Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben was a hero of the American Revolutionary War. He arrived at Valley Forge in the bleak second winter of the war and trained the ragtag American regiments into a disciplined, coordinated force. He is quite possibly the most celebrated German American in history. Italian Americans have Columbus Day, but German Americans have Steuben Day parades in cities like Chicago (this parade is seen in one of my favorite movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).
Before becoming an American hero, Steuben reinvented himself in a quintessentially American way. He was a Prussian army captain, a veteran of the Seven Years War who had run out of job options in Europe. When the Americans rebelled against Britain, he went to Paris and presented himself to Benjamin Franklin as a lieutenant general and sought equivalent pay and benefits. Franklin said the Americans were out of money and thus Steuben agreed to be a volunteer, with a major general’s commission, and accept back pay at the end of the war. (Recently Steuben has been reinvented again as a LGBTQ figure, which may be true, but is based partly on a modern reading of his 18th century affectionate letters to staff.)
Americans are all about reinvention. People often deserve a second chance and Steuben hit his out of the ballpark. But some people can abuse this American openness to reinvention.
One of them is Zohran Mamdani. While Steuben lied about his rank in the Prussian army, Mamdani is lying about his identity as a member of an oppressed victim group. His family – like those of other children of South Asian immigrants, including Kamala Harris and Pramila Jayapal – descends from an elite, educated class that benefited from cooperating, or, if you prefer, collaborating with the British Empire.
Did South Asian immigrants to the US face discrimination, including based on skin-color and foreign culture? Yes, and that is something experienced by immigrants who preceded them, including Irish and Jews. The first generation of South Asians overcame this discrimination with the kind of fortitude seen in earlier immigrants, while making achievements unprecedented by any other immigrant group. It’s also true that by the time the South Asians began arriving en masse in the 1960s and 1970s, racial and ethnic discrimination in American society was receding legally and socially. Preferential status based on race under affirmative action programs was underway.
South Asian immigrants came from a very different social-economic class than the southern and eastern European peasant farmers who arrived in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These were often members of the English-speaking educated elite of India, fleeing Nehru-era socialism, Brahmins (and their equivalents among Indian Muslims) who had served the British empire, both at home in India and abroad in Africa.
That is the Mamdani scam: claiming victimhood as an oppressed person of color. His maternal grandfather served in the British colonial administration in the Punjab; his paternal grandfather, like other Gujarati Muslims, served as a merchant during the British colonial government of Uganda. The Indians’ expulsion from post-independence Uganda was indeed harsh, but many of them, like the Mamdanis, had moved there to participate in a colonial system where they enjoyed benefits. They were given asylum and resettled in Britain and the US, certainly with fewer house servants than they had had in Kampala. But overall not too bad.
Mamdani’s mendacity has its humorous moments. He posted a video of himself eating rice with his hands, seemingly inviting a Woody Allen parody. He checked “Black/African American” when asked his race in college admission applications. Along similar lines, Kamala Harris’s campaign biography features a chapter on her childhood roots trip to Africa. Except she was visiting a maternal uncle who had served as a British colonial civil servant in Zambia and who stayed on the job post-independence.
My problem with Mamdani is less about his reinvention than about what he intends to do with it. Steuben helped build the Continental Army. I don’t see Mamdani building anything. He has no prior executive experience and his talk of implementing socialism in New York sounds like academic prattle. The one thing he seems most passionate about, on which his political career was founded, is anti-Zionism.
Mamdani started in politics by founding the “Students for Justice in Palestine” chapter at Bowdoin College. (According to a college professor friend, Bowdoin is “every Manhattan rich kid’s safety school.”) His trajectory, from campus anti-Zionist to likely mayor of America’s largest city, should concern everyone interested in America’s future. Polls show over 80 percent of American Jews identify as Zionists, as do a high percentage of American Christians. The majority of Americans who support Israel understand, as does Freedom House, that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
In short, a key concern with Mamdani should be that he will seek to destroy, not build. His target will be American support for the sole liberal democracy in the Middle East, not to mention promoting authoritarian socialism in America itself.
What a contrast with Steuben who helped ensure that America would become a beacon of freedom and liberty at home and abroad.
