Why look at Mamdani’s mending story?

People across sectors of society are seeking ways to oppose the rise of authoritarian populists, and they have declining confidence in the Democratic Party as the opposition. The Democratic Party has a record low job approval rating (Voters Give Democrats in Congress a Record Low Job Approval but Still Might Vote for Them in 2026, 2025). In this time of change and turmoil, Mamdani is expanding the paths for mending stories. What evidence is there to suggest that looking at the way he is telling his story of peoplehood will give us critical purchase on what is distinct and replicable in his practice and what is not?

Stories of political peoplehood—community-building narratives that promise economic, political, and ethical/spiritual benefits—are a necessary but not sufficient means by which leaders form coalitions that institutionalize their political vision (Ganz Reference Ganz, Odugbemi and Lee2011; Mayer Reference Mayer2014; Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2008; Smith Reference Smith2003; Tilly Reference Tilly2002). They help political organizers overcome the collective action problem (Ganz Reference Ganz, Odugbemi and Lee2011; Mayer Reference Mayer2014). Mamdani’s rise to prominence required more than attracting an attentive constituency; it meant creating a new coalition that added substantial numbers of disaffected voters by convincing them it was worth joining. The mobilizing stories he told played an important part in this rise.

In addition, making mending stories the unit of analysis is what is most needed in this time of what George Shulman has labeled an interregnum (Shulman Reference Shulman2021). Shulman argues that, as of 2016, the neoliberal order is likely dead, but what replaces it is unclear and will be fought in the coming years (Shulman Reference Shulman2021). In an interregnum when the old stories are dying, new stories of peoplehood are likely to be key to political transformation. The question many contemporary political actors want answered is whether Mamdani has discovered how to stitch together a common horizon for a multiracial politics that can subsist outside the unique context of New York City.

Mending and bleaching stories represent two different responses to the same populist mechanism. Danielle Allen argues that a society can form peoplehood based on either “oneness” or “wholeness” (Allen Reference Allen2006: 87–88). Bleaching stories aim for a oneness that sees purity and hierarchy as the natural order of things with irredeemable outsiders. Mending stories, like Ocasio-Cortez’s and Mamdani’s, aim for wholeness. Mending stories do not erase conflict. They transmit “a culture of trust … across generations” by framing our collective story as united by our shared historical and moral commitments, thereby enabling citizens to view strangers as friends (Allen Reference Allen2006: 87).

Mamdani’s place in the longer tradition becomes apparent when compared to those that came before. Stories of peoplehood helped pull together new coalitions to fight for justice during times of crisis. Since these have taken similar forms over time, they provide a baseline of comparison with Mamdani’s story. Lincoln during the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) during the Great Depression and the New Deal, and MLK Jr. during the Black freedom struggle all relied on a mending storytelling formula (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025).

Mending stories are inclusive, mobilizing community-building narratives that explain the meaning and causes of shared suffering and promote a vision for the future animated by a faith that working toward the unrealized promise of the Declaration binds us together as a people (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025: 6). Lincoln, for instance, redefined America by linking it to the Declaration’s proclamation of equality and convincing factions of a fragmented Republican Party that allowing the expansion of slavery into Western territory would undermine their political and economic freedom. His version of what “we the people” meant won out over Southerners, who argued that racial hierarchy was the natural order of things and how civilization thrived.

Mending stories have five characteristics. These characteristics should be understood as historically recurrent features of major US mending stories rather than as rigid necessary conditions. Mending stories identify the country’s particular founding narrative with the Declaration’s promise that “all men are created equal,” they view this narrative as an unrealized promise that has never been fully implemented, they explain that this unrealized promise is rooted in a Christian ethics of equality, they discursively bring together an underdog “we” they identify with diverse workers who are fighting an elite “them” made up of wealthy and powerful owners but this “them” is not seen as a group of irredeemable outsiders, and they have a vision for the future and spark in members a faith that they can work to bring about the unrealized promise of the Declaration (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025: 6–7). In each of the periods, actors fought against normatively exclusionary bleaching stories. Like their counterpart mending stories, bleaching stories also have a parallel five characteristics that, in contrast, assert a hierarchy that rejects the Declaration’s premise that all men are created equal. Mamdani’s focus on the mayoral election and grounding his ethics in his Islamic faith make it more difficult for him to employ the first two characteristics of mending stories without changing them.

