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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Six months ago, Trump won. Much rethinking was promised. Did it happen?
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Anand Giridharadas
Six months ago, Donald Trump won the presidency for the second time — and a legion of people and institutions that stand opposite him vowed a reckoning. The country was promised real soul-searching and sincere, if grueling, introspection — by the Democratic Party, by activist organizations, by the press that aspires to hold Trump to account. Lessons from the first term would be learned this time around. Blind spots would be filled. Sacred cows would be slain for the sake of reinvention.
Somehow or other, over this past half year, I ended up in many situations in which planned or spontaneous reckoning found its way onto the agenda. Sometimes it was former aides to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris debriefing the campaign. Sometimes it was summits of progressive organizers and movement leaders. Sometimes it was gatherings of labor leaders. Sometimes it was a meeting of funders. Sometimes it was desperate calls from a Democratic Party leader asking what the hell could be done. Sometimes it simply emerged at a dinner party. Sometimes it was more organized. But, again and again, people were asking a version of: How did this happen, again? What do we not see? What must change?
For a moment, it seemed there might be a window of openness to a real reckoning worthy of the word and age. With a loss so devastating to so many, there was space for rethinking.
But as I look back on this half year, I can’t escape the conclusion: there was no reckoning. In fact, as far as I could tell, quite the opposite.
What I observed in these settings was those who found themselves facing Trump for the second time — whether in active opposition to him or in the adversarial role of the press — wriggling out of the hard self-examination so many promised and craved in November.
After what was once heralded as a wake-up call, I saw instead in so many quarters human qualities that make reckoning all but impossible: defensiveness, incuriosity, touchiness, the inability to see oneself as others see you, certitude in the name of so-called “moral clarity,” smugness, condescension, blame casting, deflection, and a total rejection of introspection.
So many of the people and organizations that should be grappling hard in this moment instead seem consumed by the feeling that they have been getting it absolutely right in a world that fails to appreciate their good sense. We were promised a reckoning; instead, we got complexes of feeling misunderstood. Here we are — amazing political party or news organization or activist group — and people don’t get it. Everyone is crazy. But we’re sane!
Former Bidenworld insiders refuse to crack the doors of their minds three percent ajar to the possibility that his decline was a bigger deal than they treated it as being, with consequences the entire country is living through. And the former president himself is now being sent out to do interviews denying it all, everything is fine, I would have won, nothing to see here. It is remarkable, in a sense, this ability to be impervious to and oblivious to what so many others see, to be so uninterested in the possibility of learning from the past.
People who served on the Harris campaign engage in their own doubling down, insisting that the problems with the campaign were all external to it — the short time horizon, the pressure to stay close to Biden on policy. That the campaign itself was more lackluster and less inspiring and transformational than it could have been — that there are, therefore, lessons that could be drawn for next time — nope. This is no time for genuine reflection.
The same incuriosity can be found in the progressive wing of the party, among activist and organizing groups. Many meetings have been held, and then at those meetings the same behaviors that made progressive ideas less popular than they would naturally be were repeated. The out-of-touch, jargony, apologetic throat-clearing, the social justice terminology that feels inaccessible to those outside activism or academia, the breathtaking insistence on talking about politics in ways most normal people would not understand, the focus on issues affecting very small numbers of people instead of issues affecting everyone — these habits and reflexes reared their head in progressive “reckonings,” signaling that almost nothing meaningful would be rethought. Progressives have a giant normie problem in America; they don’t seem interested in fixing it, unless repeating the word “intersectional” until everyone comes around counts. Land acknowledgements are fine, but progressives might consider adding “game acknowledgements” to their repertoire. That’s when, like 98 percent of people in this country, you start by joking about last night’s game.
At the other end of the spectrum of the broadly defined left, you have corporate-adjacent groups like Third Way, which advocate for business-friendly policies. There is a broad consensus today that the excesses and depredations of neoliberal economic policy and unfettered capitalism and globalization and financialization helped break the country and contributed mightily to the present moment. Do you see a reckoning at places like Third Way, therefore? Nope. You see it putting out statements about how important centrist and business-friendly policies are going forward.
Then you have the national Democratic Party. Here is another place we were told reckoning might occur. But, spoiler alert, reader, it did not occur. The fact that the national party is not even really a party so much as a fundraising vehicle, the fact that it has embarrassingly little physical presence in much of the country, the fact that it is so cozy with the very donors whose business practices have fueled so much of the populist rage of this moment — none of this was truly reckoned with. Senior party leaders reached out widely for advice but seemed reluctant or unable to act on it.
Or consider the Democratic Party’s top elected leaders. Can anyone report some dazzling reckoning there? Some really sharp reimagining? The double down is in full force. It is a panglossian politics: everything that should be done is everything we already happen to be doing. There is nothing the angry street is telling us that gives us the shadow of a new idea. We are perfectly perfect, standing where we should be standing, saying what we should be saying. When, on rare occasion, someone like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois speaks of the failure to reckon, it catches fire. People feel heard. This appears to scare party leadership instead of galvanizing them. Don’t threaten them with the good time of their constituents feeling understood, at last.
