To state the extremely obvious, Mamdani didn’t invent democratic socialism. But as a politician he feels entirely fresh. He’s the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor and he’s only 34, which will make him the youngest mayor of NYC in over a century—a perpetually logged-on and seemingly tireless left-wing leader with hereditary, baked-in cultural credentials by way of his mother, Mississippi Masala director Mira Nair.
In these times, Mamdani’s triumph comes as something of a shock. By now, we’re used to poisonous, far-right bile winning the day—from Donald Trump’s yammering on Truth Social while implementing a byzantine mass deportation agenda to departed bigot Charlie Kirk’s wife sharing a tender embrace with married VP J.D. Vance. It’s evil reality TV. “American power does not seem inspired by any spirit or genius of its own,” Jean Baudrillard wrote in 1989. “It works by inertia, in an ad hoc fashion, in the void.”
Mamdani represents a powerful rebuttal to a dearth of meaning that threatens to rot us from the inside out, but his persona is not entirely without precedent. His earnest, perpetually-grinning corniness and unflinching oratorical skills evoke Barack Obama’s peak charisma years—but unlike Obama, Mamdani still has every chance to leave a legacy behind that’s more genuinely impactful than it is symbolic.
But the startling arrival of the Mamdani era also illustrates just how rare it’s become to experience anything even vaguely novel in our endlessly recycled cultural landscape. With musicians prioritizing capital gains over sonic subversion—not to mention algorithms across the internet pushing bland, generalist content to the fore—what’s been lost in the shuffle are any earnest attempts at bold experimentation, political, artistic or otherwise.
Tokyo-based culture writer W. David Marx’s new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty First Century, offers a deep analysis of the void of cultural stagnation that, within the last 25 years, has sprouted and blossomed into becoming the status quo. This void, or the absence of unconventional thinking, is at the center of everything—art, politics, fashion and technology, Marx writes; neoliberalism is to blame, of course, but not all on its own.