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Mamdani and the new challenge for nation states
The metropolis and the heartland provoke each other into extremes, as the New York mayoral race shows.
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Democrat Zohran Mamdani during a press conference in City Hall Park in New York on Nov 3.
PHOTO: VINCENT ALBAN/NYTIMES
Janan Ganesh
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Which aspect of late 20th-century life is hardest to explain to a young person? That cars used to rust? That we experienced such a thing as boredom? Or that New York had a conservative mayor?
True, Mr Rudy Giuliani handed over to another Republican in Mr Michael Bloomberg this side of 2000, but the second man had been and would be again a Democrat. No thoroughgoing right-winger has run the place for a generation, and Mr Zohran Mamdani extends that trend
