There is an irony in Zohran Mamdani’s story that is almost impossible to ignore.
It begins not in New York City, but thousands of miles away in Uganda.
In 1972, dictator Idi Amin ordered tens of thousands of Asians to leave the country. They were given roughly 90 days to pack what they could carry and go. Businesses were seized. Homes were lost. Families that had spent generations building lives in Uganda suddenly discovered that the government had decided they were no longer welcome.
Among those forced out was the family of Mahmood Mamdani — Zohran Mamdani’s father.
Think about that for a moment.
A government looked at a group of people, decided they were too prosperous, too privileged and too closely associated with an unjust economic system, and turned resentment into public policy.
It didn’t begin with confiscation.
It began with a story.
There were people who had too much.
There were people who had too little.
And government, under Amin, would supposedly correct the injustice.
The Asian community became a convenient villain. Their businesses, property and relative economic success were portrayed not simply as individual achievement, but as evidence of exploitation.
Once we stop seeing people as individuals and start seeing them primarily as members of competing classes, races and economic groups, some very ugly things can suddenly be described as “justice.”
That is the lesson from Uganda worth remembering.
And it is why I find Zohran Mamdani’s political rise so fascinating.
No, Mamdani is not Idi Amin. Saying so would be historically absurd and intellectually lazy. Mamdani is an elected democratic socialist operating within the American political system. Amin was a murderous dictator responsible for repression, expulsion and mass killing.
But history doesn’t have to repeat itself exactly to teach us something.
Sometimes it rhymes.
Today, we once again hear a political vocabulary increasingly built around dividing people into categories.
Landlords and tenants.
Owners and workers.
The wealthy and everyone else.
The privileged and the oppressed.
Those who supposedly have too much and those government believes deserve more.
The rhetoric is softer. The institutions are democratic. The circumstances are completely different.
But the temptation behind it is ancient: find somebody to blame for somebody else’s hardship.
Mamdani’s agenda promises government intervention on a remarkable scale — rent freezes, government-run grocery stores, free buses, expanded social programs and substantially higher taxes on corporations and wealthy New Yorkers.
Each proposal can and should be debated on its own merits.
But there is a larger philosophical question underneath all of them:
When did success become something government should apologize for?
There is nothing inherently immoral about wealth. There is nothing inherently virtuous about poverty. A landlord isn’t automatically a villain because he owns an apartment building, any more than a tenant is automatically irresponsible because she struggles to pay the rent.
Human beings are more complicated than political categories.
That used to be obvious.
Increasingly, it isn’t.
And perhaps that is the strangest part of the Mamdani story.
His own family’s history contains a powerful warning about what can happen when political leaders convince people that their economic problems are primarily the fault of another group.
Uganda’s Asian population didn’t create all of Uganda’s problems.
But Amin told people they did.
Their property was redistributed.
Their businesses were taken.
The supposed exploiters were expelled.
And Uganda didn’t become prosperous.
Its economy collapsed.
Because redistribution can divide wealth.
It cannot magically create it.
Government can confiscate a grocery store. It cannot confiscate the knowledge, discipline, risk-taking and entrepreneurship required to operate one successfully.
Government can freeze a rent. It cannot order someone to build another apartment building.
Government can raise taxes on people it believes have “too much.” It cannot order those people to remain in New York.
That last point should concern every New Yorker.
We are already living in one of the highest-taxed states in America. Businesses can move. Capital can move. Families can move.
And eventually they do.
The tragedy is that the people who suffer most from bad economic policy are rarely the wealthy people politicians promise to punish.
The wealthy have options.
Working families often don’t.
There is another lesson from Uganda that deserves remembering.
When politicians tell you society would be better if only somebody else had less, be careful.
When they tell you prosperity is suspicious, be careful.
When they tell you your neighbor’s success explains your hardship, be very careful.
Because free societies depend upon something much more difficult than resentment.
They depend upon opportunity.
The goal shouldn’t be to make successful people poorer.
It should be to make it possible for more people to become successful.
Build more housing.
Encourage businesses to open.
Make it easier to hire people.
Create better schools.
Make government smaller, smarter and more accountable.
Give people ladders to climb instead of arguing about who should be pulled down a rung.
Zohran Mamdani’s family history should make him uniquely sensitive to that distinction.
His family experienced what happens when government turns economic grievance into a political identity and decides that one group must surrender something so another group can prosper.
That doesn’t mean New York is becoming Uganda.
It means Uganda left us a warning.
History usually does.
The question is whether we’re willing to listen before we convince ourselves that this time the same old ideas will somehow produce a different result.
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