Is Zohran Mamdani the next Norman Mailer?

Mamdani's candidacy for New York City mayor is similar to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's similar attempt in 1969.

Defining “Favorite” in a post-Mamdani America

Zohran Mamdani has given me a chance to talk about my favorite book.

If the phrase “favorite” refers to something that a person returns to over and over again, then my favorite color is green; my favorite song is “Axel F” by Harold Faltermeyer; my favorite food is a Subway footlong tuna sandwich on Italian bread with American cheese, red onions and pickles; my favorite movie is “The Day After Tomorrow”; and my favorite book is “Managing Mailer,” who ran for New York City mayor in 1969 on a “hip left-right coalition” he vowed would lead the municipality to secede from New York State.

I first read this book because, despite growing up in Pennsylvania, my family history has deep roots in New York City. I’ve repeatedly returned to it because it is as much fun as I’ve ever had reading about politics.

Not just New York politics, or American politics, or modern politics. From ancient to contemporary, all of which I’ve casually read for fun at various points, the novella-length “Managing Mailer” is my all-time favorite read.

“Managing Mailer” mines a Mamdani-an morass

Written by high school dropout, former longshoreman and eventual Village Voice journalist Joe Flaherty, “Managing Mailer” chronicles the exploits of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead,” “Armies of the Night,” “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” “The Executioner’s Song”) as he ran for mayor of New York City in 1969. Joined by an equally erudite running mate — perennial Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who sought the presidency of the New York City Council on Mailer’s ticket — Mailer offered bold new ideas. To present these ideas, he had an innovative approach to campaigning, appearing before all comers regardless of their traditional voting preferences and speaking his unvarnished mind (often drunkenly). Mailer comfortably mixed with celebrities, socialites and power brokers, but he was most at ease with blue collar workers, random street addicts and Breslin’s organized criminal pals. Indeed, Flaherty is only there because Mailer hired the political neophyte to be his campaign manager.

This unorthodox campaign didn’t succeed electorally; Mailer only won 5 percent of the Democratic primary vote, which ultimately went to conservative New York City Comptroller Mario Procaccino. Procaccino, in turn, lost to the incumbent, the liberal Mayor John Lindsay, who ran as an independent against both Procaccino and the equally conservative Republican nominee, State Senator John Marchi.

Yet despite its failures, as vividly recalled by Flaherty the Mailer-Breslin crusade was nothing if not extremely entertaining.

For both of these reasons, Mailer’s 1969 mayoral campaign reminds me of the recent effort made by the democratic socialist Mamdani, a three-term state senator who upset former governor Andrew Cuomo by winning the Democrats’ 2025 mayoral nomination. Even though Mamdani is an unabashed leftist and by contrast Mailer hoped to forge the aforementioned “hip left-right coalition,” both men commanded attention through their proposed policies and their colorful personalities.

The key difference is that, unlike Mailer, Mamdani was able to get around the media’s universal dismissal of his candidacy by using social media. Mailer didn’t have that luxury. (He had a much better luxury; after losing his mayoral campaign, he like Breslin returned to decades of an acclaimed and lucrative literary career.)

Multiple Messages from Mailer to Mamdani

It’s a shame, because the history of New York (city and state alike) would be radically different if Mailer had prevailed. Foremost on his agenda, he wanted New York City to secede from New York State and become an autonomous city-state analogous to Washington, D.C. After achieving that, Mailer proposed that each neighborhood be allowed to control its own destiny to a degree never conferred to any locale within any American state, city or city-state. Despite abandoning the slogan “Power to the Neighborhoods,” those four words captured the gist of Mailer’s proposed “left-right coalition.” He intended to appeal to all political sides by granting each community the ability to govern itself as its own residents wished.

“We run on the notion, finally, that politics is philosophy,” Mailer explained to reporters at the left-leaning Time-Life organization at the time. Adding “one cannot begin to solve the problems of a city without engaging in philosophical arguments with oneself and with one’s neighbor,” Mailer concluded that “the powerful notion in it, which I think is appealing to all people in degrees, is that if each group of people, each interest, each force in this city can begin to think in terms of neighborhoods, then it can begin to think in terms of discovering whether its own ideas and one’s own ideas have validity, have savor, give energy to others, give energy to oneself — or don’t.”

If hippies in their own neighborhood decided to legalize LSD and have free love on public sidewalks, so be it. If conservatives wanted to require school prayer and have a cop on every corner, likewise.

Earlier in the campaign, at the conservative-leaning John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Mailer told a group of cops-in-training that “everybody in this city has more ideas than they can practically keep in their heads. And there’s no place for these ideas to go, because the entire legislative thicket of this city, of this city charter, impedes every honest man, or in fact every dishonest man, from making any kind of quick or interesting move. So neither the cops nor the crooks have a chance to get any better.”

If that sounds like Mailer arguing societies flourish when criminals thrive… yes, that’s exactly what he told this group of police officers. It was the cherry on top of an agenda far more radical, from top to bottom, than anything proposed by Mamdani today.

