Tag: “Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President””

Zohran Mamdani: Story, Theology & Social Change

Last week Zohran Mamdani strengthened his reputation as a political kingmaker. Congressional candidates he endorsed defeated more traditional opponents in New York City Democratic primaries. Mamdani’s influence is clearly growing.

Watching those results come in, I found myself thinking about a novel I published a few months ago, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever. My thoughts also turned to liberation theology and its promise to engage progressives in the current political conversation that depends so heavily on the fundamentalist religious talk that turns so many of us off.

So here I ask you to consider Mamdani’s increasing influence in terms of my novella, liberation theology and Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

The Arc of Justice Alliance

Start with Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance. Rob is the editor-in-chief of OpEdNews where I am a senior editor. He and his cohorts (myself included) are anxious to counter the Republican Project 2025 agenda that proposes to remake government by yet more privatization, deregulation, and tax breaks for the rich.

In resonse the AJA refuses to become just one more advocacy group. Instead it aspires to be an infrastructure connecting activists, researchers, educators, writers, faith leaders, organizers, and ordinary citizens into a learning ecosystem that inspires collective action.

The idea is both simple and ambitious. It asks what if organizations could learn from one another systematically? What if successful strategies could be shared, tested, refined, and remembered? What if social movements had a collective intelligence capable of accumulating wisdom rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel?

It is a compelling vision. Yet infrastructures, however necessary, seldom inspire people by themselves. Roads are essential. Libraries are essential. The internet is essential. Yet no one devotes a lifetime to roads or servers. People devote themselves to purposes and hopes.

And this is where, I think, story enters the picture.

Against All Odds

As a specifically AJA novella, Against All Odds: how Zohran Mamdani became president and changed America forever was never intended as a prediction. It was an exercise in political imagination aimed at illustrating what the AJA might accomplish.

As such, it is increasingly proving to be strangely prescient. It asked what might happen if a young Muslim democratic socialist from New York City somehow became the focal point of a movement capable of transforming American political life. More to my point here, it imagined the emergence to prominence of the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA), a network of organizations and ordinary citizens who discover their collective power and learn how to act together.

When first published, Against All Odds seemed like pure fantasy. Yet Mamdani’s continuing success suggests that the deeper questions raised by the novel may not be so far-fetched after all.

Why does this particular politician seem to inspire such enthusiasm? Why do so many people see in him possibilities that mainstream politicians cannot?

Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey suggests an answer. There Vogler draws on Joseph Campbell’s famous analysis of what Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have told remarkably similar stories. An unlikely hero leaves the familiar world, confronts powerful adversaries, overcomes fear, discovers hidden strengths, and returns bearing gifts for the community.

In Mamdani millions instinctively have recognized the pattern. They see an outsider confronting entrenched power. They see someone overcoming obstacles that conventional wisdom declared insurmountable. They see a figure who embodies possibilities larger than himself.

Moreover, In Against All Odds, the AJA becomes more than an infrastructure for Mamdani. It becomes a character in its own right. It becomes a collective hero. Mamdani serves as the visible protagonist, but the deeper story concerns ordinary people (AJA associates) discovering their capacity to act together.

Liberation Theology

That connection with ordinary people suggests something else that might enrich the presentation of AJA “philosophy.” I’m referring to liberation theology which I’ve come to describe as “critical faith theory.” More fully I describe it as “reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed committed to changing their condition by replacing the structures that have caused it.”

In our present religion-obsessed political context, liberation theology potentially supplies a powerful corrective to the prevailing Christian nationalism.

I say this not because liberation theology is Christian, but because it addresses questions that every movement for justice must eventually confront. Liberation theology asks who benefits from present systems and who pays their costs. It insists that injustice is not simply the result of bad individuals making bad choices. More often it is embedded in institutions, economic systems, political structures, and cultural assumptions.

