New Yorkers Forgot 9/11 So Quickly — By Electing A Muslim As Mayor
Or at least that is how some conversations frame it. What the vote actually shows is more complicated: a city trying to reconcile trauma, policy priorities, and the promise of pluralism..
By Jorge Machicado | November 2025
There is a shorthand in some corners of public debate: when a city that lived through the worst terror attack on American soil elects a Muslim mayor, it must mean the city has "forgotten" 9/11. That shorthand is seductive because it simplifies a knot of uneasy emotions — grief, anger, fear, forgiveness, civic pride — into a single moral verdict. But elections are about policy, coalition-building and the arithmetic of voters' daily lives. To interpret the result only as communal amnesia is to misunderstand both memory and democracy.
Last month New York elected Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old progressive who — if one reads the headlines — became the city's first Muslim mayor. His candidacy and victory were built less on theological statements and more on a platform addressing the crushing cost of living, housing insecurity, and municipal services that many New Yorkers experience each day. That basic political reality matters: voters often decide who will fix their rent, their commute, and their kids’ schools — not who embodies a single thread of national trauma.
Memory is not a single object that a city owns and then misplaces. It is contested, generational, and layered. For older New Yorkers who watched the towers fall on television, 9/11 is a defining rupture. For younger residents — many born after 2001 — the city's present-day crises (sky-high rents, subway breakdowns, public-safety concerns) are often more immediate. That generational divergence does not equal disrespect. It is the way lived experience shapes political urgency.
To say "they forgot" is also to flatten the sustained ways the attack has been commemorated: the memorial plaza, tens of thousands of personal remembrances, the annual rituals that still fill the city's calendar. Those visible, institutional acts of remembrance continue even as the electorate changes. What changed, and rightly so, is what voters demanded from their leaders.
Mamdani's rise cannot be divorced from the issues that propelled him. His campaign—marked by promises to tackle rent, expand transit affordability and invest in social services—spoke to a city exhausted by rising costs. For pragmatic voters, the question at the ballot box was not primarily about liturgy or identity politics but about who would ease the financial pressure on households. In that sense, voters rewarded a candidate addressing concrete needs, not a repudiation of memory.
But let us be clear about two related realities. First: the election exposed, once again, the lingering strains of Islamophobia in American public life. During the campaign there were dog-whistles, targeted ads, and explicit attempts to frame a candidate’s religion as disqualifying — tactics familiar from prior contests in the post-9/11 era. Mamdani himself recounted the pressures of growing up Muslim in post-9/11 New York and the private compromises many in the community learned to make. The fact that such attacks were deployed tells us that the memory of 9/11 remains a mobilizing force — sometimes used to stoke fear rather than to deepen understanding.
Second: electing a Muslim mayor is not the same as erasing 9/11 from civic awareness. Rather, it can signify a different, perhaps healthier, public relationship to the past. A polity that can vote for the person it thinks can manage its present problems — regardless of faith — demonstrates a capacity to separate individual belief from collective blame. That capacity is precisely the opposite of forgetting: it is the practice of refusing to conscript an entire religion into the symbolism of a violent act committed by others.
Critics will argue that some wounds require a particular kind of moral attentiveness — that a symbolism like the choice of a mayor should reflect the city's historical pain. That sentiment deserves respect. But it should not translate into a permanent litmus test that disqualifies faith groups from public life. Otherwise the civic ritual of voting becomes less a contest of ideas than a certificate of belonging based on sameness.
There is also an important political point that often gets lost in the heat of symbolic readings: pluralistic cities are coalitional. New York is a mosaic of neighborhoods whose immediate priorities vary dramatically. Immigrant communities, Black and Latino neighborhoods, working-class enclaves and affluent enclaves do not see the world the same way. A mayor must thread these differences, not stand as a monument to a single historical moment. Electing a mayor from a background that was once marginalized may, in fact, be an indicator of greater inclusivity — a city that trusts people of different faiths to steward common institutions.
Of course, equal representation does not inoculate the city against painful debates about foreign policy, national security, or commemorative practices. There will be tough conversations — about how to mark anniversaries, how to hire first responders, how to fund memorials, how to keep the city safe. Democracy requires those conversations to be open and sometimes uncomfortable. But they are better had in a political space where voice and difference are possible, rather than excluded.
There is one more, quieter lesson here for those tempted to reduce the election to a moral parable: examine what people actually voted about. Exit polls, local reporting and the campaign messaging show a city prioritizing housing and everyday cost burdens. The narrative that this was a moral betrayal of memory makes for a vivid headline, but it does not square with the bargaining table where municipal budgets are balanced and policy is made. Voters judged competence and promise — not historical fidelity.
That is not to say memory evaporates. On the contrary, New York will mark anniversaries; survivors and families will continue to be honored. But a resilient civic life is also one that recognizes the horizon beyond the anniversary — the residents struggling to make rent, the subways that still need fixing, the schools that need investment. A mayor is elected to solve those problems now.
So when commentators say New Yorkers “forgot,” they are often performing their own selective memory. They are choosing a particular way to read public life: one that privileges symbolic litmus tests over quotidian governance. The more fruitful question is this: can we hold both things at once — a deep and continuous respect for the dead and the daily practice of electing leaders who reflect the city's diversity and address its urgent needs?
If the answer is yes, then the 2025 election is not a story of forgetting but of a city extending trust to people of a faith that was once cast as suspect. That trust is fragile; it must be met with competence, humility and continued attention to the wounds that remain. It will be judged, as all democratic experiments are, over time — by performance, by empathy, and by the city's willingness to keep both memory and civic responsibility alive.
