I recognize this tradition viscerally. As a Moroccan, I grew up amid the lingering echoes of decolonization, which continue to mold perceptions of justice and power, albeit less overtly than in the West. I should say that I’m Berber, and I’ve always felt somewhat detached from that way of thinking. From high school onward, Third World rhetoric permeated everyday discourse on climate change, Palestine, or inequality. The issues evolve, but the lens persists, as it’s fundamentally a moral binary logic that divides the powerful from the powerless.
Mamdani’s speeches evoke that same architecture of thought. His convictions echo the Algerian Revolution’s core belief that the oppressed occupy history’s moral vanguard and that their liberation redeems human dignity. In the United States, a nation without colonies, he adapts this anti-imperial ethos to a society steeped in guilt and redemption narratives. Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil, transforming decolonization into a scaffold for moral and political identity.
In general, the perennial political challenge lies in identifying one’s true adversary. Each era masks its conflicts, and ours is even more difficult given the trickeries of language. Anglo-American conservatives, trained to debate policies and principles, are unprepared for this kind of politics. They face a movement that treats moral certainty as innocence or the pursuit of “real justice” and disarms opposition by framing power as compassion or the pursuit of “real common good”. Wokeism was only the beginning, showing that moral language can sustain ideology more effectively than doctrine or policy. Mamdani represents the next stage. He turns this moral framework into political practice, carrying it beyond culture and identity into economics and foreign affairs.
Algerian Revolution and Mamdani’s Language