The Zohran Moment

What we can learn about him and his movement from his father's books

I'm feeling the deep significance and pathos of the “Zohran moment.” I want to share some reflections on this, along with my hopes and fears about it in a few posts here. If we were to envision an archetypal opponent of the current Trump regime, we couldn't do much better than 33-year-old, charismatic Zohran Mamdani, who lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment in Queens with his lovely wife, illustrator and animator Rama Duwaji. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, originally from Uganda, was a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Professor Mamdani has written many books on colonialism and genocide.

Zohran's mother, Mira Nair, is a very successful film director and producer, best known for Mississipi Masala, on the Indian diaspora in the U.S., and Salaam Bombay!, on the daily lives of children living in the slums of Bombay. Zohran, in other words, comes from a literate, multicultural, Leftist background that spans continents and colonial histories — his parents, in their different ways, have sought to illuminate colonialist histories and to humanize the struggles of the poor and oppressed.

Over the last few days, I have been reviewing some of Mahmood Mamdani's books to get a sense of Zohran's intellectual background and pedigree (strangely enough, I did the same with Netanyahu's father, who was a historian focused on Israeli history, months ago). The books include Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, and Citizen and Subject: Decentralized Despotism and the Legacy of Late Colonialism.

I'm finding these books excellent, helpful, and hopeful in some ways. They also hold crucial lessons for our current — extremely dangerous — situation in the U.S. I hope you will follow along with me as I do my best to unpack what seems essential to me here. There are things we must understand as we undertake the difficult task of trying to salvage the U.S. from its current self-destructive path, if that is even possible.

In Neither Settler nor Native, Mamdani argues that the modern nation-state was built not on tolerance and inclusion, as the myth of liberalism would have us believe, but on exclusion and violence. This happened through the construction, “othering,” or demonization of political minorities. He traces the origin of the modern state to 1492, when Spain expelled Jews and Muslims and launched overseas colonization. The Westphalian peace of 1648, which institutionalized religious toleration within Europe, was a later development in the history of the nation-state.

Mamdani contends that modern colonialism and the nation-state were born together, each defining itself by the exclusion of internal or external “others.” Looking at the examples of the United States, Nazi Germany, South Africa, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine, he shows how national governments and colonialist powers used “indirect rule” to create fragmented societies. Political identity was intentionally tied to ethnic or tribal categorization. This created the potential for mass violence, ethnic cleansing, and brutal civil wars.

In the colonial period, European conquerors abandoned the goal of assimilating colonized peoples. Instead, they embraced “indirect rule,” which means they preserved, politicized, and even amplified or constructed local identities as a way to divide and control subject populations. This strategy created permanent minorities: It turned newly defined ethnic or tribal groups into political units with distinct legal systems and territorial homelands.

Colonial modernity created permanent political identities—“native” and “settler,” “minority” and “majority”—through legal fictions and administrative divisions. These identities were designed to control populations and prevent unified resistance. The colonized were not just dominated physically but restructured epistemically—taught to see themselves through the lens of the colonizer's logic.

When former colonies won independence, their new leaders inherited the imposed colonialist structures. Unfortunately, instead of dismantling them, they often intensified them by embracing the European model of nation-building via cultural homogenization of the majority and demonization of minorities. This led to new forms of exclusion, internal colonization, and, in extreme cases, mass violence.

In When Victims Become Killers, Mamdani explores this thesis by analyzing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 to a million Tutsis were killed in a few short months. I never realized before reading this was that there were no intrinsic ethnic, genetic, cultural, linguistic, or religious differences between the Hutu and the Tutsis. They spoke the same language (Kinyarwanda), practiced the same religion (mostly Catholicism by the 20th century), lived in the same communities, and shared cultural norms. The distinction between them was socio-economic, not ethnic nor racial in the strict sense (a bit like Blue State liberals and Red State conservatives in the U.S.).

