I want to talk about Zohran Mamdani’s being Muslim and South Asian/Ugandan, but before I do, I want to say that I support him simply because’s a democratic socialist with a once-in-a-generation political talent.

Ghouls like Andrew Cuomo and his supporters seem to think political talent is making social media clips rather than the oratorical and forensic skills Mamdani has and that we traditionally associate with democratic leadership. I’ve been delighted to see Mamdani explain his positions and platform in language that is clear and complex. I’ve been delighted to see what a happy warrior he is, in the style of FDR, taking genuine pleasure in the give and take of adult argument and debate, speaking like a grownup, giving thoughtful answers rather than being caught like a deer in the headlights by idiot gotcha questions. I see him very much as the path to a future we can be hopeful about and excited by. That’s why I support him.

That Mamdani is Muslim and South Asian/Ugandan is a plus. As much as I’m a democratic socialist, I’m also someone who has increasingly come to appreciate and identify with how the United States has often, though by no means always, taken in people from around the world, both voluntary and involuntary migrants, and, more important, how those people have made and remade this country in their image and in their conflict with America’s self-image. As a friend of mine who’s a noted American Studies scholar recently said to me, it’s the one of the few genuinely great things this country has done, something we can be truly proud of.

Twenty-five years ago, despite having been trained by one of the leading scholars of this question, I didn’t think much about this; I just took it for granted. But between my increasing opposition to the existence of Israel as an ethnonationalist state, and the right’s increasing hostility to immigrants and people of color, I’ve come to think more about how new arrivals to this country, including the generations of my family before me, and longstanding members who’ve been kept out of power, have shaped what this country is, creating something that was neither themselves nor the country as it was but something entirely new and mixed and multiple, what Randolph Bourne called “trans-national America” and Horace Kallen celebrated as our democratic hybridity.

I realize how tricky it is to tell this story in a quick post, particularly because the history of enslavement and exclusion is by no means a seamless part of this pageant, but I hope you’ll bear with me.

You can see this in the history of New York City’s mayors. After being in the hands, for centuries, of the Dutch, the English, the Scotch-Irish, the Irish, New York’s mayoralty was remade in the twentieth century by that century’s transnational America, new arrivals—from Italy, the Pale of Settlement, and the Black Belt of the American South.

We’re now in the twenty-first century. The City is no longer the gorgeous mosaic of Eastern European, Irish, Jewish, Black, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, imagined by David Dinkins. It’s more Asian and African and Arab and Muslim and Latino. I see this in the changing student body at Brooklyn College. A good half of my students there are from families from Central and South America, South Asia, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

I see Mamdani as a kind of passing of the torch—to a younger generation, more progressive, more brown, more Black, more worldly, in every sense. Again, for me, the critical fact is his politics. But his politics is connected to his person and his story, how he speaks, whom he speaks to. He brings me back to that hopeful moment in February 2020, the Nevada Moment, when Latinos in Nevada, members of unions, younger and more militant, cast their ballots for Tío Bernie.

We’re past that moment. Things look worse, much worse, and the country is in a much greater state of disrepair and collapse. Not quite the 1930s, but broken in so many ways. And like then, we have a chance to vote for a candidate, the child of immigrants, who can bring some hope to this moment, who can bring our city into the city it has become.