Leaving aside usual observations that he has Obama-like charm and intelligence combined with radical left politics, I’m fascinating by Mamdani’s account of the Department of Community Safety here:
This is how the Vera Institute describe the proposal, which seems in effect like a radical scaling up of something which is already taking place to varying degrees across the US:
According to Mamdani, the department of community safety would “fill the gaps” of safety-related programs and services: “Its mission will be to prevent violence before it happens by taking a public health approach to safety.” It has become increasingly obvious that traditional first responders like police cannot be expected to address every unmet safety need. Instead of using arrests and incarceration as a one-size-fits-all public safety tool, a department of community safety would house and invest in a range of resources like crisis response services, restorative justice programs, counseling, peer support, violence interruption, and others to bring what’s needed to people and neighborhoods in crisis.
https://www.vera.org/news-spotlights/what-a-department-of-community-safety-could-look-like
What’s striking about his account in the discussion above is how skilfully it adopts the language of ‘safety’ to describe a civic and social mission. It’s directly addressing the fabric of urban experience in a way that speaks to real sources of anxiety and harm, but insists on trying to repair the problem rather than simply displace and/or punish it.
I wonder if this is what left politics needs to look like under present conditions. It suggests a triangulation of the left in which the language of the right is adopted with the claim that we are really doing something about him. It’s something Andy Burnham has played with in the UK, arguing the problem with the ‘levelling up agenda’ wasn’t the idea itself but that the Tories neither really meant it nor were capable of delivering it.
If you combine this left triangulation with an orientation towards repair, committing directly and straight forwardly to addressing the concrete problems which a majority of people face every day. You choose the problems where there is broad agreement about the nature of the problem, articulating practical solutions to it using a vocabulary with the potential to cut across the political spectrum. If, as seems to be the case with Mamdani, this orientation and the solutions has a significant foundation in civil society and local communities, this soft-left pragmatism comes to appear quite radical in its implications even as it sounds like common sense.
Mark Carrigan 