Is Mamdani’s idealism already fading? Rhetoric is meeting reality

No one who has noticed the obsequiousness crouching behind Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s ideological fixity should have been surprised by the way he was played by Donald Trump when they met recently in the Oval Office. Mamdani, who seems to have sprung straight from his academic father’s post-colonialist writings, bows to any powerful paternal figure — especially when that figure knows how to ring Mamdani’s Pavlovian bells.

“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programmes is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretises your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilisations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilisations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighbourhood. Russia and China, also rich civilisations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferrable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a non-profit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighbourhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighbourhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply sceptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

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