On a humid June night in Queens, New York, Zohran Mamdani stood beside his mother and father, grinning as supporters chanted his name over and over again. He had just clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City after defeating former New York governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary—the first time a figure from the activist Left has come so close to leading America’s largest city.

For many New Yorkers, Zohran Mamdani’s victory heralded the arrival of a new political generation: unapologetically leftist, impatient with compromise, and ambitious for radical change. His policy platform reads like a catalogue of far-left fever dreams: defunding the police, freezing rents, establishing city-run grocery stores, and pushing a US$30 minimum wage.

Since the primary, Mamdani has shot ahead in the polls for the general election. A Siena Institute survey put him at 44 percent, nineteen points ahead of Andrew Cuomo and nearly doubling Eric Adams’s support. An AARP/Gotham Analytics poll found a similar pattern: Mamdani at 42 percent, Cuomo at 23, with Curtis Sliwa at 17 and Adams sinking into single digits.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mamdani’s rise is the long shadow of his father’s intellectual project. Mahmood Mamdani is a world-famous antinationalist academic at Columbia University, who argues that every sovereign country is built on exclusion and sustained by domination and violence. He has called for a political future in which every nation state including the United States would be “deconstructed.”

Nationalism is the dominant political form of the modern world. Nation states set the rules for citizenship, command armies, print money, and provide the legal frameworks within which our lives unfold. Yet this has not always been the case, and there is no guarantee that it will always remain so. For that reason alone, it is worth engaging seriously with the case against nationalism—a case that has been pressed by both the Right and the Left.

Mamdani’s argument is that the great tragedies of the twentieth century were not excesses but the logical outcomes of nationalism itself. The Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Partition of India, the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks in the 1990s, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—all can be read, he suggests, as moments when the logic of nationhood reached its cruel conclusion: interethnic conflict, persecution, and mass killing.

Even in quieter times, nation-states are in the business of policing identity. Citizens, immigrants, and travellers are classified and stratified; each is assigned different rights, obligations, and degrees of belonging. To Mamdani, this points to a deeper structural flaw. The very form of the nation-state creates insiders and outsiders, security for some and precarity for others. In Neither Settler nor Native (2020), Mamdani argues that the nation state and the creation of minorities are inseparable. His solution is a “post-national” politics of inclusive citizenship, in which belonging would no longer rest on national identity. 

There is something to this critique. Certainly, there are forms of nationalism that have proven catastrophic. Mamdani is right to remind us that the darker chapters of the twentieth century were not isolated pathologies but emerged from movements that mobilised the language of nationhood.

As a humanist, I find it unsettling that the accident of birth so profoundly determines one’s life chances: the passport you hold can mean the difference between freedom and constraint, prosperity and poverty, dignity and despair. It can take what should be universal—the right to live, work, and flourish—and repackage it as a privilege reserved for one group and denied to another.

But it is quite a leap from saying that nationalism can become violent to claiming that violence is its inevitable destiny. History supplies plenty of counterexamples. The vast majority of nation states have not succumbed to a spiral of ethnic cleansing, and many of those that did, such as Nazi Germany, have since been rebuilt in a more open and pluralist spirit. Nationalism is not one thing, but many: some nationalisms can become toxic, but others may be unifying and constructive.

Besides, transforming a world that is currently based upon nation states into something else would be an unimaginably difficult task. Nation states are sovereign. They have armies. Many of them have nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. They have millions of employees, and large institutional frameworks—universities, hospitals, roads, bridges, etc. How do you convince them all to simultaneously self-dismantle? 

It is one thing to point to times in history when nationalism has failed; but it is quite another to conjure an alternative order in which billions of people, across hundreds of languages and cultures, would abandon the frameworks that organise their lives. Nationalism has proven remarkably durable precisely because it offers civic solidarity, and has built institutions that no other ideology has yet been able to replace.

While he is critical of nation states in general, Mahmood Mamdani’s treatment of Israel stands out. In Neither Settler nor Native, he presents Zionism as the quintessential nationalist project. The Jewish state, in his telling, is a machine for producing exclusion, turning Palestinians into a subordinated population by design.

