations; Spanberger’s gubernatorial, in Virginia, is going to be January 17 and Sherrill’s in New Jersey on January 20).

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The ceremonial itself, and the speeches, were pretty inspiring, as far as I’m concerned. I really liked Levine pointing out that each of the three of them swore on a different holy book, and Williams getting emotional, and then asking all of us to take an oath together:

— that no one let go of anyone’s hands, because if we’re all connected, we can’t lose anyone. So we hold on to the hand of our neighbor, and we reach out with our other hand to grasp someone who may fall through cracks, and we bring them along. I want everyone, if they’re comfortable, take a hand of the person next to you, or the arm, and just repeat after me. We can all be the voice of the people.

CROWD: We can all be the voice of the people....

Echoing Mamdani’s tribute to the collectivity of democracy in his November victory speech:

...while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. Now, it is something that we do.

I only want to point out a couple of additional things.

Corey Robin has a lovely piece on “Mamdani’s Moral Imagination” referring to the point in the mayor’s inaugural speech where he responds to Clinton’s idea of the end of “big government”:

To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this—no longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.

For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path—one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception.

Robin finds that he has been hankering after excellence himself in recent years, following a long turn to cynicism that began when he was a young organizer for a graduate students’ union fighting with university administrations that seemed intent on destroying everything universities should be for, the pursuit of learning for its own sake—he doesn’t mention it, but the Latin word they used in the Middle Ages in Paris and Oxford and Salamanca, universitas, referred to the scholars’ identity as members of a kind of labor guild, with its undergrad apprentices, journeymen (baccalauri), masters (magistri), and doctors, creating learning as they imparted it. Instead, universities were industrializing, focused on processing their product as quickly and cheaply as possible, and accusing the union of trying to destroy the universities itself, and he began to lose faith in the whole project of saving the system and fall into cynicism.

At the same time, something about the very awfulness of the current situation of intellectual workers, the enshittification of the Internet and the stupidity of AI and the very poverty of higher education as it has become, has made him one once again to stand up for excellence, socialist excellence of the kind developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was the best people (Weber and Durkheim, the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, John Dewey) who took up the idea of building the best society, before the Soviet Union made socialism a synonym for drabness and mediocrity

Now he writes,

One of the reasons I’m so excited about Zohran is that I feel like he gets this in his bones. As I’ve been arguing here, on my blog, and at the New York Review of Books, he doesn’t see socialism and government as the last stop before penury and poverty, as a way of catching people who would otherwise fall, as a safety net. He sees it as a launching pad, as a way of doing great things, great things that all of us can do together, cooperatively, or when necessary, that many of us can do through confrontation....

That lost vision of perfection, of moving toward excellence, should be at the core of the socialism we seek to build. In schools, in healthcare, in housing, in work, in government, in childcare, in universities, in green energy projects, in democracy itself. It is the reason we value human freedom, not just for ourselves but for everyone. Equal freedom for all, as it used to be known.

And that, Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan point out, is what “affordability” is about; not just the “kitchen table” issues we think of when we think of how much struggle our lives require. Affordability is freedom:

While Mamdani talked about affordability—freezing rents and making childcare and buses free—his broader point was to reclaim the meaning of freedom, and the responsibility of government to ensure that we have it.

These policies are not simply about the costs we make free, but the lives we fill with freedom. For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. Our City Hall will change that. ... Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home.

Anyone familiar with FDR’s Four Freedoms speech (or the Norman Rockwell paintings that followed) will recognize the lineage. Mamdani was calling for a modern version of the New Deal coalition, with the matching vision of a government willing and able to fight for the freedoms the New Deal promised.

I think my favorite thing about Mamdani’s vision of excellence, and Robin’s too, is that its deepest example is invariably food, generally cooked by immigrants from the taco trucks on every corner we used to talk about when we talked about immigration reform and the halal stalls on every other corner to the fine dining establishments almost entirely staffed by immigrants:

We expect greatness from the cooks wielding a thousand spices, from those who stride out onto Broadway stages, from our starting point guard at Madison Square Garden. Let us demand the same from those who work in government....Where else can you hear the sound of the steelpan, savor the smell of sancocho, and pay $9 for coffee on the same block? Where else could a Muslim kid like me grow up eating bagels and lox every Sunday?

Excellence is grounded, excellence is delicious, excellence is something everybody needs and deserves.