The cost of Zohran
Mayor Mamdani’s policies are guaranteed to wreck New York City
Heather Mac DonaldWilliam F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.
American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging. Zohran Mamdani, the quintessential product of the academy, is poised to take such performative grievance to one of the biggest stages in the world. The results will not be pretty.
Mamdani’s governing agenda reflects his family background, education and negligible post-college career. Now 34, he was born in 1991 to a professor of postcolonial studies and a filmmaker. The family moved to New York City from Uganda in 1999 so that Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, could teach in Columbia University’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department and direct the university’s Institute of African Studies. The young Mamdani imbibed academic anti-westernism at the family dinner table, which hosted such leading lights of postcolonial studies as Columbia’s Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi.
Mamdani fashions himself a champion of the working class. He chose not to attend New York’s most storied working-class college, the public City College of New York (then $6,330 a year), however, in favor of the private Bowdoin College, a bucolic, secluded retreat in Maine (then $59,900 a year). The centuries-old New England institution grew out of the finest ideals of America’s Founders; it boasts Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, US president Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court justices, decorated Civil War generals, abolitionists and industrialists among its graduates.
