The meaning of a facial expression and the making of a new New York
By 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.