The Elite Panic at the Heart of Liberal Attacks on Mamdani

Tressie McMillan Cottom, The Elite Panic at the Heart of Liberal Attacks on Mamdani, NYTimes, July 27, 2025.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is driving some people mad.

Mamdani is, of course, the young, charismatic, charming and decidedly left-of-center candidate upsetting the political status quo. He is also Muslim and of Indian and Ugandan descent. The recent political attacks against him are coming from all directions — Republicans, Democrats and the real estate lobby. Some of these attacks are about political interests — of course, landlords wouldn’t like affordable housing and tenant-friendly Mamdani.

But a lot of these attacks are thinly veiled racism. They conflate Mamdani’s left-wing political messaging with the “otherness” of his racial and ethnic heritage. It is an old racial trope that worked unevenly against President Barack Obama. Be afraid of the cheerful brown man. He isn’t a “real” American. He is dangerous because he wants to take from the rich to give to the undeserving poor.

It makes sense that Republicans play this card. They already dally in the irrational world of race fantasy, where white Americans are an oppressed majority. But Democrats are supposed to know better. Being the party that knows that race is real, that it works in measurable ways and that those ways matter to their base is kind of their brand. They had it figured out when these attacks were deployed against Obama.

If they knew it was wrong in Obama’s case, why are they falling for it in Mamdani’s? [...]

A primal fear of minorities drove a lot of voters toward Donald Trump. It should be commonly accepted by now that his political rhetoric targets minorities and uses violent stereotypes to dehumanize them and that millions of his supporters don’t just accept that — they relish it.

But at the same time, Donald Trump managed to appeal to some racial minorities during this last election. That caused liberals and poll watchers a lot of angst. How can anyone explain his support among the very racial and ethnic groups that he endangers?

The long and short of it is that multiculturalism is not a natural deterrent to racism.

Dylan Rodriguez, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, calls this moment “white Reconstruction,” a term that draws on the 19th-century attempt to enfranchise Black Americans after the Civil War. Rodriguez argues that the long post-civil rights era that flowed from the Civil Rights Act was not one where progress inevitably won out; it was one where the accommodation of social progress looked like racial equality but ultimately undermined it.

Where the Reconstruction of the 1860s and 1870s attempted to make Black Americans whole, today’s white Reconstruction tries to make white Americans not more whole, but more powerful. On the right, white Reconstruction looks like relentless, shameless attempts to claw back rights from poor people, minorities and women. But on the left, it looks more like what Olufemi O. Taiwo, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, calls elite capture, or the co-option of radical ideas (in this case, diversity) by powerful institutions. Elite capture is a way for those with power to accommodate social progress through the performance of diversity while keeping their hold on political hegemony. It’s action that looks like progress, but in reality it changes very little.

Incoherence all around:

This is all good context for the incoherent discussion of Mamdani, which frames him simultaneously as a threat and the embodiment of the American dream. He represents the American ideal of diversity — an immigrant who worked hard, studied at Bowdoin College and wanted to be a public servant. But at the same time, there are people on both sides of the political spectrum who want to challenge the institutions, especially the elite colleges, that made his American story possible.

Conservatives may despise higher education’s cultural elitism. Liberals may pretend that they don’t worship it. Both groups channel their anxieties about their own place in our country’s pecking order through it. [...] While Democrats obsess over the middle class, Mamdani’s economic policies prioritize poor and working-class people. He has, in a way, betrayed the white liberal investment in the institutions that made him possible.

Checking identity boxes on official forms:

Checking multiple boxes — or not checking one at all — is an individual accommodation of empirical reality. It is also a threat to the idea of race as something that conservatives can easily vilify or that liberals can easily commodify.

(Mamdani said as much in his statement about how he self-identified on his college application. He checked all the boxes that applied, because no single box, not even the combination of boxes he checked, could effectively capture the completeness of his identity.) [...]

When both sides of the political spectrum share an obsession with interrogating one’s racial purity, maybe it’s time to confront an uncomfortable truth: A lot of us are exactly who Donald Trump believes that we are.