When we evaluate a new mayor, we are usually taught to separate “style” from “substance,” and to treat visibility, symbolism, and public presence as distractions from the real work of governing. That distinction feels natural—but it is also historically specific, and it may no longer describe how political legitimacy actually forms in a society marked by institutional distrust, media saturation, and social fragmentation.
One way to read the article below is as a familiar early-tenure assessment: is #ZohranMamdani still performing like a candidate, or has he begun governing “for real”? But there is another way to read it—one that does not assume that governing happens only behind closed doors, or that public presence is merely theatrical. From this perspective, visibility, explanation, and embodied action are not substitutes for governance; they are among the conditions that make governance intelligible and credible in the first place.
Mamdani’s early actions—showing up at tenant buildings, explaining the budget directly to the public, appearing in moments of crisis rather than delegating them entirely—can be read not as campaign leftovers, but as an attempt to close the widening gap between political authority and lived experience. In a political culture where institutions often feel distant, opaque, or unresponsive, governing “in public” may be less a performance than a way of rebuilding trust through shared orientation and presence.
The article that follows can still be read critically, and it raises real questions about budgets, appointments, and limits of executive power. But it may also be read as documenting a deeper tension: between an older model of politics that treats legitimacy as something institutions possess and dispense, and an emerging model that treats legitimacy as something that must be continually enacted, explained, and sustained in full view of the people it claims to serve.