Updating the mending tradition and countering MAGA without exclusion

Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez reject the bleaching story tradition that conceives of the nation’s ideal as connected to an imagined pinnacle of greatness already achieved (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025: 10). They deploy mending stories that call for moving toward an unrealized promise. In his mayoral victory speech on November 4, 2025, Mamdani cited Jawaharlal Nehru, “A moment comes but rarely in history … when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025e). Similarly, in an interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2022, Ocasio-Cortez suggests the 60 years following the Civil Rights Act may go down in history as “just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy […]” (Remnick Reference Remnick2022). Both Ocasio-Cortez’s expression of flirtation with democracy and Mamdani’s bringing out values long suppressed express the idea of an unfinished democracy.

In addition, while bleaching stories relegate part of the polity to the status of permanent outsiders, mending stories treat opponents as potentially persuadable. This difference was visible when Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders gave speeches at the Fight Oligarchy event in Idaho. When the audience booed the presence of Trump protestors outside the event she told them not to, and emphasized everyone would be welcomed into this movement (Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2025a). Mamdani demonstrated a similar posture in the Oval Office meeting with President Trump (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025j). Mending and bleaching stories construct an antagonism, but the difference between them lies in whether a part of the “we” is portrayed as irredeemable outsiders.

Furthermore, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani reject the bleaching stories’ reliance on “cynicism and a lack of faith in institutions, systems, and leaders” (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025: 12). Instead, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani put hope in changing the present to move toward a better future. In his inaugural, he emphasized the precious “opportunity to transform and reinvent” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2026). Ocasio-Cortez also talks about the future, built by “working people past, present, and future” (Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2025c). The backward-looking bleaching stories justify their exclusions by arguing the future is bleak because of impurities, mending stories require participants to believe that forward progress toward a better future is possible.

Rescaling and pluralizing peoplehood

Mamdani alters two of the conventional characteristics of mending stories in ways that open up democratic possibilities. Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani differ in the way they use shared US history. Ocasio-Cortez makes greater use of appeals to the nation and to the Declaration’s unrealized promise, while Mamdani instead develops a peculiar New York City exceptionalism.

Mamdani’s portrayal of the city as a beacon in darkness and a model of pluralistic coexistence for the world changes the vocabulary of traditional mending stories. He reconceives the civic subject, making it “we New Yorkers” rather than “we the people of the United States.” In so doing, he is redefining the locus of democratic promise and reorienting the site of political legitimacy. To understand Mamdani’s approach, it is useful to understand the range of criteria of uses by similarly situated politicians (Skinner Reference Skinner, Ball, Farr and Hanson1995: 9). Mamdani’s consistent de-emphasis of national identity marks a deeper divergence from the strategies of more conventional candidates. Andrew Cuomo—Mamdani’s main competitor in both the primary and general election—similarly centered New York but also repeatedly returned to invocations to the nation. In particular, Cuomo would return to the phrase “E Pluribus Unum. Out of many one” and called it our country’s “founding premise,” “the salvation of this nation,” and “the American way” (Cuomo Reference Cuomo2025; Cuomo Reference Cuomo2021). Likewise, the previous mayor, Eric Adams, also talked about New York as the epitome of the “American way of life” and the “American Dream” and “everything we are as an American” (Adams Reference Adams2025; Adams Reference Adams2022; Clermont Reference Clermont2021). Mamdani’s reluctance to invoke the nation is also different from other prominent Muslim political leaders, like Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar who in her 2018 victory speech spoke eloquently of the unrealized “bounty of the American promise, the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and the unrealized promise of the “American Dream” (Omar Reference Omar2018). Furthermore, this reluctance is also not due to his ideological attachment to democratic socialism, otherwise Ocasio-Cortez would show a similar disinclination.

Ocasio-Cortez adopts a quite progressive version of a standard mending story, invoking the unrealized promise of the nation under threat from the wealthy elite, a story that echoes the plot described by past actors like Lincoln, FDR, and MLK. In her tweets, her speeches on anti-oligarchy, and her other social media posts, Ocasio-Cortez locates the civic subject as US workers and residents fighting for a vision of equality and rights (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [@AOC] 2018, 2019; Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2025b; Smith Reference Smith2021). As she summarizes in a Facebook video, the goal is to establish “a country where the American dream is actually possible” (Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2025b). The American Dream is defined as the people defending freedoms promised but deferred.

