Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Revolution — A Response
New Republic reads Mamdani’s moral politics as mostly religious. I suggest the real story is a synthesis: Islamic ethics + democratic socialism + a relational, schmoozal political practice that goes well beyond “grassroots.”
Audrey Clare Farley’s recent New Republic article makes a rare and welcome observation: that Zohran Mamdani’s appeal is not merely electoral or technocratic, but deeply moral. She highlights the eschatological tone of his victory speech, the resonances across religious traditions, and the sense—felt by many—that Mamdani is articulating a politics charged with the dignity of the vulnerable. On this, she is right.
But the piece ultimately mischaracterizes the source of that moral force. It treats Mamdani as if his politics were derived from or saturated by his Muslim background, as though the operative explanation lay in a religious worldview that happens to line up neatly with democratic socialism. What this misses is the distinct synthesis that makes Mamdani’s politics what they are.
Mamdani’s public style emerges from three sources: elements of Islamic ethics, the analytic and organizational language of DSA, and something he rarely names but constantly enacts—what I have been calling schmoozalism. Media shorthand often calls this “grassroots politics,” but that term is too thin. Schmoozalism is the politics that arises in dense, reciprocal, face-to-face social life: the moral formation that happens in repeated encounters, in shared spaces, in ongoing public presence. It is dialogic, mutual, improvisational, and unheroic. It is how communities build themselves.
Farley sees the moral register but not the medium. Because her categories are “religious” vs. “political,” she defaults to explaining Mamdani’s appeal through faith traditions—even when she acknowledges that he rarely invokes them directly. Yet Mamdani’s politics are not imported from Islam, Hinduism, or any doctrine. Nor are they simply Marxist, socialist, or activist in origin. They emerge from a movement among these traditions, not an allegiance to any one of them.
This matters because it explains both his broad appeal and his method. His sermons-in-miniature land not because they draw on religious authority, but because they arise from a style of politics that treats people as interlocutors rather than audiences. That style is moral because it is relational. It resonates with religious traditions not because it is religious, but because it is rooted in the kind of ongoing mutuality that many traditions themselves cultivate.
Farley also faults Mamdani for focusing too narrowly on material conditions, suggesting that he underestimates “spiritual poverty.” But this is another version of the same category error: assuming that moral life must be addressed as doctrine, exhortation, or inward transformation. Mamdani’s approach is different. He works by reshaping the environments in which people encounter one another—not by preaching conversion but by constructing the conditions under which solidaristic life becomes possible again. That is a political method, but it is also a moral pedagogy. It is how hearts actually change.
If anything, this is the dimension American media is least prepared to recognize: that Mamdani’s politics are not simply progressive, not simply religious, and not merely “for the poor,” but attempt to recover forms of social life in which meaning and power are co-created. This is why he resists heroic leadership, foregrounds the collective, and treats political work as something done with people rather than on behalf of them. It’s also why people across faith traditions hear echoes of their own commitments: he is articulating a social ontology they already know, not a theology they must adopt.
Farley is right to insist that Mamdani should be taken seriously as a moral figure. But the source of that moral authority is not reducible to religious inheritance. It lies in a synthesis—Islamic ethical motifs, democratic socialist analysis, and a fundamentally schmoozal, dialogic mode of political life—that makes his leadership feel different from the political class we have grown used to.
This is not “the Left finding its messiah.” It is something more modest and more radical: the rediscovery of politics as a shared project of lived moral encounter.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/202902/moral-life-zohran-mamdani-mayor
