stiff bromance<\/a> he has going on with President Donald Trump, but the model held up by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a staunch supporter of the New Deal.<\/p>\n\u201cTheir relationship, also, is a North Star for what it can look like to have a federal and municipal relationship of partnership,\u201d Mamdani said, before suggesting he\u2019s not just looking for any Democrat in the White House. \u201cIn thinking about what comes after this federal administration, it is also a vision and ambition that is more than just not Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interview with PBS\u2019s Alexander Heffner took place at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island, and so reflected heavily on the four-term president\u2019s legacy. Heffner also questioned Mamdani about his political identity, and the fact that he is often called a communist despite being a democratic socialist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pressed to define communism, Mamdani didn\u2019t quite deliver. \u201cCommunism goes far beyond this kind of a belief,\u201d he said after defining democratic socialism. \u201cCommunism is also a theory of our politics that extends way beyond the notion of the question of how to deliver on a dignified life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mamdani also declined to posit whether Roosevelt, who was adamant in his time that he wasn\u2019t a socialist, would define himself as a democratic socialist if he were alive today. \u201cRegardless of how he would describe himself, he would consider what we are fighting for to be in alignment with that same movement,\u201d Mamdani said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She\u2019s got a three-letter moniker and the right politics. Could AOC be Zohran Mamdani\u2019s FDR? The New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[878,12246,7511,15269,9,24,55,54,56,82],"class_list":["post-356990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-alexandria-ocasio-cortez","tag-communism","tag-democratic-socialism","tag-franklin-d-roosevelt","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}