In that sense, liberation theology complements many of the traditions AJA already embraces. Like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it insists that liberation cannot be delivered from above. Like Asset-Based Community Development, it recognizes the wisdom already present in ordinary communities. Like Four Arrows‘ Kinship Worldview and Fritjof Capra‘s Living Systems Theory, it understands human beings as fundamentally interconnected.

But liberation theology contributes something distinctive as well. It offers a method for analyzing power.

Too much contemporary political discussion focuses on personalities. Too much religious discussion focuses on individual morality. Liberation theology directs attention toward structures. It asks why poverty persists in wealthy societies. It asks why war remains profitable. It asks why systems repeatedly generate inequality, exclusion, and environmental destruction. It reminds us that social transformation requires more than good intentions.

In today’s political climate, that insight seems especially important because it counters Christian nationalism, and forms of religion that function largely as chaplaincies to wealth and power. Too often religion blesses the status quo. Too often it directs attention away from structures of domination and toward the private lives of individuals.

The Jesus who emerges from liberation theology is very different.

He announces what he calls the Kingdom of God. He proclaims good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. He blesses the hungry and warns the rich. He overturns tables in the Temple and repeatedly challenges religious and political authorities. The central question of his ministry is not, “How do I get to heaven?” It is, “What kind of world does God intend for God’s children, and how do we begin building it here and now?”

That question lies close to the heart of every authentic movement for justice.

Indeed, as I read through the philosophical foundations of AJA, I am struck by how often they converge on a common insight. Whether we approach the matter through the Kinship Worldview, Partnership Theory, the Evolved Nest, Freire’s pedagogy, Living Systems Theory, Asset-Based Community Development, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or liberation theology, we encounter the same broad conclusion. Human beings flourish not through domination but through relationship. Not through hierarchy but through participation. Not through fear but through solidarity.

Conclusion

Perhaps that is why Mamdani’s recent success (anticipated in Against All Odds) matters.

It is not simply that a politician has accumulated influence. It is that many people seem hungry for a story larger than cynicism and fear. They are searching for evidence that ordinary citizens can still shape history. They are looking for a way beyond the politics of resentment and despair.

Christopher Vogler would probably recognize what is happening. The hero’s journey is never finally about the hero. It is about the transformation of the community to which the hero returns.

If that is true, then the most important lesson of Mamdani’s story may be that the hero we have been waiting for is not a single person at all. It may be the emergence of a people who finally discover their collective power and begin using it to create a more just and compassionate world.

That ultimately is the goal of the Arc of Justice Alliance too.

How Zohran Mamdani Can Become President: (An Excerpt from My “Arc of Justice Alliance” Novella)

Most people do not read policy papers; they’d rather read stories That is not a failure of intelligence; it simply a description of how human beings learn, imagine, and change.

My novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever was written to complement the policy statements of the emerging Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA). The book is not a prediction, nor a legislative blueprint. It is a story — a civic fable — meant to explore how democratic renewal might feel, sound, and unfold if ordinary people followed the lead of politicians such as Zohran Mamdani.

The book grew out of decades of political reflection, organizing experience, and moral concern, and was developed in conversation with AI. That collaboration does not replace human judgment; it sharpens it, forcing questions of coherence, plausibility, and ethical consistency that policy language often evades.

What follows is the book’s opening chapter. It is offered here not as entertainment, but as an invitation: to introduce the book’s exploration of how power operates, how legitimacy erodes, and how moral imagination may be a prerequisite for democratic repair.

Excerpt from Against All Odds

Chapter One – The Bronx Spring

“Every revolution begins as a local rumor — until someone believes it might be true.”
— AJA Field Notes, 2025

The winter had been long in Queens. Gray salt crusted the curbs. Trains screamed overhead like mechanical prayers. And yet, beneath the cold concrete, some-thing was stirring — quiet, electric, alive.

They called it the Bronx Spring.

