The electoral victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York has galvanised the US liberal and progressive body politic and, for some, beyond. Many are framing his success not just as a legislative win but as a symbolic exponent of the transformative change occurring in America’s political consciousness. It feels like an endorsement of forging a new future, past neoliberalism and mainstream liberalism, and of resisting the co-opting of dissent by corporate bodies. Even with the cheers, it is a time to pause and reflect. There are at least three questions we must pose.AdvertisementThe first involves the liberal reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s victory itself. Much of the liberal spectrum is happy, but beneath the surface lurk strategic and ideological differences that exemplify significant friction in debates over the liberal Left’s future. On the one hand, many liberals are happy to see Mamdani’s win as an antidote to the centrism that has marked the Democratic Party over the past three decades. This political climate favours market pragmatism over redistributive justice, and it either silences or redirects public anger about widening inequalities into cultural battles. Mamdani’s clarity of vision on issues such as housing, healthcare, policing, and anti-war politics feels like a breath of fresh air. Here is someone talking about the moral urgency of remaking structures, not just normalising their perversions.However, another part of the liberal coalition is still uneasy, even as its members celebrate. This wing, more inclined to institutions and policies in temperament and orientation, worries that Mamdani’s language, however morally convincing, could be politically incendiary. An agenda that actually declares capitalism as the source of systemic wrongs, they fear, will divide brittle coalitions; incite a conservative backlash; and imperil gains won bit by bit in Congress, city councils, or gubernatorial mansions.For them, realpolitik is about compromise, not confrontation; persuasion, not polarisation. They view Mamdani and his colleagues as idealists whose prescriptions are divorced from the strategic realities of electoral politics. Thus, the liberal embrace of Mamdani is not by any means seamless. It is riddled with anxiety regarding the co-existence of systemic critique and governance in our time.AdvertisementThe second arises from that tension: While it may be impossible to deny the symbolism of Mamdani’s victory, what can it actually accomplish? Poll results rarely have immediate structural effects in a two-party system biased against the Left. The state’s architecture, particularly at the state and federal levels, has been chiselled over generations to prevent radical agendas from taking hold. Obstacles in the legislature, dominance of corporate donations, media deception, and bureaucratic inertia continue.The dynamic, intriguing yet difficult to follow during the presidential primaries, may affect a progressive assembly member in New York, even one with a large following. The ability to persuade limits legislative power, and persuasion needs more than just moral clarity.Yet to see this purely in material terms would be to miss the significance of symbolic politics in crisis-ridden democracies. Symbols do not just signify change; they encourage it. They make us question the boundaries of what is possible and press the dominant narrative to move on its axis. Enter Zohran Mamdani, an Assembly member whose presence has shattered the neoliberal consensus that a discourse critical of capitalism is wishful thinking, anything resembling socialism is un-American, and redistributive governance is tantamount to political suicide. His win is a message to young activists and marginalised people: political imagination survives, and critique remains alive in public imagination. In that regard, given the attitudes of defiance and resistance, the symbolic is crucial, especially at this fraught American moment of legislative logjams, ideological enmity, and existential worries regarding the fate of democracy itself.Yet symbols alone are not enough to drive back the monsters that have returned. And this brings us to the third and perhaps most pressing question: What sense can we make of politics where it appears that the darkest forces of history have staged a return under the name of popular will? Reactionary politics in America has long used the language of grievance and humiliation. It has learned the art of weaponising economic dislocation into cultural resentment, turning people against one another and hiding the source of systemic exploitation behind performative patriotism. And it is driven, at bottom, by the machinery of capitalism. This economy contrives to siphon off the dignity of labour and funnel opportunity to those who are already prosperous, while dressing its avarice in the everyday language of merit and efficiency.most readThe liberal Left’s task is not simply to defeat the Right; it is to reveal the hidden infrastructure of this populism. That means building solidarity across fractures, between urban renters and rural debtors, precarious gig workers and traditional labour, racial justice movements and economic justice campaigns. It also demands that liberals face up to their own failures, like the long history of liberal acquiescence in privatising public goods, weakening unions, and deferring too much to market rationality. Years of liberal technocracy undermined the emotional and moral connections between elites and workers, which the Right then filled quickly and successfully.Indeed, in this context, Zohran Mamdani’s victory is not the answer but an opening. It makes liberals confront the question of whether they are willing to settle for representation without redistribution, diversity without democratisation, and freedom without fraternity. His is a politics that would re-anchor democracy not in the dramaturgy of inclusion but in the materiality of justice. The stakes are high: Can a liberalism long conditioned by the language of rights nevertheless be redeemed in light of the values of equality? Can it remember once more that democracy is not just a process but a promise that the most vulnerable among us will not be left at the mercy of corporate capital?The writer teaches at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and was the Eugenio Lopez Visiting Chair at the Department of International Studies and Political Science at Virginia Military Institute, US