The meaning of a facial expression and the making of a new New York
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Anand Giridharadas
Reposting this essay from this week live from Zohran‘s campaign headquarters, where we just learned that he won.
I begin with a confession. On more than one occasion (OK, three), I have finished watching a video of Zohran Mamdani speak and hurried to a mirror to work on my smile. I have no plans to run for office, but the Mamdani grin is so striking, so politically potent, so confounding to his foes, so distinct from the projected affect of many of the New York mayoral candidate’s own allies, so full of sun in the dreariest timeline, that I have wondered about my own. Do I smile enough? Do I ever smile? Was my grandmother right that I look angry in my book jacket photos? Am I angry? Why am I so angry? What kind of life could I have had if I could smile like that guy? And in the mirror I try it, and what my brief study has found is that a smile so broad physically hurts. It doesn’t seem to hurt Mamdani, though. It may be why he wins.
Before you say that’s ridiculous, let me explain. With a smile. Ow.
To be clear, the heart of the campaign was always substance. A million New Yorkers could probably name his key policy ideas: fast and free buses, universal childcare, and a sweeping rent freeze. His opponents have struggled to offer much more than fearmongering about his substance. Mamdani is running as a Democrat who wants to do very specific and understandable things to make life more affordable, and therefore uncork the dreaming and creation that can spill forth when life becomes more than a struggle merely to sustain itself — at a time when, nationally, Democrats are struggling to figure out who they are and how to be more than just Not Trump.
As a result, I kept noticing Mamdani’s smile and minimizing it to myself as any kind of important theme. Because, naturally, it’s about the policies; it’s about the big ideas; and it is. But the question is how he has been able to turn the “capitalist capital of the world” into “the epicenter of an ascendant and impatient socialist-led rebellion,” as The New York Times recently put it. And how he has been able to rouse 90,000 people to volunteer for his campaign — a staggering figure that translates into the sight of Mamdani canvassers everywhere in New York. And how he has been able to win over enough skeptics to get to this historic precipice.
And into the mix of factors I’d throw the smile.
You know the smile. It is a face-filling, muscle-tensing, high-octane power beam that flares every time Mamdani comes to a podium, every time he is in between sections of a speech, every time he approaches a prospective voter on the street, every time he is filmed dancing in nightclubs in the dead of night, every time he hears someone in the crowd yell “Habibi!” Like every politician’s smile, it is more than a facial expression. It is rhetoric. In his case, it seems to project a mix of things — genuine joy in the process of campaigning itself, confidence and a certain aboveness, accessibility to all comers, refusing to mirror the demeanor of those who traffic in fear of him.
Ronald Reagan’s smile put an aw-shucks, gee-whiz patina on a policy agenda that would wipe smiles off millions of faces. Barack Obama’s smile cast him as cool as a cucumber, a rock star whom you wanted to follow as a fan as much as a citizen (and who would let you down if he turned out to be merely mortal). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s smile on her thronged Instagram lives is the smile of up-close-and-personal relatability in the social-media age, an insider bringing you on her strange ride.
At a moment when everything seems so dark, I find it helpful to immerse myself in ideas of how America will rise again after this time. The immediate stretch of the road is grim. But there is a future we can fight for beyond it. And The Ink is committed to airing and exploring ideas about how we get there. This interview with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has stayed with me, and I thought I’d re-share it today. If you enjoy what we do here, support us by subscribing. — AG
Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?
It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.
What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.
I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.
The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.
1. The bully and the posse
Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.
What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.
El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.
That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.
Confront the bully. But woo the posse.
2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right
Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.
Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.
Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.
Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.
Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”
What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”
So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.
3. America is good, actually
In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.
Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.
This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.
Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.
He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.
It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!
What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.
“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.
“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”
His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”
4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough. Win the peace
Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.
Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.
But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.
But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”
What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.
The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.
And how do you win the peace?
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5. The age of insecurity
There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.
What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.
Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.
You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.
“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”
So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.
And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?
6. Abolish vanilla
Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.
A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.
“You can’t beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he’s always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You’re like, Well, I don’t know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”
El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.
7. Reclaim common sense
Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.
His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)
But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.
America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.
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After losing to Carlos Alcaraz in the U.S. Open final, Jannik Sinner had an insight. He lost because he was too “predictable.” There he was, issuing gunfire serve after gunfire serve, slugging perfectly crafted baseline cannonballs, the strokes that had made him the highest-ranked men’s player on earth (until the match on Sunday). And what was Alcaraz doing? Hitting with no less force and craft, but also — and more importantly, in Sinner’s telling — mixing it up. Alcaraz was unpredictable. He hit drop shots, forcing Sinner to lurch forward; he came up to the net himself and volleyed and half-volleyed at angles that warrant criminal investigation; sometimes, when he was barely going to get to a ball, he attempted the hardest possible version of a return stroke (say, switching the trajectory of the ball) instead of simply lobbing it back to buy time. He wasn’t one kind of player but many. He refused to let the rigor of his training make him a bore.
The difference between Sinner and the Democratic Party is that he knows he has this problem. As soon as I saw him voice that extremely self-aware analysis at the post-game press conference, it struck me as a tidy and apt summary of why Democrats have, in the main, been so inadequate to this moment.
Up against a historically unpopular and endlessly self-sabotaging and not all that bright demagogue attempting an authoritarian takeover, Democrats default to being predictable. They hit back solid baseline groundstrokes at their utterly boring press conferences. They give unmemorable speeches in which you hear the lawyerly formulation “as it relates to” far more often than any line you might remember. They tend to avoid stunts and attention-seeking, as if they were landed aristocrats. They give you elaborate explanations for why things like shutting down the government may feel good, but don’t make sense. They declare that everything is very, very bad, and then behave as though things are, in fact, manageable, thus ensuring that no one believes their warnings. When, in Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, they finally have a candidate running somewhere who actually excites people, they do what addicts of predictability are wont to do: they freak out and refuse to support him, in keeping with their upside-down political logic: If a leader causes people to feel something, like, actually feel something, that leader must be stopped.
There are exceptions. Gavin Newsom is one. He Alcarazes. He mixes it up. He does slightly facile things, along with very serious things, to make you look. He engages in dumb meme wars, which are the most important kind of meme wars if you understand what memes are. He tries shit. He seems to have become less afraid of looking silly than losing the country.
But the feels that Newsom gives, or that Mamdani gives, or that, on occasion, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, has given, or that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been giving for some years now, are so rare. Because the culture of the Democratic Party, the invisible infrastructure of what is rewarded and incentivized and trained for and shamed, favors the safe, the predictable, the done thing. There is more fear of looking stupid than of fascism. The corporate culture of “no surprises,” of meetings held to apprise important executives of what will happen at future meetings, has bled into political life, just as corporate money has taken over political parties.
These are people I know, people I interview, people I’m friends with, people I admire. I am writing this both from knowledge and from love. But these are people whose lodestar is not messing up, not making a mistake, not misspeaking, not being disliked, not hurting feelings.
It is killing us. Get wild. Get weird. Hit a drop shot. Sit in at the Capitol. Serve and volley. Shut down the government and see what happens. Hit a slice. Make a speech for the ages.
The country will not be saved by politicians who behave as though they are auditioning for senior partnerships in publicity-shy law firms. Stop playing like Sinner and play like a sinner.
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