In 2008, as a gargantuan housing market crisis threatened to usher in much more than a major recession, and fed up also with President George Bush’s forever wars, Americans did the unthinkable – they elected an African-American as their president.
That Barack Obama was classy, brilliant and gifted helped a great deal. Americans wanted real and far-reaching change. The financial chaos and tens of thousands having had their homes seized contributed to Obama’s election.
That was Obama’s rallying cry, as reflected in the title of his campaign book: Change We Can Believe In.
Nearly two decades later, with the US again teetering over the edge with severe financial woes for more than a hundred million Americans and explosive socio-cultural cleavages which saw Donald Trump again become president a year ago, New York City did the even more unthinkable: It chose as mayor a 34-year-old Muslim immigrant from Uganda who promised to shatter the Wall Street-imposed economic orthodoxy in the world’s financial and corporate capital, by providing free bus service, universal child care and rent stability for the desperately struggling.
But in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, infinitely more controversial was his making condemnation of Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a key part of his platform.
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani waves to his supporters after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, November 4, 2025.
Photo credit: Reuters
The New York Times reported that Bill Ackman, the billionaire financier and a leading supporter of Israel, “fired off a text indicating that hundreds of millions of dollars would be available to clobber the young interloper in November and save our city”.
But Mamdani’s radical platform saw him lift his one per cent name recognition at the start of the race to crushing former governor Andrew Cuomo, the scion, albeit himself tarnished, of the fabled New York Cuomo household.
The front page article of the Wall Street Journal on Mamdani’s victory began with “Wall Street heavyweights failed to stop New York City voters from electing a democratic socialist mayor. They spent millions to elevate other candidates in the New York City mayoral race. Now what?”
Mamdani’s stunningly easy victory provides another dramatic illustration of the growing revolt of American voters fed up with a rapidly deteriorating status quo in which tens of millions have been for decades steadily losing basic services once assumed to be sacrosanct even by Republican leaders.
At the same time as these cuts are being made against working families, elected representatives have been passing legislation which permits the already super-rich to plunder the national purse under the Republican and Democratic parties – because these representatives need huge sums for the exorbitantly expensive elections.
Unless the current headlong rush to a build an even larger billionaire oligarchy is corrected by leaders like Mamdani and the small Bernie Sanders, AOC-led band of progressives, boldly allying with independent, pro-people representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene, we will soon witness the death of democracy, since it is no longer serving the needs of the vast majority of the citizenry.
If this trend continues, we will see revolts not of voters but of the masses. If democracy is under the tight control of the super-rich, it is no longer “of the people, by the people and for the people”, as Abraham Lincoln so unequivocally described it. That is what makes democracy better than the other forms of governance.
Many claim this a failure of capitalism and our extreme inequality is a result of legislated policies, which have created an astonishing 900 billionaires in the US.
Before Ronald Reagan became president in 1982, there were only 13! Overall, there are more than 3,000 dollar billionaires in the world, with about 500 in China and 250 in India.
The richest of them is Elon Musk, with assets of $480 billion and a new pay package agreed Thursday of $1 trillion.
What kind of world leaders are happy with such outrageous wealth while billions of people desperately search to put together a decent meal for the family daily – and not always succeeding?
The major media, now owned by large corporations or billionaires, routinely report on these billionaires without highlighting what a huge moral and political scandal it is that such extreme wealth in the hands of a few co-exists with billions of people struggling to find food, education and care.
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, arrives for a campaign event at a senior center in Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City, US, on October 31, 2025
Photo credit: Reuters
The super-rich need to recognise that their continued accumulation of vast amounts of wealth amid extreme deprivation is suicidal as it will destroy the system and their riches with it. As Arnold Toynbee has written, civilisations do not die – they commit suicide.
Its probably an apocryphal but Karl Marx is reported to have said that when the last capitalist is about to be hanged, and they are searching for a noose, he will shout out: “I will sell you one.”
Mamdani’s election picks up another fascinating thread – the unusual constellation of East African intellectuals who have made major contributions to American politics and culture.
A decade earlier, Kenya had offered the US the dazzling Lupita Nyong’o, daughter of Prof Peter Anyang Nyong’o and Dorothy Nyong’o, who among a long list of top acting prizes won an Academy Award.
Before all these, there was of course an infinitely greater Kenyan gift to the US. President Obama was the child of Kenyan economist Barack Hussein Obama and Ann Dunham.
In an ironic and indeed tragic twist, the supposedly progressive Obama refused to endorse Mamdani, even though his refusal could have led to the election of the much accused and thuggish former New York governor Cuomo.
But Obama did campaign vigorously for conservative Democrats running to become governors of New Jersey and Virginia.
To its great discredit, but not surprisingly, virtually the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party refused to support Mamdani. No wonder there is a huge revolt of voters in America, who are too often given terrible choices at the ballot box by party leaders.
The first such voter revolt in my lifetime occurred in 2016, when we saw the radical Trump defeat the supposed shoo-in, Hillary Clinton. Trump won even though the entire leadership of his own Republican Party opposed him!
The vast population of struggling Americans wanted real change. They won it over the unified opposition of mainstream parties and institutions.
In that election, there was widespread passionate support in the Democratic Party for Senator Bernie Sanders as well in the primary against Hillary Clinton, despite his open talk of “revolution”.
Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani kisses his wife Rama Duwaji after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, November 4, 2025.
Photo credit: Reuters
But the Democratic leadership openly tilted the scale hard against Sanders. Interestingly, a similar scenario played out in the United Kingdom in 2016 where Jeremy Corbin saw his support rise phenomenally with his far-reaching change platform but he too was stopped by the vested interests favouring the status quo.
The bottom political line for the West is this: the surge of conservative and far right political parties is a result of the once pro-people Democratic and Labour parties throwing in their lot with the more lucrative financial and corporate powers.
We pray for Mamdani’s success as he attempts to live up to the hopes of millions in New York and tens of millions in the United States to build a country-wide movement that will usher in a more humane society and world.
