The Visionary We’ve Been Waiting For: Zohran Mamdani
The Visionary We’ve Been Waiting For: Zohran Mamdani
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
Some politicians promise change.
Zohran Mamdani promises everything.
And not just the things you want — the things you didn’t even know you wanted, the things you’ve been trained by capitalism to think you shouldn’t want, the things so generous they make Santa Claus look like a coupon-clipping miser.
Mamdani’s upbringing alone reads like the preface to a political scripture. Born to Ugandan and Indian heritage, raised amid intellectual abundance, and steeped in a worldliness that few of his critics could even spell, he’s inherited not just wealth, but the far rarer asset of moral certainty. This is a man who did not claw his way up from scarcity — he was spared such indignities — and so is free to imagine a world unburdened by the pedestrian needs of “earning” and “budgeting.” That freedom is the crucible in which true leadership is forged.
His detractors mutter about privilege. They whisper about family money, private schooling, and a life without the “grit” of hourly wages. They fail to understand that this is the point. You cannot build a city on the tired, market-soaked ideas of people who have had to balance a checkbook. You need someone who’s never once had to calculate a tip to envision the liberation of a cashless utopia.
And his vision — oh, his vision! — is nothing short of revolutionary.
State-Run Grocery Stores
It begins with food, because of course it does. For too long, Americans have been trapped in the neon hellscape of privately owned supermarkets. The so-called “choices” of twenty-seven brands of peanut butter? A capitalist trick. Mamdani knows the truth: one government peanut butter is all you need. He has the courage to imagine shelves stocked by the state, curated by committees of taste-neutral nutritionists, so that no citizen need ever again be paralyzed by the tyranny of “crunchy or creamy.”
Think of the savings! No advertising budgets. No competing store chains. No “buy one, get one” nonsense — you’ll get what you’re given, and like it, because it will be free. And in the absence of branding, we will all finally be equal in the eyes of the jar.
Free Transportation for All
To Mamdani, buses and subways are not just public utilities; they are vehicles of equality. He dreams of a transit system that costs nothing — not “low fares,” not “reduced rates,” but nothing. Fare inspectors will be retrained as morale officers. Metro turnstiles will be repurposed into public art installations. Subway announcements will be read in soothing, multilingual tones, reminding passengers that they are being carried not just to their stop, but toward a brighter tomorrow.
Critics scoff about “costs” and “maintenance.” Mamdani scoffs back, with the gentle patience of a man who’s read Marx in the original German and understands that cost is a fiction, maintenance a distraction, and that the tracks will be oiled by the goodwill of the people.
Historic Parallels of Genius
If you think this is new, you’ve forgotten the giants who came before. Stalin made bread lines fair. Mao gave the peasants work, even if it involved moving mountains with shovels. Castro, bless him, taught every Cuban to read the revolutionary slogans painted on their own walls. Mamdani stands proudly in this tradition — not imitating, but innovating, bringing these models to a New York City skyline they never dreamed could be theirs.
His leadership is not confined to policy; it’s in the poetics of his ambition. Like FDR with better hair, or Che Guevara with a more diverse Instagram feed, Mamdani embodies the romantic left’s ideal: the leader as artist, the policy platform as poem.
The Audacity of Everything Free
Why stop at groceries and transit? Housing, healthcare, clothing — all ripe for liberation from the marketplace. Under Mamdani, we might see rent abolished, with every apartment assigned like a library book you never have to return. Fashion week could be reimagined as “Distribution Week,” where citizens line up for their annual allocation of garments in state-approved shades. Doctors could be freed from billing and insurance to spend their days reciting affirmations to patients, since most illness is rooted in capitalism anyway.
To lesser minds, this sounds impractical. To Mamdani, practicality is the death of progress. He is not weighed down by the fossilized thinking that shackled generations before him. The fact that no society in history has sustained such largesse is not a warning sign — it is an invitation to be first.
Personal Magnanimity
And yet, for all his grand designs, Mamdani carries himself with the humility of a man who knows he is history’s instrument. This is not the arrogance of wealth; this is the calm confidence of someone who understands that his personal abundance is simply a down payment on the abundance he will distribute to all. His life story is not a tale of struggle, but of stewardship. The silver spoon was not his to keep, but to melt down and recast into a serving ladle for the people’s soup.
A Sixth-Gear Kind of Leader
If most politicians operate in first or second gear, occasionally shifting to third for campaign season, Mamdani lives in a constant, roaring sixth gear of idealism. While others haggle over incremental change, he is already mapping the post-scarcity economy where no one works unless they want to, and everyone “wants to” for reasons unrelated to money.
This is the velocity of true change — the kind that makes the cautious feel dizzy, the realists feel irrelevant, and the rest of us feel as if we are being strapped to the hood of a bullet train bound for the future.
The Punchline We Deserve
Someday, historians will marvel at how Zohran Mamdani saw a city of millions and envisioned not just improvements, but the complete rewiring of human desire. They will note that he was unafraid to question the fundamentals — ownership, price, labor — and that he did so with the serene assurance of a man who had never stood in a checkout line.
And we, his contemporaries, will remember the moment we first heard the plan: free groceries, free rides, free everything. We will remember how our hearts leapt, not because we believed it was possible, but because, for one shining second, we wanted to believe it was necessary.
In the end, Mamdani’s genius is not in promising us what we can have. It’s in teaching us to yearn for the things that only a man who’s never had to yearn could imagine.