In his July 4 remarks marking the 250th birthday of the nation, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke on Friday about the nation as the “grand experiment in self-governance—an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium.”
He also denounced many aspects of the country and its history, including sweatshops and discriminatory laws.
“We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions,” he said. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he added, referring to Elon Musk.
“We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans,” Mamdani said. “We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands—those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone—and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”
Mamdani also decried the health insurance industry, which he said “exploits the sick,” while noting that some nurses work overtime.
“We see America in corporate landlords, for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed beneath a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work and still believes his country can do better by his family,” he said. “Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder. Yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people.”
It wasn’t clear to which bombs the mayor, who has often accused Israel of genocide, was referring. (JNS sought comment from the mayor’s office.)
“Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws,” he said. “Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent.”
The mayor also referred to “Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity” to come to the country.
“My family did not arrive by boat, although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane,” the mayor said. “Even from the air, we could make out the promise of America—the promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals.”
“There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it: American exceptionalism,” he said. “American exceptionalism, the conventional wisdom tells us, makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the West, is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here.”
The “irony,” he said, is that the those who were told that they were unexceptional are the ones who often write U.S. history.
“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong Gods, angering the wrong people,” he added. (JNS asked the mayor’s office why he referred twice to “Jewish people” rather than Jews.)
“It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land,” the mayor said. “It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had. We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.”
