One Man’s ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Is Another’s Inferno

Those New Yorkers who didn’t cast a ballot for Zohran Mamdani in the city’s mayoral primary race — which is hardly a modest constituency — might have taken some solace from the new mayor’s inaugural address.

That speech was no overture toward Mamdani’s skeptics. Just the opposite, in fact: The mayor repeatedly insisted that he would not yield in his efforts to advance the revolution in rising expectations among the city’s supposed proletarians, among other prospective revolutions. Those declarations were festooned with cloying metaphors and turns of phrase that should embarrass the cursorily literate. Throughout the address, Mamdani exerted himself in his pursuit of transcendent prose, swinging for the rafters at the end of every other paragraph.