Mamdani shifts the civic subject to a New York resident. In his victory speech after being elected mayor, he explained: “In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025h). In his inauguration speech, he expounded on this theme:

Mamdani turns the city into a microcosm of his vision of politics for the world. Stewards take care of something that is supposed to carry on after the steward has handed off the responsibility to the next steward. What are New Yorkers stewarding? It is the promise that there can be a huge, prosperous city that embraces its diversity and sees it as the engine of its dynamism, compassion, and love. There is an element of exceptionalism with an egalitarian twist. Mamdani repurposes Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” the beacon sending out a light in the darkness image (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025a, Reference Mamdani2025c). However, unlike Winthrop, the light doesn’t emanate from a rigid adherence to a particular exclusive identity. Instead, the “something” stewarded is the embrace of pluralism, the intermixing of global cultures and economic classes in this one, big, remarkable city. He repurposes the nostalgic energy generated by exclusive versions of exceptionalism to a significant reworking of its conventional use.

The other significant difference lies in how they ground the moral argument. Bleaching stories often invoke religion in anti-pluralistic ways while mending stories do not imply God is on their side and leave room for differing interpretations (Illuzzi Reference Illuzzi2025: 10). Both Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani invoke morals and religion in pluralistic ways, but the ways they do so differ. Ocasio-Cortez follows the tradition of Lincoln, FDR, and MLK, who frequently equate the ethical core of their Christian faith with the Declaration’s statement that all men are created equal. About two-thirds of Americans report they are proud or very proud to be an American and Ocasio-Cortez can lay claim to this tradition to legitimate her bold policy goals (Alper et al. Reference Alper, Rotolo, Tevington, Nortey and Kallo2023).

Ocasio-Cortez also grounds her policy positions on her Catholic faith. In an article on criminal justice reform for a Catholic publication, she uses the Lord’s prayer and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew to make the point that “we are compelled to care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick and, yes—the imprisoned” (Ocasio-Cortez Reference Ocasio-Cortez2018). In a story from National Catholic Reporter—“AOC credits her Catholic faith for positions on health care, [and the] environment” (Feuerherd Reference Feuerherd2020). In each of these examples, Ocasio-Cortez explains her countercultural critique of capitalist exploitation as representing the “radical kind of love” she sees in the New Testament.

Mamdani does not avoid discussion of his religion and its connection to policy; instead, he frequently taps into the tradition by invoking MLK. In some instances, he directly explains the connection between his faith and his democratic socialism. At the end of one of his Instagram reels, for instance, he says: “We can usher in a new era of leadership. We will fight for you because we are you. Or as we say on Steinway, ‘Ana Minkum wa ilaykum’ [I am of you and for you]” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025g). Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, is a locale with a high concentration of Muslim residents, and Mamdani makes his point about the need for radical inclusion by invoking a popular Arabic adage. His statement that he is of the people asserts his Muslim identity as part of a marginalized majority long kept out of power. Because he has experienced that exclusion, he frames his candidacy as a commitment to eradicate the heavy burdens that the majority has carried for too long.

Nonetheless, the invocation of his Muslim faith as the source of his policy positions is not the ordinary move he makes. In interviews, he is very disciplined, using the same MLK quote from 1961 to explain the content of his democratic socialism: “Call it democracy or call it democratic socialism but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God’s children” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025f). In other place, he universalizes this formulation: “This campaign is for every New Yorker who believes in the dignity of their neighbors” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2024; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025f). Whereas Ocasio-Cortez relies upon Christian ethics within the Declaration, Mamdani instead largely draws on the moral authority of MLK to ground his moral critiques. Mamdani’s rhetorical move enables him to articulate a moral commitment through a civil-religious figure rather than through explicit citations of Islamic theology.

The democratic stakes of Mamdani’s distinctive approach

Mamdani’s mending story of peoplehood variation raises important normative questions about the effects of scaling down democratic peoplehood and pluralizing civil religion in an age of populism. Scholars of authoritarian populism have found that widespread experience of marginalization and belief in decline shape the kinds of claims many residents of industrialized democracy will see as legitimate (Elchardus and Spruyt Reference Elchardus and Spruyt2016: 126; Gidron and Hall Reference Gidron and Hall2020: 1028). Authoritarians have exploited this rhetorical landscape.