It began with a tenants’ strike in a decaying building off 31st Avenue — the kind of place where the rent doubled every two years while the heat failed every January. Young organizers — Somali, Bangladeshi, Dominican — went door to door with clipboards and conviction. And at the center of it all stood Zohran Mamdani, a man whose voice carried both the warmth of Queens and the cadence of Kampala, equal parts poetry and fire.

He wasn’t a mayor yet, or even thinking that far ahead. He was a state assembly-man still riding the E train to Albany twice a week, still sending midnight texts that began, “Comrades, one more thing…” But something in him — and around him — had shifted.

The city was tired of promises. And the Bronx, like the chorus of an old labor hymn, began to hum again. The night it truly began, the wind sliced through the corridors of the Queensbridge Houses.

Zohran was there, coat collar turned up, hands full of coffee and flyers. A woman named Amina opened her door just wide enough to see his face. Behind her, a child slept under a mural of the Virgin and Malcolm X.

“Another politician?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m your neighbor.”

It wasn’t a line; it was true. He lived two blocks away.

That night, fifty tenants gathered in the laundry room to write what they called The People’s Demands: rent rollbacks, energy audits, legal aid for evictions. No one expected much. Not in a city where real estate and police unions ran the show. But when Zohran spoke, he didn’t sound like a candidate. He sounded like a possibility.

“Power,” he said, “isn’t what they hold in City Hall. It’s what we hold when we stop believing we’re alone.”

Days later, things began to move. Heat returned to the buildings. Landlords called emergency meetings. A city inspector — one who’d ignored complaints for years — appeared, clipboard trembling.

Something had changed.

Zohran’s small Astoria office became a nerve center — whiteboards, coffee cups, volunteers working until dawn. They mapped block-by-block networks of resistance.

They called it Reclaim the City. But within the movement, a quieter name began to circulate — The Arc of Justice Alliance.

It meant different things to different people: a moral trajectory, a bridge to something better, a plan for what democracy might still become. Late at night, Zoran wrote in his notebook: “If we can build one just block, we can build one just city. If we can build one just city, we can build one just nation.”

Power, even moral power, never goes unnoticed. In City Hall, consultants scoffed. The Post ran a headline: “Socialist Slum Preacher.” Developers whispered to their lobbyists. And in Washington, analysts began filing quiet memos about a charismatic legislator organizing “urban solidarity experiments” in Queens.

The movement was becoming visible. And visibility, in America, is a dangerous form of faith.

Spring came late that year. The cherry trees bloomed unevenly along Roosevelt Avenue, the air thick with rain and ambition. At a rally in Bryant Park, Mamdani stood beside bus drivers, sanitation workers, and students. The crowd wasn’t large, but it was awake — eyes bright, faces lifted toward something unseen but undeniable.

“Every generation,” he said, “faces a choice between cynicism and renewal. We stand tonight at the threshold of both.”

The words landed like prophecy.

By summer, the rumor would become a movement, the movement a campaign, and the campaign a city reborn in defiance of empire. But for now — on that cold evening in Queens, with the wind off the East River and the trains moaning overhead — it was still only a whisper, shared among the hopeful.

The Bronx Spring had begun.

Yet, even then, before anyone could name it, an odd tremor ran beneath the surface of public life — small bureaucratic stumbles, missing records, a strange silence from federal monitors who normally hovered over tenant disputes. It was as if the machinery of the old republic were developing hairline fractures no one yet saw.

Reflection

Stories do not replace policy.
But they often make policy thinkable.

If this excerpt resonates, it may be because it names something many people already sense: that power rests in an awakened electorate and that politicians like Zohran Mamdani can represent the future of our nation as the “Republic of Care” proposed by the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).

As noted above, Against All Odds is part of the broader work of the AJA, an effort dedicated to imagining and building democratic institutions rooted in care, accountability, and human dignity.

If you find value in this work, you are invited — never pressured — to support that effort. Purchasing the full book or donating helps sustain writing, organizing, and public education aimed at turning moral imagination into lived reality.