Among the resistance, too, there is incuriosity. It is admirable, taking up of the cause of defending democracy, the work it involves, even the bravery. But the resistance has been hurt by an attitude that can sometimes imply moral superiority or dismissiveness toward the very citizens it hopes to persuade. There is often an affect of being the only ones to get it. The movement has struggled to attract people of color, and Black people in particular; it has struggled to attract young people and working class people who don’t have the luxury of time and gas money. And these conspicuous (and democracy-threatening) absences often seem to inspire contempt for those who don’t see rather than curiosity about the resistance’s own limitations. In politics, if your ranks are fewer than you want them to be, the safe assumption is that it’s your own fault.
The press is, of course, not the opposition to Trump — even though some would like it play more of that role. But it was widely agreed in many quarters of my profession that some rethinking was in order after Trump’s second victory. How do you combat his lies rather than unwittingly amplify them? How do you cover a man who uses the vernacular of traditional media forms to spew propaganda? How do you hold to account a man who is waging frontal war on the press itself? Why is the mainstream press so distrusted, and why is so much of the bled-out trust finding its way to independent podcasts and newsletters? But I have been struck by how many of my peers in the media have chosen to double down rather than truly rethink and reimagine. Here, too, is a defensiveness almost heroic in its devotion to keeping the old thing going. We just have to keep doing what we were doing. Our critics don’t get it. People want us to be this and that; they want us to betray ourselves. We will stick to what we know. And the trust bleeds further out, and many of the traditional media forms reach fewer and fewer Americans.
Of course, there are exceptions to these phenomena. But, from where I sit, I have noticed infinitely more wagon circling and doubling down. Ask yourself: In what sectors of American life have you seen leaders (and regular people) engaging in the actual kind of reckoning I’m talking about, letting the criticisms fall on them, trying to figure out what they mean, secure in knowing they are still decent even if they have limitations they can’t see?
The defensiveness and incuriosity are understandable. People naturally feel defenseless in this moment; the cavalry is very clearly not coming. No one is in the mood to make themselves vulnerable right now, because vulnerability is danger. The stakes are high, and every hint of weakness will be exploited. If the Democratic Party takes a genuine public look at itself, or if a big media company does, won’t Trump exploit the crack in the armor? It takes a level of security to look at yourself and criticize part of what you’ve become without feeling that you are at risk of invalidating the whole. It may not feel like the time.
The problem is that, in refusing reckoning, refusing introspection, turning against curiosity itself, those facing Trump become more like him.
The mirror neurons of our collective brain are firing on full blast right now. Introspection is, of course, the central gaping absence in Trump himself. But now his deepest tendencies are becoming our tendencies standing across from him.
An unthinking man is making us unthinking. An unreflective man who always thinks his first thought is his best thought is inspiring that instinct in his foils. A president blindly sure of himself is making others blindly sure that everyone who supports him is deluded or ill. A man who sees all critics as haters is stirring a similar defensiveness in those who face him.
Trump is causing those playing opposite him in this drama to remake themselves in his image. His is a Trumpomorphic opposition.
What perhaps protects Trump’s power and position as much as any formal power is how he changes those opposite him. There is a small chance he will throw someone like me in jail one day. But he has already remade my heart, made me at times harsher, less prone to assume good faith, more dismissive, than I would have been. This is a way of defanging your opposition that is considerably easier to scale.
Trump makes those he faces less equipped to face him. Less and less prone to living the lives of curiosity, openness, self-doubt and self-questioning, visioning and revisioning, wondering, renewal, and constructive jettisoning that is so vital to actual strategy and action. He drains his foils of their lifeblood, and, remarkably, has them celebrating the wasting of their minds as imagined strength.
Trump will never be defeated, or held to account, or kept in proper check — pick your lane and vocation — by people as unthinking and defensive and incurious as he is. Making you as facile as he is serves only him. Nuance and complexity are part of the way out — and, above all, curiosity about what you don’t see.
A culture of incuriosity prevents any real understanding of Trump’s enduring appeal — even in the face of the present chaos and pain. Everyone with some one- or two-word catchall explanation for what is going on — Fox! racism! — is pretending they know things. This incuriosity prevents his opposition from seizing on the clearly potent issues he has latched on to — say, how trade works — and offering their own, non-rampaging version. The incuriosity prevents the construction of a broad pro-democracy coalition. It prevents the reform and transformation of political parties and movements. It prevents the kind of changes to the news business that could allow good information to reach way more people.
The cost of all this incuriosity can be measured in distrust. Majorities of Americans do not trust the major political parties, do not trust journalists, do not trust people in sclerotic institutions who are so wedded to their certainties that no new information can derail them. Trump has lost a considerable amount of support since taking office. Yet it is a remarkable fact about our present situation that this slide has not really seemed to benefit Democrats.
Incuriosity is perhaps the knowledge culture of a tribal age. In more tribal societies, people don’t ask what’s the best way to prepare bread or throw a wedding or allow women to spend their time. They do those things the way they do those things. Questions are trouble. When you’re scared and hunkering down with your people, you may not feel in the mood for a big rethinking. This fear has to be gotten over.
Where is the boldness? Where is the wildness? Where are the people willing to shred their own deepest assumptions and roll the dice? Where are the institutions renovating their entire strategy, in the cold light of new realities?
After all, the opposite of Trumpism is not just a different immigration or tax policy. It is, at bottom, fundamentally different habits of mind: curiosity, humility, openness to criticism, a hunger for growth, and the courage to change.