Under these structural conditions, Mamdani’s story frames marginalization as a bond that forges together communities split by those in power. Whether highlighting the mangling of his name or asking the largely South Asian crowd in Hillside to raise their hand if they had been called a terrorist, or had their name mangled at work, or “made to feel less than because of who you are, because of where you came from, because of what you believe in,” he is linking the experiences of those who have been kept in the shadows (Instagram—Tonight! 2025; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025b). Mamdani stitches together a coalition that is increasingly cynical about established institutions: “I want to speak to every child who grows up in New York, marked as the other, who is randomly selected in a way that rarely feels random, who feels that they carry a stain that can never quite be cleaned” (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2025a). The city’s identity as a haven for a diverse immigrant population becomes a way for those on the margins to gain their full humanity and stop hiding.

Mamdani’s city-based story creates some unresolved normative problems for left-wing peoplehood stories. Many authoritarian populists address feelings of social marginalization and decline by expanding the scale of their appeals. They refer to civilizational narratives of greatness and then say their particular nation is exceptional in promoting these civilizational values (Yilmaz & Mrieson, Reference Yilmaz and Morieson2022: 19). These tap into patriotism, religious morals and spirituality, and specific national history, which many still find quite important to their sense of identity.

Mamdani’s approach presents the possibility of finding an alternative that appeals to disenchanted constituents without reproducing the exclusionary approach. Mamdani, however, is negotiating a tricky path through a thicket of challenges. The nation as an organizing scale of community is likely here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Rogers Brubaker argues: “the nation-state remains the decisive instance of belonging even in a rapidly globalizing world, and struggles over belonging in and to the nation-state remain the most consequential forms of membership politics” (Brubaker Reference Brubaker2015: 7). Furthermore, his positionality as a Muslim in the United States creates structural constraints to bringing discussions of patriotism and religious values to bear in his politics. While Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico can invoke his Christian identity to directly challenge Christian nationalism and reclaim the Declaration’s founding narrative from these actors, such moves are less available to a brown Muslim politician (Klein and Cascione Reference Klein and Cascione2026; Vote Common Good 2026). Lajevardi and Oskooii in their research on the United States find that the more people identify with America, the more likely they are to “hold more negative attitudes toward Muslim Americans” (Lajevardi and Oskooii Reference Lajevardi and Oskooii2024).

In a period of interregnum, Mamdani’s global city reframing navigates between the Scylla of authoritarian populism with its exclusionary appeal to “real Americans” and the Charybdis of cosmopolitan universalism, whose abstractions risk backlash in an age of global disenchantment. In the past, the mending tradition navigated related dangers by talking about the nation having an unrealized promise in the Declaration that we need to work toward. This brought people into a shared multigenerational project where they could place their personal and family stories within a larger arc of history, while still seeing the beautiful and ugly parts of that history together. This is the tack that Lincoln, FDR, MLK, and Ocasio-Cortez make. Melvin Rogers argues that there is a danger in sanctifying origin stories, as it elevates past figures as authorities and arbiters of the present (Rogers Reference Rogers2026).

Mamdani moves closer to the Charybdis without getting consumed by it. He does this by rejecting an origin story that holds up figures with special authority that need to be respected. He rarely invokes the framers, founders, Declaration, or the Constitution. Yet, he has a concrete local vision for an unfinished project to realize the potential of New York’s global dynamism, diversity, and what he argues is its concomitant productivity. Mamdani does not explicitly reject Brubaker’s reminder that the nation-state is still the most consequential form of political belonging, but he relocates the locus of this identity from belonging to it to belonging in it. He is both scaling down and also situating peoplehood in a deeply pluralized local. New York is special because it represents an untapped potential vanguard for a globalizing world. It could, if it chose to embrace its ethnic, racial, economic, religious, and cultural diversity, provide a model that explicitly rejects the bleaching vision of the rising authoritarians.

This approach may be ahead of its time and may not be an appropriate strategy for national candidates. Rogers Smith argues: “Although appeals to socialism and democracy and the perspectives of oppressed peoples—made with little reference to American national identity—have helped to build successful reform movements at times, they have most often lost” (Smith Reference Smith2022: 419). Mamdani is making reference to a specific subnational American identity, but the nation still holds a special and privileged place in US political identity. If progressives do not try to articulate a compelling community-building story of national identity and right-wing populists continue to do so, they could be ceding the normative terrain.

