Speaking at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as mayor today, Imam Khalid Latif invoked the phrase “moral imagination.” Those of you historically inclined and theoretically attuned will instantly recognize the term. It was coined by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and beloved by midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Gertrude Himmelfarb.

So we now have, in the twenty-first century, at the invocation for a Muslim political leader, a Muslim religious leader repurposing the words of two of New York’s greatest Jewish intellectuals from the twentieth century, who had repurposed the words of an Irishman from a Catholic family that had converted to Anglicanism in the eighteenth century.

That’s quite a historical and political tapestry being woven here, no?

If you stayed to listen to Mamdani’s inaugural address, your ears might have perked up at this:

To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.

For too long, we have turned to the private sector for greatness, while accepting mediocrity from those who serve the public. I cannot blame anyone who has come to question the role of government, whose faith in democracy has been eroded by decades of apathy. We will restore that trust by walking a different path: one where government is no longer solely the final recourse for those struggling, one where excellence is no longer the exception.

We expect greatness from the cooks wielding a thousand spices, from those who stride out onto Broadway stages, from our starting point guard at Madison Square Garden. Let us demand the same from those who work in government. In a city where the mere names of our streets are associated with the innovation of the industries that call them home, we will make the words “City Hall” synonymous with both resolve and results.

Readers of this blog may remember that just after Mamdani’s victory on November 4, I noticed a similar, briefer yet deft, rhetorical turn in his election night address: “Excellence will become the expectation across government, not the exception,” said Mamdani. “We will leave mediocrity in our past.” I argued in that post that this was a new move on the left, this embrace of excellence over mediocrity, and that it had a history going back to Marx, who argued for the excellence of modern production techniques over older techniques, and who also saw excellence in the division of labor among chefs, and that this was related to Mamdani’s focus on immigrant workers in restaurants.

Before Mamdani’s inauguration, I expanded a bit on this theme in the New York Review of Books.

Since the French Revolution, professions of excellence and proscriptions of mediocrity have been mostly the preserve of the right. “To obey a real superior,” declared the English conservative (and uncle of Virginia Woolf) James Fitzjames Stephen, is “a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting.” True to form, Mamdani’s conservative opponents have warned that socialism will send the city slouching toward shabbiness.

Since the 1970s, Democrats have largely ceded this rhetorical ground to the right. Instead of offering an alternative vision of excellence or mounting a robust case for different values, they have adopted the private sector as the gold standard of performance. Like Republicans, they have promised to run the government as if it were a business or corporation or bragged that they already have.

Mamdani is not the first Democrat to want to toss aside that playbook. He is the first to act as if it’s already been trashed. As he made clear on election night and in the composition of his transitional committees, his perspective is populated by workers, commuters, tenants, organizers, civil servants, and elected leaders. They are the people who get things done. All capitalism does is build oligarchy and crap. The lords of enshittification shouldn’t set the standard of society. Politics and government must supply the agents and the actions, the expectations and criteria for the excellence that Mamdani promises.

…

It’s no accident, as I wrote after the election last month, that Mamdani has made the food of immigrant restaurants the centerpiece of his vision. He understands that the division of labor among immigrant workers doesn’t bring greater productivity. It brings greater variety, making for not one universal excellence but many excellences—democratic excellence. There’s a lesson there not just about immigrants but about how to argue for progressive values, not just in New York City but across the country.

In a way I’ve never experienced in my life, I feel in synch with a political turn, felt by millions of voters, that’s now being reflected in the voice of one of the most dynamic leaders we’ve seen in a long time.

Which leads me now to a bit of a personal/political memoir, which may resonate with other leftists of my age, with those of us who are part of lost generation of progressives, the Gen X leftists, who’ve mostly felt out of step for virtually every political development of our adult lives.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in my political writing, prompted by the surge of enshittification, the rise of AI, and the concomitant erosion of academic and cultural standards. I found myself increasingly focusing my political writing on the importance of excellence for the left, on pushing for the highest standards of teaching and writing and work, not as a punishment for the poor or as an excuse for excluding subjugated groups, but as an aspiration of a genuinely democratic society, as something everybody wants for themselves and the people around them.

If you’ve read Samuel Moyn’s book Liberalism Against Itself, which is mostly an autopsy of what happened to liberalism with the Cold War, he mentions this point briefly, though it’s the beating heart of his analysis. Once upon a time, he says, leftists and left-liberals were inspired by a perfectionist vision of human improvement, of the flourishing of all people, through social, cooperative action. For all its problems, and there were many, that vision drove everything from the formation of the Labour Party in Britain to the German Social Democrats (before the Great War) to the experimental aesthetics of Bolshevism to the push for decolonization. And then, for a thousand different reasons (the Cold War being one of them), that vision got lost.

That lost vision of perfection, of moving toward excellence, should be at the core of the socialism we seek to build. In schools, in healthcare, in housing, in work, in government, in childcare, in universities, in green energy projects, in democracy itself. It is the reason we value human freedom, not just for ourselves but for everyone. Equal freedom for all, as it used to be known.

I got truly involved with the left, beyond the usual student activism, in the early 1990s as a union member, then leader, in grad school. One of the reasons I got involved in the union was my sense that the university was destroying the kind of work I wanted to do—and that the university claimed to be doing. I felt the threatened destruction in teaching—with speedups in graduate student instruction of undergraduates and an increasing use of adjunct labor—and in research, as the university pushed to crunch out PhDs faster, with less training in foreign languages and other fields, and fewer prospects, long-term, for permanent employment of academics.

I was the classic kind of union worker, you might say, defending the guild against the firm, the craft of work against the pace of profit. I remember arguing with fellow graduate students, with faculty and administrators, all of whom opposed the union on the ground that it, not the university, threatened the great traditions of learning and teaching and scholarship.

Initially, I marveled at their misperception, which I took as an opportunity for conversation, organizing, and transformation—on the assumption that we all ultimately cared about the same thing. With time, I grew more cynical about the institution and its defenders. I came to think that the faculty and the administration were either besotted by a romantic fantasy of a world that was no more or cynically using the language of the past as a cover for the present.

I began arguing for unions not as a defense of craft and quality but as a way of dismantling the whole university industrial complex. And whenever anyone got misty-eyed about teaching students and writing books, I rolled my eyes. Which eventually turned me from an effective organizer into a not terribly effective organizer. I could no longer believe in the object of our efforts, save the union itself, which is not how non-members become members of any movement.

Yet here I am, at the age of 58, and suddenly I find myself returning to arguments about the importance of teaching and scholarship, about craft and knowledge, about caring about the work we actually do. I can’t say I’ve come full circle—I think there was a lot of useful knowledge gained by my disenchantment with the academy—but I’ve returned to where I began, albeit outfitted with some tools and perspective. I feel like I’m now fighting for a left that is more than the left fighting for itself but a left that is arguing for a genuinely better society. Not just one where people can feel safe and secure, but one where they can grow and expand, perfecting themselves and the world around them.

One of the reasons I’m so excited about Zohran is that I feel like he gets this in his bones. As I’ve been arguing here, on my blog, and at the New York Review of Books, he doesn’t see socialism and government as the last stop before penury and poverty, as a way of catching people who would otherwise fall, as a safety net. He sees it as a launching pad, as a way of doing great things, great things that all of us can do together, cooperatively, or when necessary, that many of us can do through confrontation.

It feels like coming home.