Zohran Mamdani wants to fight inequality but can those who benefit from a system really bring it down?

Many Indians, even those who can’t name their chief ministers, who believe in democracy when it’s posh, have been very excited, as though it is their lives that are about to improve. Across the world, Mamdani has given hope to people who feared the end of liberal America, though New York City’s mayor-elect himself cannot run for president because he is not a ‘natural-born citizen.’ He was born in Uganda, not the US.

He is also the darling of a kind of people who are in the top 1% but write essays against inequality. Why is there derision in that line even though I was not aiming for that? Can’t a beneficiary of inequality abhor inequality? Can’t a beneficiary of caste abhor caste? Can’t a man who is paid more than women for doing the same job be a feminist? Can’t Mamdani, born to privilege, have contempt for it? I don’t think so.

How do good things happen? One way is when millionaires go to war against billionaires. When I say ‘millionaires’ and ‘billionaires,’ I am being metaphorical and not statistical. I mean people who are a bit rich and those who are extremely rich.

Mamdani has declared very modest assets, estimated at around $200,000. However, I am not going to waste this column persuading you he is privileged. He himself has not denied it. “I never had to want for something, and yet I knew that was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers.”

Millionaires, too, have their tormentors. When they want to take them on, they usually do it through social justice for the poor. Mamdani’s achievement is in restraining himself to the practical aspects of social justice, even though he probably believes in that fable—equality.

I like a lot of what he has said during the campaign. He wants New York to assure everyone a reasonable quality of life, where everyone can afford at least a reasonable house, all children between the ages of 6 weeks and 5 years are cared for free by the state when their parents are busy, and bus rides are free for all. He wishes to treat everyone in New York as though they are middle-class in an affluent nation. India generally considers everyone under its care poor, unless they are at an airport.

It won’t be easy for Mamdani to realize his plans. He has to find the money for them in a very expensive country that already taxes its rich and corporations well. Also, he may not have the power to see some of his promises through. Even so, he has set New York on a certain path. He may even think that social justice is a step towards equality.

There is a difference between social justice and equality. Let us consider what Mamdani campaigned for as a practical definition of social justice. No one stands to gain from the absence of social justice. No one gains from the lack of dignity of the unlucky, of people having to live in squalor and the poor being unable to afford public buses. Equality is a very different thing, even though it is casually inserted in social justice.

Inequality has clear beneficiaries. As in, it is very useful for some to have an unfair advantage over a vast population. Every rung of society can monopolize some resource. Children in every rung get an immense head-start over those below them. Mamdani himself is a beneficiary of inequality. An Indian family taking legal citizenship of the US itself points to a certain privilege, if you have ever seen what even a tourist visa for America requires you to fill.

Millionaires could be more harmful to the middle-class than billionaires. My definition of ‘middle-class’ is anyone who has to work to sustain the present standard of life. Millionaires compete with the middle class across the whole spectrum—college admissions, sports, public office, startups. Here they have an enormous head-start. Billionaires are rarely seen by the rest; they usually circulate and compete in a different world, with very few overlaps with the middle class.

So, millionaires are bigger beneficiaries of inequality than billionaires. Yet, it is convenient for millionaires to frame billionaires as enemies of the people.

The beneficiaries of a system cannot end it. The beneficiaries of inequality cannot end it because they are the very products of that system. Can’t a good guy like Mamdani fight against privilege? If you went to Mamdani and asked, “Will you destroy the system that favours someone like you?” he would probably say “In the blink of an eye” or something cinematic. And probably even mean it.

But then even a true altruist may unconsciously favour the system. For instance, he would not destroy higher education; he would not destroy the intellectual clubs where people who are a lot like him guard the gates. Equality lowers the quality of life of the gentry. In guarding inequality, the upper class act as a collective organism.

Also, equality is not as pretty as it looks when intellectuals speak of it. Equality is nothing like social justice. Equality is your children having to go abroad because they have no chance of admission to a good college here; equality is a new assertive class of people who have replaced you in places that used to be home. You still favour equality, I know. Everyone does. Yet, mysteriously, the world is becoming more unequal.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’