Mamdani’s pluralization of civil religion achieves three goals simultaneously: (1) it navigates Jewish–Muslim tensions, (2) reclaims radical economic credentials, and (3) it maintains coalitional breadth. This does not seem to be a case of simple triangulation or strategic vagueness, but a reclamation that can serve all three political and moral purposes simultaneously. The first of these is most acute in New York City’s current context. October 7th exacerbated already existing fissure lines between Jewish and Muslim communities. Invoking MLK rather than Islamic tradition provides a shared civil religious grounding that sympathetic Jewish New Yorkers can also claim as their own. He does not erase his Muslim or South Asian identities. From his graphic design choices that drew from Bollywood, and South Asian bodegas, to his wearing of the kurta (long, loose, and collarless shirt common in South Asia), to hosting phone banks in Urdu, Arabic, and Bangla Mamdani embraces his multiple identities directly and visibly while also framing this as part of the vision laid out by MLK (Marcelo and Press Reference Marcelo and Press2025; Patil Reference Patil2025; Ryan et al. Reference Ryan, Fandos and Rubinstein2025). For a non-Christian politician in what has been an inhospitable environment for Muslim candidates, using MLK seems like a deliberate choice to provide some common ground (Kalkan et al. Reference Kalkan, Layman and Green2018). To a much lesser extent, Rep. Ilhan Omar also invokes MLK as an illustration of the application of justice (Omar, Reference Omarn.d.).

The second role of invoking MLK and pluralizing civil religion is reclaiming the radical economic credentials of MLK from the late 1960s. Mamdani’s most frequent invocation of MLK is to answer what is the content of his democratic socialism. The MLK from the Poor People’s Campaign was very critical of capitalism, and this allows Mamdani to advance his ambitious policy proposals that seek to restructure the system while placing them in the mainstream of American political culture. Mamdani can accurately say that MLK was arguing for huge structural changes like a guaranteed minimum income, and Mamdani’s proposals to freeze rents, provide free buses, and offer cheaper groceries are either squarely within this tradition or even less radical than it. Embracing this version of MLK claims the radical economic credentials of radical activists within the Democratic Socialists of America and groups such as the Movement for Black Lives.

Third, embracing this version of MLK rather than explicitly adopting the language of abolitionist frameworks common among activists, such as those within the Movement for Black Lives, conveys his economic radicalism while distancing him from positions most likely to alienate some disaffected and nonvoters most concerned with pocketbook issues. He is both a part of the larger radical economic tradition and not looking to weld his governing agenda to the desires of activist caucuses.

Despite these potential benefits, Mamdani’s mediation of religion through MLK poses broader normative questions regarding the role of pluralized spirituality in democratic citizenship. Notwithstanding a significant rise in the number of Americans who report no religious affiliation (called “nones”), especially among younger Americans, religion and spirituality remain quite important to the majority of Americans (Smith et al. Reference Smith, Cooperman, Alper, Mohamed, Rotolo, Tevington, Nortey, Kallo, Diamant and Fahmy2025). There is also scholarship showing how Christian nationalism is growing in importance and its influence works in the exact opposite direction as other religious communities, undermining civic values and practices (Alberta Reference Alberta2023). “Those Christian Americans who reject white Christian nationalism and are actively involved in their faith communities are generally more likely to advocate for a civil arena that protects and defends the rights of all people and groups” (Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection 2022: 3). Liz Theoharis and William Barber II argue that failing to invoke religious morals and to confront Christian nationalism directly allows Christian nationalism to capture the civic terrain needed for democracy to survive (Barber II and Theoharis Reference Barber and Theoharis2018, Reference Theoharis2020; Theoharis Reference Theoharis2020, Reference Theoharis2023). The unresolved question is whether Mamdani’s pluralized civil religion approach can compete with nationalist religious politics, and on what scale it can compete. Mending stories have historically privileged Christian spiritual invocations. This is not because the same messages are not present in non-Christian traditions, but because the US electorate has grown up in a culture infused by centuries of Protestant ideas, beliefs, and practices. Mamdani’s campaign represents a sophisticated attempt to extend this tradition, drawing on Islamic principles and the Black freedom tradition rather than explicit Christian texts and stories. Whether the interregnum provides sufficient opening for this to take hold more nationally remains an open question.