Over centuries, Tutsi elites tended to be wealthier cattle herders, while Hutus were more often subsistence farmers. But this was fluid: a wealthy Hutu could rise to be considered Tutsi, and vice versa. There were no physical boundaries, separate territories, nor ritual taboos dividing them.

The colonialists froze this fluidic sitution — a bit like a class system —into a fixed, essentialized “ethnic” difference. This began under German occupation, but intensified under Belgian rule. The Belgians forced Rwandans to declare their allegiance on identity cards, and they supported this by promoting a racialized form of pseudoscience. The colonizers viewed Tutsis as more “European-looking.” They made them into the local elite, enforcing rule over the Hutu majority. In the decades after Rwandan independence in 1962, these categories hardened into political identities with deep resentments and fears attached to them, eventually unleashing a horrific genocide.

I believe we must acknowledge the serious, alarming parallels between the events leading up to the Rwandan genocide and what we see happening in the U.S. right now. If this sounds alarmist, it is because I believe we need to be alarmed.

In their book Unhumans, the White Christian nationalists Joshua Lisec and Jack Posobiec write that Communists, Leftists, and liberal Democrats are not fully human and do not need to be treated like full human beings. They propose that the U.S. needs a dictator like Franco and Pinochet, going so far as to praise Pinochet's helicopter killings, when the Chilean dictator threw political opponents out of helicopters. Posobiec has three million followers on Twitter and accompanied JD Vance to Munich for his NATO speech.

Vance blurbed Unhumans, calling it the right plan for the future of America: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

During his campaign, Trump borrowed directly from Hitler's Mein Kaumpf when he repeatedly asserted that undocumented immigrants in the US are “poisoning the blood” of America. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution found that 34% of Americans agreed with the statement. There have been major demographic shifts in the U.S, since the early 60s, when the vast majority of Americans identified as white (although the census didn't separate out Hispanic identity at that time). As of mid‑2023, non‑Hispanic white Americans represented about 58% of the U.S. population, meaning that non‑white Americans made up more than 40%, a share that continues to grow. It is estimated that, by 2040, more than half of the U.S. population will be non-white.

Obviously, one of the main factors in Trump's success has been the anxiety of the White population over losing its majority status, expressed in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and so on. This is why the Christian Right are so enamored of Israel: It provides the template for a religious ethno-state able to brutally repress its native population, which is what they seek to accomplish here.

The techno-fascist Balaji Srinivasan — collaborator with Andreessen Horowitz, author of The Network State — has proposed a future where political "tribes," such as the "Red" and "Blue" tribes, will need identity cards to pass through each other's neighborhoods or territories:

“What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You’re a fellow Gray.”

The Grays’ shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman’s banquets” to win them over.

This is similar to the imposed divisions, created by previous colonialist orders, which leads to essentializing differences between people. Based on historical precedent, this sets the conditions for regimes of incarceration, punishment or even extermination.

What is obviously the case in the U.S. is that Trumpism has revealed the dark underbelly of America, the mass psychology — or collective psychosis — of warfare, control, and domination that was intrinsic to the American project and the American character from the nation's origin. For the last fifty years, liberals, at least, maintained the comforting illusion that we had overcome this darkness to a significant degree, collectively choosing our destiny here as a pluralistic, multicultural and open society. Trumpism has made the invisible visible, once again.

As Mamdani explores, the U.S. was always a project of “settler colonialism,” with the national identity defined by the genocide and resettlement of the native people and the brutal subjugation of African slaves. In Neither Settler nor Native, he writes: “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement. The conflation of settlers and immigrants is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel. Through this historical error, settlers wrongly justify their claims to the land and their positions in society on the basis of a rule of law.”

Next time, I am going to delve deeper into Mandani’s work, including his concept of the “decolonization of the political” as an approach to building a humane future, beyond nationalist fervors. I also want to explore how digital technology — particularly Artificial Intelligence — is imposing new forms of colonialism, including data colonialism but, particularly, the colonization of the interior, of human attention and psychology, to an unprecedented degree. It is only by understanding where we are, now, in the global fight for human liberation that we have any chance of moving forward.