Mayor

It was a performance worthy of an Oscar or maybe a Tony. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s address at his swearing in ceremony on New Year’s Day electrified the freezing crowd every bit as much as it shocked the Democratic establishment, and perhaps even the 50 percent of New Yorkers who didn’t vote for him. The newly-minted Mayor had the stage, but graciously acknowledged that the real star was socialism. “I was elected as a Democratic Socialist and I will govern as a Democratic Socialist.” He hailed an “era of big government,” vowed to govern “expansively and audaciously” and said he would “set an example for the world.

Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.

When Zohran Mamdani took the pulpit at Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church last Sunday, he had a golden opportunity. He could have spoken to the hopes of black New Yorkers, their resilience, their aspirations for safer neighborhoods, better schools and paths to prosperity. Instead, the first thing he brought up was police shootings. There is nothing wrong with addressing police shootings. They are tragedies that wound communities deeply. But it is telling that when Democrats step into black churches, their reflex is to start with pain. They do not speak to us as whole citizens with complex desires. They reduce us to our wounds, assuming that the surest way to earn our votes is to rehearse our traumas.This is what I call “pain politics,” and frankly, I am tired of it.