Posted on 09/02/2025 6:34:05 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Zohran Mamdani’s father Mahmood is a postnationalist who advocates the dissolution of all nation states, which he views as intrinsically violent and unjust.
On a humid June night in Queens, New York, Zohran Mamdani stood beside his mother and father, grinning as supporters chanted his name over and over again. He had just clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City after defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary—the first time a figure from the activist Left has come so close to leading America’s largest city.
For many New Yorkers, Zohran Mamdani’s victory heralded the arrival of a new political generation: unapologetically leftist, impatient with compromise, and ambitious for radical change. His policy platform reads like a catalogue of far-left fever dreams: defunding the police, freezing rents, establishing city-run grocery stores, and pushing a US$30 minimum wage.
Since the primary, Mamdani has shot ahead in the polls for the general election. A Siena Institute survey put him at 44 percent, nineteen points ahead of Andrew Cuomo and nearly doubling Eric Adams’s support. An AARP/Gotham Analytics poll found a similar pattern: Mamdani at 42 percent, Cuomo at 23, with Curtis Sliwa at 17 and Adams sinking into single digits.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Mamdani’s rise is the long shadow of his father’s intellectual project. Mahmood Mamdani is a world-famous antinationalist academic at Columbia University, who argues that every sovereign country is built on exclusion and sustained by domination and violence. He has called for a political future in which every nation state including the United States would be “deconstructed.”
Nationalism is the dominant political form of the modern world. Nation states set the rules for citizenship, command armies, print money, and provide the legal frameworks within which our lives unfold. Yet this has not always been the case, and there is no guarantee that it will always remain so. For that reason alone, it is worth engaging seriously with the case against nationalism—a case that has been pressed by both the Right and the Left.
Mamdani’s argument is that the great tragedies of the twentieth century were not excesses but the logical outcomes of nationalism itself. The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Partition of India, the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks in the 1990s, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—all can be read, he suggests, as moments when the logic of nationhood reached its cruel conclusion: interethnic conflict, persecution, and mass killing.
Even in quieter times, nation-states are in the business of policing identity. Citizens, immigrants, and travellers are classified and stratified; each is assigned different rights, obligations, and degrees of belonging. To Mamdani, this points to a deeper structural flaw. The very form of the nation-state creates insiders and outsiders, security for some and precarity for others. In Neither Settler nor Native (2020), Mamdani argues that the nation state and the creation of minorities are inseparable. His solution is a “post-national” politics of inclusive citizenship, in which belonging would no longer rest on national identity.......SNIP
Obama 2.0
Pb
America needs “common sense muslim deportation”
Shocked.
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