Robert Reich to Mamdani: Why Is It So Hard for Dems to Understand that You’re the Future of the Democratic Party?

REICH: “Well, I — you know, in terms of catching up to the world, I mean, you are, I think, the future — I have said this many times, others have as well — the future of the Democratic Party. Why is it so hard for the Democratic Party to understand that?”

MAMDANI: “(laughs) I can — I can tell you that I’ve — I’ve been very excited by what I’ve heard from Democrats across here, the five boroughs here in New York City. And I think, you know, part of the resistance to the idea that the Democratic Party could return to being a party of an affirmative vision that fights for the dignity of working people is that there have been a lot of people who’ve made a lot of money over the last few years in having a purely oppositional framework of what it is that we stand for. And there is always a benefit to continuing with the status quo. And there was always going to be a difficulty in transforming it. But I think it’s it’s ultimately very necessary because the very Democrats that inspired so many across this country to find themselves in this party are the ones whose words that we are not hearing anymore. You know, Fiorello La Guardia said you cannot preach liberty to a starving land. And it does not matter how many times we extol the virtues of democracy, if that democracy cannot deliver the material needs for working class people, then what use does it have to those people? So, our job is to say that, you know, in the same moment where we take on the authoritarian administration of Washington, D.C., we have to also take on the affordability crisis here in New York City. And that’s a crisis where we bear an immense amount of responsibility as the Democratic Party because it has been Democrats time and again who have had these positions of power, and we’ve seen two of the most prominent ones in Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo, we’ve seen their language, their policies, more and more they are akin to that of the same ones that we are fighting in Washington, D.C.”