Opinion: Radical decency is New York's answer to Trumpism

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Broken America tries ‘radical decency’

Mark Kenny

Updated

November 10 2025 - 7:17pm , first published

November 9 2025 - 5:30am

Mark Kenny

Updated

November 10 2025 - 7:17pm , first published

November 9 2025 - 5:30am

For America’s shocked and clueless establishment, it has taken almost a decade to find an effective antidote to Trumpism.

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On Wednesday, that changed as voters flocked to embrace what I’m calling “radical decency”- an unapologetic manifesto of people before profits. Of services, not surrender and healing over homelessness.

But its birth was hardly painless. The stunning electoral energy behind Zohran Mamdani, New York’s dashing new Mayor-elect, has blasted the centre-left Democratic Party from the funk in which it has wallowed since 2016.

Appropriately, in the very Democratic stronghold that spawned the cash-worshipping Trump juggernaut, Democrats have been reminded that their actual purpose is to represent ordinary people rather than A-list celebrities, big corporations, and billionaire donors.

Yet, on their watch, the country’s largest city had become unlivable and unaffordable.

New York’s new Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani at a rally in October. Picture Shutterstock

The Democratic establishment’s answer to this carnivorous property-fuelled avarice had been denial. Rather than intervene, the party’s leading lights - a comfortable gerontocracy - seemed happier holidaying in the Hamptons.

Soaring real estate values meant that even fully employed New Yorkers, particularly younger ones, were priced out of homeownership, and many were being forced out of any form of secure housing.

With his message of fast, free buses, a rent freeze and fee-free childcare, Mamdani’s unhesitating advocacy for the least well-off drove a stake through years of Democratic indolence.

No mere accident, this electoral groundswell was real and entirely deliberate. Despite scaremongering from Democratic grandees and line-toeing strategists, New Yorkers chose a 34-year-old outsider, a self-declared “democratic socialist”. In so doing, students, migrants, blue-collar workers and younger professionals ignored Trump’s description of Mamdani as a “communist” and defied intimidatory threats to cut federal funding to New York if the South Asian Muslim was elected.

Voters also dismissed mainstream media bleatings about Mamdani’s youth and inexperience, embracing instead his courageous defiance of greed and his promise of material change on the ground.

Not just a turning point for the city, Mamdani’s formula offers an answer to the question bedevilling progressive America since Trump’s outsider revolution swamped the nation and swallowed the GOP: how do we fight back?

As Mamdani showed, that question answers itself.

His ambitious purpose begs another question, too, for establishment Democrats. What were they thinking by going with tinkerers like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Had Trump’s arrival and his supposedly impossible reprise not proved that the old rules were dead?

In hindsight, Mamdani’s broad allure is obvious. Like the unknown Barack Obama in 2008, the mayoral candidate had actually benefited from being seen as an outsider.

In defeating an establishment Democrat, Obama had modelled a new type of community-activated politics using local networks and legions of young volunteers.

Mamdani took this further, enabled by the rapid sophistication of social media and propelled by the growing sense that something fundamental in America is broken.

Furthermore, Mamdani correctly diagnosed that Trump’s MAGA appeal stemmed from its explicit rejection of a failing orthodoxy, including the notion that Trump, too, was a political novice.

In 2025, Mamdani concluded that the most pointless thing you could offer in the face of Trump’s assault on politics-as-usual was the defence of what had given rise to that assault.

Rather, he would look forward. If dramatic norm-busting was plausible from the radical right, why not a correspondingly daring social justice push from the anti-establishment left?

Where Trump enriches plutocrats, Mamdani promises to tax them more. Where the President abolishes food stamps and demonises migrants, Mamdani valorises these as America’s very foundations.

“Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own,” he said in an acceptance speech exemplifying the finest traditions of American oratory. “I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas (grandmothers), Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”

Crucially, Mamdani was not just laying bare the colossal disaster of Trumpism for ordinary New Yorkers, but the tragedy of the Democrats’ unwillingness to properly fight back.

“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: these are not hands that have been allowed to hold power. And yet, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight … the future is in our hands. My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.”

It would be a mistake to view Mamdani’s success as just another upset in a topsy-turvy world. That a young Muslim has been elected in the city of September 11 is certainly a surprise. As is the fact that a “democratic socialist” is to be the Mayor of the city of Wall Street, the unofficial capital of capitalism itself.

Yet this feels more significant again.

It suggests two things. First, that civility, community and compassion can unite and inspire voters even in Trump’s cruelly fractured America.

And second, that for Democrats to overcome the President’s rancorous but entertaining politics, they need bold responses and the courage to leave failed institutions and discredited assumptions behind.

Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times’ political analyst and a professor at the ANU’s Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.

Mark Kenny

Columnist

Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times’ political analyst and a professor at the ANU’s Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.