The mayor of New York City planted an olive tree on Tuesday night and filmed it. The video went out on Thursday afternoon, timed almost to the minute of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations, and ended with the words “an olive tree grows in Gracie.” His supporters called it classy. By then the Strategic Response Group; the unit he pledged to disband — had already been arresting people on First Avenue for over an hour.
I want to be clear about my own position before I say anything else. I promoted Zohran Mamdani. I promoted him during the recent theater. I am not writing this from a position of having warned you, and I’m not interested in the version of this argument that gets to be smug about it.
I’m coming out with this because holding Zohran to a lower standard than we would hold any other head of state is American privilege, plainly. Our comrades in Gaza do not get to be graded on a curve. And because the accountability our movement refuses to apply to the people we elect is precisely the accountability that gets traded away the moment they have something to lose.
The argument of this piece is not that Mamdani is uniquely bad. It’s that the specific case against him; a campaign promise abandoned, a police commissioner kept on for the first time in seventy years, a Zionist governor endorsed, a Speaker endorsed one day after his Kushner meeting broke, a protest unit he swore to dissolve making the arrests; is the clearest test case we have for whether electing our own inside the Democratic Party produces anything other than better press.
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