New York will have a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. To the delight of the left and dismay of the right, a young Muslim born in Uganda to Indian parents will head the city. The right warns of a "communist jihadist" whom its radicals would like to strip of his citizenship and deport.

The left celebrates a three-time minority (Muslim, Indian, African) with a radical progressivist agenda. Above all, however, his victory exposes the blind spots of both political currents that have allowed themselves to be corrupted by liberalism in recent decades.

Mamdani's success: the result of the failure of both the left and the right

First to one misunderstanding. Despite appearances, Mamdani does not fulfil the American dream of the guy from humble circumstances who overcomes all sorts of odds to work his way up through hard work.

That's the story offered by white Christian men like Bill Clinton and J.D. Vance, not the now-celebrated three-time minority leader. He didn't grow up a single mother in the Bronx or come to the U.S. in a rubber dinghy or hike the deserts around the Rio Grande.

He grew up in the privileged surroundings of an exclusive New York neighborhood, prominent parents, and private schools that are inaccessible to most white Americans. His father is a renowned international academic with a professorship at Columbia University, and his mother has won numerous awards for her film work.

His origins give Mamdani the ideal qualifications for American politics: social capital and minority affiliation. What he lacks in money, he makes up for in friend Soros.

But there's nothing wrong with that; he's been dealt a good hand and he's playing it well. In addition to the perks that have fallen from the sky, he has also demonstrated undeniable political talent. Above all, though, his victory holds up a mirror to both the Western left and right and shows their longstanding failures. Both currents have allowed themselves to be colonised and corrupted by liberalism in recent decades.

On the right, free-market neoliberals and aggressive neoconservatives are displacing traditional conservatives who championed the family, natural communities, small business and a restrained foreign policy.

Among the leaders of the Western left today, it is hard to find traditional socialists fighting against big capital for social justice; they have been replaced by progressives obsessed with climate, gender, race, migration, and indeed any new minority.

Mamdani is a progressivist with a traditional left-wing agenda

And what about Mamdani? He may be a progressivist, but he won on a traditionally left-wing agenda, with the consequences of neoliberalism and neoconservatism playing powerfully into his hands. Mamdani belongs to the progressives both by origin and by his previous positions.

But in the campaign he eschewed progressivism and bet on traditional left-wing themes: affordable housing, millionaire's taxes and affordable public services.

His pro-Palestinian sympathies didn't hurt either. New York is one of the cities with a significant Jewish community, but a number of American Jews today are frustrated by both Netanyahu's massacres and the Trump administration's persecution of critics of Israel and Zionist extremists.

Although New York Jews voted overwhelmingly for Mamdani's rival, the independent Democrat Cuomo, a third of them gave their vote to a young Muslim.

But the ground for his victory was also set by the extremist politics of the liberal right. Alongside the neoconservative adoration of Israel, it is also about the growing social inequality caused by neoliberal deregulation. Since the 1980s, the scissors between the richest and the rest of us in the US have been melting, and both the middle class and the poorest classes have suffered.

While the percentage of the richest is increasing its share of national income year by year, over forty million Americans depend on food stamps. In doing so, 40 percent of food stamp recipients go to work, but at wages that are so starvation wages that they could not support their families without government assistance.

Mamdani is not the new Roosevelt

If someone in the land of billionaires is working for minimum wage, they can't afford even modest rent, not just in New York but elsewhere in the U.S. No OECD country has a higher relative poverty rate than the US, and they are at the very bottom of the charts in infant mortality and life expectancy rates.

When Mamdani declared that billionaires shouldn't exist (he would probably give Soros an existential exemption), he wasn't just addressing revolutionary dreamers. A lot of ordinary Americans are also bothered by the way super-rich asocials like Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and hundreds of other members of the property oligarchy are being cut off from society by neoliberalism.

Mamdani has cleverly allowed himself to be carried along by the failure of liberals from the right and left to exacerbate poverty and oligarchization. Just how this boils over in American society was shown by last year's murder of the head of America's largest health insurer, after which a section of the public expressed sympathy for the perpetrator, Luigi Mangione.

The problem will not just go away, but it can be solved. Ninety years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reforms changed the country's economic regime towards a fairer society, but for the last fifty years America has been going in the opposite direction.

Mamdani does not look like Roosevelt yet. He is likely to return to a much easier pursuit of progressivist themes: protecting undocumented immigrants, restricting police, privileging non-white minorities. America will then continue to wait for a new Roosevelt... or for a new Lincoln and the Civil War.