Zohran Mamdani is routinely labeled a “socialist” or an “Islamist sympathizer.” The right brands him a radical. The establishment (whatever that vague term encompasses) casts him as a provocateur, a liar who eats with his hands for clout. But these tags overlook the deeper ideological current animating his worldview. Mamdani, in truth, draws from a very distinct left-wing tradition: Third Worldism, a postcolonial moral project born in the mid-20th century that recasts politics as a global uprising against Western hegemony.
I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan Berber, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists—a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.
Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third World liberation on American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.
