Mamdani’s Mending Story: Rescaling Democratic Peoplehood in an Age of Interregnum

Abstract

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City has sparked debates about the replicability of democratic socialism. This article instead compares how Mamdani’s deployment of stories of peoplehood diverges from the strategies used by ideological peers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The conventional move of many inclusive US peoplehood stories is to center the unrealized promise of the Declaration of Independence and connect it to the Christian idea of equality. Instead, Mamdani’s story centers on the history of New York City, and he invokes Martin Luther King to ground his democratic socialism in a shared civil-religious tradition. These strategies navigate a division within the coalition opposing authoritarianism, between those who regard the American democratic tradition as irredeemably compromised and those defending it reflexively—sidestepping the origin story and Christian grounding problems without abandoning the mending tradition.