His proposed solution follows naturally from this diagnosis. Rather than two states living side by side, he argues for something more radical: a single political entity that goes beyond nationalism altogether. In this vision, Israelis and Palestinians would live together as equal citizens in a post-national democracy. Only by dissolving nationalism itself, Mamdani insists, could justice be achieved.

But this proposal has won no favour with either side. Most Palestinians are not demanding a “post-national” arrangement but a Palestinian nation state—either alongside Israel or in its place. Their struggle is not for the abolition of nationalism but for the realisation of their own. And for Israeli Jews, the idea of giving up a Jewish state runs directly counter to the lesson drawn from centuries of statelessness and persecution: without sovereignty, Jewish survival can never be guaranteed. Mamdani’s solution, then, appeals to neither side. It replaces a bitter clash of national projects with an abstraction that has no real constituency on the ground.

The Virtue of Nationalism—An Internationalist’s Critique

The second and most impressive section of the book lays out Hazony’s principled arguments for adopting a vision of the world order characterized by an ‘order of independent nation states.’

QuilletteMatt McManus

Of course, Mamdani is not trying to act as a neutral arbiter. He casts Zionism as an illegitimate form of ethnic domination while presenting Palestinian struggles to overthrow Zionism as part of a wider struggle against settler-colonialism. This position exposes the tension at the heart of his worldview. On the one hand, he condemns nationalism as inherently violent and exclusionary. On the other, he aligns himself with a nationalist movement that is just as committed to sovereignty, territory, and borders as any other. What would become of the Jewish population in a post-national state? What would happen to them if Hamas or a similar Islamist group were to win an election, and become the new government of that state? In 2021, Hamas explicitly promised to partly expel and partly enslave the Jews after taking control of what is currently Israel. They demonstrated the sincerity of their intent on 7 October 2023, when they massacred around 1,200 and kidnapped 250 Israelis. Surely, Mamdani does not believe Israelis are going to voluntarily subject themselves to a possible repetition of the horrors of that day. 

The precarity of Jewish survival is precisely what led to the development and rise of Zionism. The Jewish national project emerged from hundreds of years of pogroms, genocide, and mistreatment. As a people without a state, Jews had been left vulnerable to the whims of others. Pogroms in Russia, the Dreyfus Affair in France, the Holocaust in Europe—each confirmed the same brutal lesson: without sovereignty, Jews would remain outsiders everywhere, reliant on the goodwill of majorities that could turn hostile overnight. Zionism was an attempt to create a political framework in which Jews would be secure not because they were tolerated, but because they were citizens of their own state. Despite all the rhetoric that gets thrown around about Israel being dismantled, it remains the remotest of possibilities because Israelis simply won’t let it happen. Not all barriers or borders are erected with the intent to oppress someone. Sometimes they are erected to prevent someone else from oppressing you.

While Mamdani’s son is likely to become the mayor of New York City—and discover, no doubt, that governing is a lot harder than campaigning on airy promises—the elder Mamdani’s dreams of a post-national utopia will remain dreams for a long time yet. The world is becoming more nationalistic not less. From India to America, China, and Russia, political leaders have been more willing to mobilise national identity as a rallying cry than at any point since the Second World War. Anti-immigration sentiment continues to rise in the West, fuelling the rise of right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. The dismantling of America is unlikely to happen any time soon, because Americans on average don’t want it to happen.

This is the real-world context of Mamdani’s call for “post-national citizenship lands.” Mamdani’s ideas are not only utopian, they go against the direction in which history is currently moving. And that direction is not likely to change—at least, not imminently. While in some sense, our collective human culture is being merged into one via the internet and other mass communication technologies, the political order that governs our lives remains firmly national. In fact, the more globalised our culture and economy have become, the more ferociously voters have reasserted the nation as the world’s main organising principle. 

Ronald Reagan once joked that if aliens invaded Earth, our national divisions would dissolve. But absent little green men, our political loyalties to the nation state are far stickier than Mahmood Mamdani realises. When people feel insecure, they do not simply abandon the nation as their frame of reference; if anything, they cling to it all the more tightly.