For Mamdani, America's 'greatness' comes from its money

www.americanthinker.com

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made a speech yesterday expressing his loathing for America on its 250th anniversary, defining the greatest democracy on the planet as a string of racism problems, and worse still, only rich and powerful because of its money.

We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.

Which is exactly the sort of thing a confused and resentful third-worlder might say. That kind of talk goes on in those places and I've heard it myself.

I don't know anyone raised in America who has ever been taught that, let alone believes that. We are the land of the free, the country that rewards success and shuns an intellectual overlord class, allowing people to be left alone. The exceptionalism comes with the longevity of the idea. The prosperity comes of living the life.

But then, there's this view, coming from a third worlder who never did shed the old ways to become American like Americans. The ingrained hate was too deep:

NYC Mayor Mamdani on American exceptionalism: "We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else... The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place." pic.twitter.com/FAiPfcPvB3
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 3, 2026

After a very negative public response, Mamdani tried to backtrack a little, but only a little, and not successfully:

It's a sorry, grotesque view, the view not of America, but of a Marxist;s view of America, the philosophy of which is explicitly based on materialism -- not trust, civic engagement, industry, and communities working together, which is what Alexis De Tocqueville described and wrote of in his 1835 Democracy in America.

Mamdani then goes on to describe a typical third world oligarchy as 'America,' with an intellectual elite, such as you might find in Pakistan, or Syria, where his wife hails from, or any other place people leave:

The powerful have always known their answer. America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.
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Why would anyone move to such a place? Mamdani doesn't say -- but one can surmise based on what he said earlier -- because money.

Material money again, the materialism of Marx speaking.

And somehow, that money just floated it from nowhere, or came from the government printing press, it was never the result of industry, of taking risks, innovating, investing and saving, which are the tools of creating wealth. It's just money that sits there in a pile, waiting for a socialist to harvest.

Somehow, the money, the tech, the greatness, were just sitting there for no particular reason.

It reminds me of this passage from V.S. Naipaul's 1981 Among the Believers:An Islamic Journey about the confusion and resentment of the post-colonial nascent Islamist world.

The patron saint of the Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan was Maulana Maudoodi… At the end of his long and cantankerous life the maulana had gone against all his high principles. He had gone to a Boston hospital to look for health; he had at the very end entrusted himself to the skill and science of the civilization he had tried to shield his followers from. He had sought, as someone said to me (not all Pakistanis are fundamentalists), to reap where he had not wanted his people to sow. Of the maulana it might be said that he had gone to his well-deserved place in heaven by way of Boston; and that he went at least part of the way by Boeing.

Grok comments:

Naipaul uses this anecdote to highlight what he sees as a central contradiction in the Islamic revivalist/fundamentalist movement: its ideological rejection of Western civilization while depending on its technology, medicine, and expertise (here, modern air travel on a Boeing and advanced medical care in Boston). It fits the book’s broader theme of observing the tensions between traditional Islamic ideals and modern realities in post-revolutionary Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

It certainly fits Mamdani, too.. He sees the outer shell of America, which is its prosperity, and then arrogantly believes he knows the whole story. And worse still, like any third world intellectual, he feels quite comfortable about lecturing the rest of us about what it means to be an American.

No wonder that speech went down so poorly. Such a sorry picture and even as he thinks he knows us, we recognize his type well.

Image: X video screenshot