“My idea, parenthetically, is that a good society doesn’t depend upon having a great police force or having a great criminal element in society, which certain revolutionaries would believe, you guys would say, but rather that a good society depends upon the cops and the crooks getting better,” Mailer proclaimed. “Think about it. It’s an unusual notion, but the idea behind it is if they both get better, everybody is doing more every day, which means you’ve got a richer society in terms of the real life that people are living.”

Mailer wasn’t always this articulate. Plying these ideas to assembled undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence College, Mailer’s “theory of power to the neighborhoods, a turf for every lifestyle” fell flat after he referred to one of the outspokenly feminist students as “sugar.” On another occasion, while clearly drunk and rambling during a speech at the hip Village Gate club in Greenwich Village, Mailer ribbed his fellow Jews so fiercely that Breslin complained he was running “with Ezra Pound,” the infamously anti-Semitic poet. In retrospect, Mailer’s anti-Semitism seemed mostly in jest; his homophobia, by contrast, seemed genuine, and often rankles the modern ear.

Then again, Mailer reserves his worst for his own tribe. I doubt even the most virulent Mamdani hater will find any bigoted statements from him as vicious as those coming from Mailer, himself Jewish, when he said that “the Jews are an incredible people at their best. At their worst they are swine. Like every WASP I ever met at their worst. They are awful. All people are awful at their worst. Some are worse than others.”

When you compare Mailer to Mamdani, the former seems like a veritable gaffe machine, and the latter like a saint.

Yet the genius in Mailer’s candidacy outshone the flaws. In addition to his ideas about seceding and giving power to the neighborhoods, Mailer’s campaign offered detailed proposals on issues ranging from reducing air pollution (including strict vehicle emission standards and, drastically, a monthly “Sweet Sunday” in which use of electronics and cars would be severely curtailed) to improving public transit (the Harvard-educated engineer designed new Manhattan monorail plans that experts unanimously agreed would decimate traffic gridlock) to reducing homelessness (Mailer wanted to reallocate funds used to demolish old buildings and spend it instead on renovation-focused Neighborhood Housing Banks). Mailer’s concepts were so inspired that he won support from ideologically diverse thinkers like libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who agreed with Mailer that “smashing the urban government apparatus and fragmenting it into a myriad of constituent fragments’ offered the only answer to the ills plaguing American cities,” and left-wing journalist Theodore H. White, who called Mailer’s campaign “one of the most serious campaigns run in the United States in the last five years… [H]is campaign was considered and thoughtful, the beginning of an attempt to apply ideas to a political situation.”

Plus Mailer had the great redeeming trait of self-awareness, especially about his own shortcomings. As he tongue-in-cheek wrote in a jacket blurb for Flaherty’s book (which is often scathingly critical of its subject), “Flaherty treats a dozen delicate egos like golf balls and then proceeds to see how far he can whap them. I wouldn’t mind if I could ban this book (since I am one of those egos) but since I can’t, I may as well leap on the bandwagon.”

Unlike Mailer — who famously bragged he supported anti-fluoridation for right-wing neighborhoods that wanted it and “Free Huey Newton” parades for left-wing neighborhoods that wanted that (or in his words, his platform ranged from “free Huey Newton to end fluoridation")— Mamdani is running a conventional left-wing campaign. He supports community-owned grocery stores in each of New York’s five boroughs, congestion pricing to reduce both transportation fares and air pollution, a rent freeze, building 200,000 affordable new homes, investing in green technology to fight climate change and providing free child care for youths up to the age of five. Although Mamdani is accused of wanting to defund the police (he does not) and hating Jews (he does not, although he does criticize Israel, which I’ve argued is not inherently anti-Semitic), these are not the policies that truly upset his most ferocious detractors.

Greed: The Problem

They are upset because of their greed. They are alarmed by Mamdani’s plan to raise the corporate tax rate to 11.5 percent. This will create an additional $5 billion in revenue, which will fund Mamdani’s various projects. More ominously to these elites, Mamdani has hired left-wing advisers who will no doubt go after the wealthiest 1 percent when they need additional funding. Thus Mamdani is being opposed with a singularity of purpose conspicuously absent last year, when these same Democrats needed to stop former President Donald Trump from reclaiming power.

This same mainstream media mocked Mailer because his decentralization plans would also have taken far, far too much money from the pockets of the elites and demolished many of the city’s most powerful interest groups.

That, ultimately, is why “Managing Mailer” remains such a vital read. In terms of being fun, I return to it over and over again because of Flaherty’s engaging prose, Mailer’s and Breslin’s noble mission and the dozens of colorful personalities (or, as Mailer put it, “delicate egos”) they encounter during their quixotic, doomed campaign: ‘60s protest icons like feminist Gloria Steinem and and anti-war activist Jerry Rubin, New York City political legends Representative Charles Rangel and Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., boxer José Torres and Black Panther lawyer Flo Kennedy. Breslin in particular has many moments to shine, slowly emerging as a poignant figure filled with wisdom and empathy.

As far as relevance goes, though, “Managing Mailer” is probably more germane in 2025 than it has been at any time since Mailer’s death in 2007.

You can thank Mamdani’s campaign — which, though nowhere near as radical as Mailer’s, has gone much farther much faster in shaking up the status quo than any New York City mayoral candidacy ever — for this book’s ongoing relevance.

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Back Seat Socialism

Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.