Mamdani’s Imaginary America

Z ohran Mamdani spent his Fourth of July contributing to the doddering liberal tradition of mistaking crushingly downbeat pessimism about America for patriotism.

Mamdani devoted his address commemorating the nation’s 250th birthday to offering what he claimed was a view of the American experience from an immigrant’s perspective. But New York City’s mayor expressed only a qualified version of the faith in American institutions and belief in America’s greatness that’s more common among foreign-born Americans than among their native counterparts. Instead, he channeled the apprehensions about America that have overtaken the younger, well-educated, affluent white voters who form the base of the Democratic Socialist movement.

The mayor opened his address with a description of what immigrants saw as they arrived at Castle Garden, Ellis Island, and, eventually, LaGuardia Airport. They saw slave traders ready to “take them into bondage” and tenements “rife with squalor,” but they also saw a “monument to freedom.” He established implicitly what he’d later make explicit: that New York is a city of contradictions within “a nation of contradictions.”

Mamdani’s opening remarks prompted him to elaborate on the story of personal triumph over adversity that is central to the immigrant experience in America. Even if the mayor dwelled more on the adversity than the triumph — the “nativism” those migrants faced, the “jobs they would be refused,” the “landlords who would not rent to them,” and the “abject labor in living conditions they would withstand” — he credited immigrants for still somehow seeing “opportunity” in this new world.

At this point, students of political rhetoric might expect Mamdani to pivot from this grim reflection on American history to something a touch more uplifting. Instead, the mayor’s speech grew even darker as he erected an elaborate straw man against whom he could favorably contrast himself.

The story of America that we all know, Mamdani said, is a lie. The “irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power, influence, and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.” The concept of American exceptionalism, he said, has been reduced to material factors: our wealth and our power. “The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional because here nothing is fixed into place.”

That is not true. America may, indeed, be in love with the new and fashionable. Its cities, New York in particular, may make a fetish of knocking down the familiar in favor of what’s in vogue. But its values are fixed.

That’s what the immigrants for whom Mamdani presumes to speak believe. Those who adopt America are more likely to conclude, as Calvin Coolidge said 100 years ago, that there is a finality to the notions enshrined in America’s founding documents: that all men are created equal, that their rights are divine in origin, and that no just government can derive its authority from anything other than the consent of the governed.

After misattributing the professional left’s status anxiety to immigrants, Mamdani veered off into a diatribe in which he described an America that’s recognizable only to the properly indoctrinated.

Immigrants, he said, have a “special power.” That is, “the power to determine what America means.” But they have an enemy in “the powerful” who have “always” seen America as “an arena of supremacy.” If this ill-defined but omniscient cabal had its way, America would be a place where “only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal,” he said. They “will tell you” that America “belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin,” Mamdani continued. “The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit.”

What country is Mamdani describing? It’s not his own, in which nearly 80 percent affirmed only last year that “immigration is a good thing” for the country. As Mamdani went on, he further revealed the depths of his confusion.

America, he mourned, is a land of promise that is forever unrealized. It’s a nation in which “children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” Mamdani carped. It’s a nation full of “monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.” It’s a country of hypocrites, too. “We see masked agents terrorizing our streets,” he said, “eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.” It’s a country where “negligence has become a business model” and where we “sell our elections to the highest bidder.”

What is he talking about? Rates of childhood poverty, which have markedly declined from their consistent 20th-century plateaus, are entirely unrelated to the paper value of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. There is “no evidence” to suggest that a monopolistic or oligarchic elite dominate “every” or even any industry. If money were the sole factor determining American election outcomes, Mike Bloomberg would be president, Tom Steyer would be on his way to California’s governor’s mansion, and Andrew Cuomo would be sitting in the seat Mamdani himself occupies.

In the ugliest allusion in Mamdani’s speech, he praised the work done by those who built this country with “callous, dirt-streaked hands” even as he condemned us for having “allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.” We don’t know exactly who owns those tender, money-counting hands, but we can safely assume that their rapacity and malignance are problems to be solved.

Mamdani spent his Fourth of July condemning a country that doesn’t exist. In the process, he perpetuated the very myth he supposedly set out to knock down: the notion that working-class immigrants cannot succeed in America because the structural obstacles in their way are too formidable. But, to the unscrupulously ambitious, that myth and the persecution complex it encourages are powerful motivational tools.

“At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” the mayor insisted. “Division is the oldest trick in politics, and the cheapest.”

Mamdani’s speechwriters are right about that. If they had taken their own advice, they’d have thrown Mamdani’s speech in the trash.