If Zohran Mamdani has mastered anything, it’s adapting to the people he wants to associate with.

In a press conference following the recent shooting in Midtown Manhattan, Mamdani, who has a history of anti-police rhetoric, repeatedly sought to walk back his most inflammatory statements and said the only reason he had criticized the NYPD was because he was irrationally angry at the death of George Floyd in 2020. 

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“The tweet that you refer to is a tweet that is out of step with the way in which I not only view police officers, the immense work that they do in this city but also the seriousness with which we need to treat that work,” he said, referring to a 2020 post he made calling for the defunding of the NYPD.

It was yet another pivot from an unpopular position for a man who has maintained a very positive relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America, offered up a word salad response to concerns he has supported antisemitic rhetoric, and otherwise presented himself as the leader of the left-wing in New York City, hoping it will lead to his election as mayor. 

As this 33-year-old with communist instincts has stepped ever closer to leading the nation’s largest city, conservatives have fixated on the fact that Mamdani is a Muslim Indian immigrant from Uganda who was only recently naturalized as a citizen, arguing that he should be denaturalized and deported. 

There’s definitely a good argument to be made that Mamdani’s hostility toward American ideals should have disqualified him from ever being a permanent resident, let alone a citizen. But the uncomfortable truth is that American culture has shifted to the point where, especially in cities such as New York, it is largely divorced from the ideals that America was built on.

At the same time, it isn’t hard to see just how much New York City has changed just in the 21st century. In 2000, the city’s mayor was Republican Rudy Giuliani, who had built his career as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. His administration was followed by then-Republican Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire fiscal conservative with some socially liberal tendencies. 

Thus, after Bloomberg was term-limited, winning the Democratic Party nomination has all but guaranteed election to the mayoralty, which is why Mamdani’s victory in the June primary has drawn such attention. Fellow Democrats, eager to moderate and clean up the party’s image, have declined to endorse him, and his nomination has hardly scared away non-Republican rivals, including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who launched an independent bid after Mamdani beat him in the primary.

As the Republican Party has largely been non-competitive in the city, New York has, in many ways, become a training ground for radical progressives. Progressive darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) represents an uncompetitive House district that encompasses parts of Queens and the Bronx. Former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), another progressive hero, represented the bulk of the Bronx until his self-serving antics convinced voters to back his primary challenger last year. 

As much as conservatives such as myself may wish otherwise, the progressivism that Mamdani, Ocasio-Cortez, and the rest of their ideological ilk profess is hardly a foreign ideology. Americans may have imported aspects of progressivism, but the current cultural and political expressions of the left wing in the United States are, unfortunately, uniquely American.

Mamdani, then, is far more of an avatar of the college-educated progressive urban yuppie that has come to dominate many of our cities than he is a Muslim Indian who grew up in Uganda. His political ideology was hardly crafted in the third-world nations from which he and his family came. Rather, it was formulated by the progressive intelligentsia that has come to dominate much of the nation’s educational and nonprofit institutions. 

Take, for instance, Mamdani’s policy promises and general outlook on gay and transgender issues. In Uganda, where Mamdani was born and lived during the earliest years of his life, homosexuality is illegal. But in New York City, thousands took to the streets in June as part of the city’s annual Pride parade, including Mamdani himself. His campaign website promises to greatly expand the New York City government’s engagement on gay and transgender issues, including by establishing a “Office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs.” Of course, the Pride movement has long been synonymous with New York City. It originated there in 1969 with the Stonewall riots.

One of the reasons that President Donald Trump’s decisive victory in 2024 was such a boost of morale for the conservative cause was that, for years, it had felt as though radical progressive culture was ascendant. Since the #Resistance was launched in the wake of the 2016 election, the left wing has come to dominate the nation’s cultural expressions. 

The examples are endless. Hollywood nearly canceled its own awards show for having too many white nominees, and late-night comedy shows stopped being comedy shows and instead morphed into cringey live-audience political talk shows. Companies, eager to avoid activist boycotts and other public pressure, adopted “environmental, social, and governance” standards for their investments while promising to donate billions to liberal social causes. Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star game from Atlanta because of a voter ID law passed in the state. 

In short, all of the nation’s cultural expressions were either run by or beholden to the radical progressive Left.

But after Trump’s victory last year, that has all changed. Major companies are eschewing the overtly progressive promotions they were engaged in less than a decade ago, ad campaigns are now defended publicly even in the face of backlash from the activist Left, and liberal nonprofit organizations that used to receive millions in corporate donations have seen those funding streams dry up.

With the newly ascendant status of conservative culture, it is easy to forget that the progressive cultural currents that dominated much of the last decade have not disappeared. Those currents and their ideological supporters are still burrowed in the very institutions that have retreated from these causes. 

American progressivism may hate what America has long stood for and seek to undermine it, but it was and remains an American project. Mamdani did not import the progressive ideology that he champions from Uganda. It was already here. Rather, he assimilated into the dominant culture of the city he seeks to lead.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that the U.S. could never be conquered or defeated by an external enemy, but only from within. 

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“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he said. “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” 

Today, the effort to complete suicide of the nation is mainstream and embedded in our institutions. Mamdani’s progressivism and its subversion of what America has stood for are already a major cultural marker of the very city he seeks to lead. He did not bring it there. Rather, much like the generations of immigrants who have come before, he assimilated into it.