Yesterday, Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in New York, becoming the Big Apple’s first-ever Muslim mayor. Born in Uganda, Mamdani is a self-professed democratic socialist who captivated New Yorkers with ambitious promises of free public transportation, higher minimum wages and expanded social services. His message of accessibility and fairness resonated with millions, even as critics accused him of utopian populism. Yet beyond the headlines, Mamdani’s victory represents something far more significant than a municipal upset: It is another milestone in America’s long-running anti-establishment story.
The keyword here is anti-establishment. U.S. politics have been dominated by that sentiment since at least the mid-2000s, when disillusionment with institutions began to deepen. Former President George W. Bush was arguably the last “legacy” candidate to win anything of consequence. His successor, Barack Obama, though institutionally grounded, challenged the racial and generational conventions of American leadership in 2008 and 2012. His campaign of hope and inclusion gave many voters their first taste of a politics that felt genuinely transformative. Yet that spirit was quickly neutralized when the Democratic Party, in 2016, chose to rally behind former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rather than Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders – conceding the anti-establishment mantle to the Republicans and to President Donald Trump, whose populist rhetoric turned voter anger into electoral power.
The brief interruption that followed came in the form of Joe Biden’s presidency, which in retrospect looks like a four-year intermission. His election was propelled by exhaustion after Trump's first term and by the extraordinary conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Biden’s inability to restore public faith in Washington, coupled with economic frustration and cultural polarization, set the stage for the very backlash he hoped to avert. His declining popularity – remarkable even by modern standards – suggested that the deeper currents of resentment and mistrust in American life had not receded at all. In the end, the return of Trump to national prominence was less a surprise than a continuation of the same storyline.
On the American left, the anti-establishment impulse has also found durable expression. Sanders remains its most recognizable face, a figure whose calls for universal health care and redistributive justice have permanently shifted the Democratic agenda. U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, better known as AOC, injected that movement with new charisma and cultural fluency, redefining what progressive politics can sound like in the social-media era. Over time, once-taboo labels such as “socialist” have lost much of their sting. Candidates who openly identify with them now win elections in major cities, and public figures can criticize Israel’s policies without immediate political exile, something nearly unthinkable in mainstream American discourse just a decade ago.
There are, broadly speaking, two forces driving this anti-establishment wave. The first is what might be called post-empire blues: The quiet realization that the 1990s, America’s unipolar heyday, are long gone. The confidence of that decade – the belief that liberal capitalism and U.S. global leadership were permanent fixtures – has given way to fatigue and uncertainty. The second is generational. Younger Americans have begun to accept a difficult truth: Their lives will not be more prosperous than those of their parents or grandparents. They are the first generation in recent memory facing downward mobility as the norm rather than the exception. Housing, education and health care costs have risen beyond reach, while job security and wages stagnate. In this context, promises of free transit or debt relief are not radical fantasies but pragmatic responses to an economy that no longer rewards effort as it once did.
Viewed through that lens, Mamdani’s victory is not a fluke of local politics but part of a broader transformation. The American electorate is re-imagining who should lead, what fairness looks like, and how much the old rules still apply. Anti-establishment sentiment has ceased to be a temporary protest; it has become a governing force. Whether it leads to renewal or further fragmentation remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the center no longer holds, and New York – true to its reputation – has merely been the first to say it out loud.
