The Nation examines how Mamdani’s St. Patrick’s Day stumble reveals a broader philosophy of solidarity politics
A Philosophy Built on Parallel Histories
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani quoted James Connolly at the Irish-American Labor Coalition luncheon on March 13, he was doing what he does most naturally: finding the thread that connects one community’s liberation history to another’s. The trouble, as The Nation’s D.D. Guttenplan observed in a sharp analysis published in late March, is that following that thread all the way requires more than rhetorical fluency. It requires knowing where the thread leads, and Mamdani, when asked directly whether he supported Irish unification, demonstrated that he had not yet traveled that portion of the road. The episode was, Guttenplan argued, not entirely the mayor’s fault. But it was also a trap he should have seen coming, particularly for a politician who has made anti-colonial solidarity the organizing principle of his global politics.
Connolly as a Symbol and a Commitment
James Connolly is one of the foundational figures of both Irish republicanism and international socialism. He organized for the Industrial Workers of the World in New York City, edited the socialist newspaper The Harp in lower Manhattan, and returned to Ireland to help lead the 1916 Easter Rising, where he was captured, wounded, and executed by British colonial authorities strapped to a chair because he could not stand. For the Irish-American labor movement, Connolly is not a historical footnote; he is an ancestor. For the democratic socialist tradition that Mamdani inhabits, he represents the synthesis of national liberation and class politics that the left has always aspired to achieve. Mamdani’s invocation of Connolly at the Irish labor luncheon was read by Sinn Féin figures in the room as a statement of alignment. His subsequent hedging on unity read as a failure to honor that alignment.
The Self-Determination Framework
By St. Patrick’s Day, Mamdani had arrived at the formulation that served him better: as someone who believes deeply in the principle of self-determination, I think that should also be extended to the Irish. It is the language of his father’s work. Mahmood Mamdani, the distinguished political theorist, has spent his career developing a framework of citizenship and agency that challenges both settler colonialism and the ethnic politics that tends to emerge as its mirror image. His 2022 study Neither Settler Nor Native, which The Nation cited as relevant to how Mamdani navigates these questions, offers a vision of belonging not rooted in ethnicity but in civic participation and democratic practice. The son’s politics are shaped by the father’s scholarship in ways that are sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit.
The Risk of Ethnic Parade Politics
Guttenplan’s analysis in The Nation pointed to a structural tension at the heart of Mamdani’s governing approach. He ran as a candidate who would probably skip many ethnic parades, recognizing that the parade season calculus forces mayors into performances of ethnic solidarity that can generate as much resentment as goodwill. He has already made exceptions for the Irish and Chinese New Year, and is expected to face the Israel Day Parade question in May. Each exception sets a precedent. Each absence generates a grievance. The Nation’s analysis noted that Israel and Palestine are not the only foreign policy minefields for a mayor who has made international solidarity central to his political identity. Mamdani’s handling of the Irish unification question suggests he is still developing the political toolkit needed to navigate a city where every community has its own international grievance and its own test for whether the mayor is truly with them.
What It Means for the Broader Coalition
The Irish episode is, in the end, a relatively minor stumble that Mamdani recovered from with reasonable effectiveness. What makes it worth examining closely is what it reveals about the challenge of building a governing coalition around the principle of universal anti-colonial solidarity in a city as ethnically complex as New York. Solidarity, as Connolly’s own life demonstrated, is easy to proclaim and hard to sustain when the specific demands of specific communities require specific commitments. Mamdani’s St. Patrick’s Day video, which invoked Irish history as a prologue to Palestinian solidarity, was widely praised. His failure to answer the unity question directly was widely mocked. The difference between the two is the difference between eloquence and commitment. The The Nation has been among the most consistent and sophisticated observers of Mamdani’s mayoralty from the perspective of the democratic socialist left. The Jacobin has covered the broader question of what democratic socialist governance looks like in practice in the current American political environment. Whether Mamdani can convert his philosophy of parallel liberation histories into a durable governing coalition that holds together through the budget fights, the police reform debates, and the ethnic parade gauntlets of his first term will determine whether this mayoralty becomes a model or a cautionary tale.
