The Charisma of Empire: Obama, Mamdani and the Erosion of Accountability
charismatic leaders of empire don’t save us; they polish the gravestones.
The Intoxication of Charisma
I am not immune to a charming man, a curse that has followed me for much of my life. Charisma is, after all, intoxicating when presented in tandem with hints of humility and kind, playful mischievousness. In its presence not only does it present itself as seeing you and only you, in the midst of whatever surrounding noise there may be, but it grounds pacing feet, calms a pacing heart. To be in the presence of a charismatic man is to feel, even if briefly, a sense of self - a self uninhibited by whatever burdens weigh on your shoulders and mind.
And so I understand, at the most base level, what sort of an emotional impact the image of President Barack Obama and Mayor Zohran Mamdani singing childhood songs to a group of young, adorable children had on the millions who saw those videos and images - especially as we continue to collapse deeper and deeper into fascistic decay with no real escape route. Obama, for tens of millions of Americans represents perhaps the last great President, unencumbered - as his mythology goes - by scandal or mistakes beyond a tan suit. He ran on a platform of hope and change and for many, he delivered even if all they can name as achievements remain confined to his personality, identity, charisma and the appearance of progress.
For tens of millions of Americans, Mamdani represents something similar but simultaneously a big break from from the legacy of Obama’s Democratic Party and its ultimate failures. Mamdani’s campaign was also a message of hope and change, but one which explicitly broke away from the corporate Democrats, one which explicitly condemned and named a genocide. His was a campaign and message which explicitly spoke to the exasperated and exhausted groans of the working class, of a generation promised everything and burdened with the gift of nothing.
But the thing with charisma and with charismatic men is that they often disarm you just enough to make you forget what you should be questioning; they, even if momentarily, put you at ease just enough so that scrutiny and accountability are collapsed into feelings.
And so what we are dealing with is not just ‘charm’ as you and I colloquially understand it, but power - and specifically as a force that reorganizes judgement itself.
Max Weber talked about what he called “charismatic authority” - which was not authority grounded in law, tradition or even moral good but in crisis. It is an authority grounded in the belief that a leader possesses exceptional (even almost sacred) qualities that his followers - who give him that near sacrosanct authority by attaching themselves to him - see as promising clarity and redemption. This especially happens in moments of crisis, when institutions are seen to have failed and when uncertainty of the future worsens - destabilization of society and politics creates a destabilization of the self. And there really is no better example than Barack Obama’s 2008 election: hope and change felt Godsent after eight years of now watch this drive.
Mamdani’s ascent, too, exemplifies what Weber wrote about: he emerges from an anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement in a city whose repression became emblematic of the national repression of anti-genocide, anti-Zionist dissent. Taxpayers have seen their rent, their groceries - every facet of life - get more and more expensive while billions upon billions of their hard-earned tax dollars have been used to fund and arm the slaughter of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian children by a parasitic client state. All of this in addition to the growing tech billionaire oligarchy which continues to make sure that every day in this world is worse than the previous day.
But the other thing with charisma is that it doesn’t change who you are, ultimately, when measured against the backdrop of good versus evil, against the backdrop of material realities versus affect.
And so President Barack Obama is a war criminal - and before you dismiss this as hyperbolic, here’s a different phrasing: Obama was one of the most consequential presidents for reordering American violence and war as so constant, so clandestine that we, collectively, don’t even look back at his presidency as one of the most violent and destabilizing tenures of the past fifty years.
That he is still looked upon fondly - that he can use his charisma and nostalgia in the way that he did in the recent photo op with Mayor Mamdani - tells us how the power of charisma lies in its ability to dismantle even the discourse of accountability.
“Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
The moral and legal crimes of President Barack Obama are innumerable - both domestic and international but I want to focus here on a segment of his most consequential crime: the reconfiguration of American violence.
Barack Obama oversaw the unprecedented expansion of drone warfare and special operations across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Leaning on the 2001 AUMF, he didn’t just continue the “War on Terror”- that he had come to ‘save’ us from - he stretched it across continents and transformed it into a borderless, permanent system of covert war. Across multiple theaters, this approach killed civilians, destroyed infrastructure, displaced populations and fractured political life. Weapons and fighters moved across borders, contributing to the expansion of sadistic non-state groups, such as ISIS, while the U.S. simultaneously claimed to be working to contain them. The result was not the end of war, but its reconfiguration into a continuous, transnational project of destabilization which continued long after his own exit from office.
One of the foundational ways in which he undertook this violence was through drone strikes, institutionalizing “signature strikes” that targeted people based on patterns of ill-defined behavior rather than confirmed identity, effectively collapsing the distinction between suspicion and guilt - or, perhaps more accurately, between proximity and guilt.
Entire regions were turned into what can only be described as kill zones: places where people lived under constant aerial surveillance, where the buzz of drones signaled not just observation but the spectre of death.
By the end of his tenure, Obama would have overseen ten times more the number of drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush. And one of the greatest tragedies of this violence was how unnamed and unknown its victims remain. Names and identities aside, there are also no definitive final tallies on the number of people - including civilians - killed in these drone strikes and that was by design because the numbers we do have, from various sources, are built on fundamentally different definitions and data sources.
Civilian casualties - which included so many children - weren’t anomalies; they were built into the logic of the program. The reclassification of “military-age males” as presumptive combatants alone tells us how the threshold for killing was lowered to clean up the numbers and legitimize the mission.
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants. - NYT, 2012
The Obama presidency’s expanded, rebranded “War on Terror” also extended to the assassinations of U.S. citizens. In 2011, Obama authorized the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki without charge or trial, in clear violation of his Fifth Amendment rights. In the same strike, another American, Samir Khan, was also killed - extrajudicially.
Weeks later, Obama authorized a separate strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman. Under his administration’s classification of “military-age males”, Abdulrahman - despite being a child - was one.
These assassinations weren’t aberrations but extensions of his executive claim to unilateral, extrajudicial authority over life and death of anyone deemed in the periphery of an ill-defined “threat”. And it was all formalized through secret legal memos and internal “kill list” processes reviewed within the White House.
And this entire architecture of violence was mirrored domestically through the expansion and normalization of mass surveillance (as well as the expansion of the DHS/FBI informant/entrapment project, but I’ll save that for another day). The Snowden Leaks exposed a vast system of global data collection - phone records, internet activity, communications - operating at a scale that redefined what state surveillance looked like, setting the stage for all that would continue to come long after his departure.
The tyranny with which Donald Trump rules is a tyranny long-baked into the office, not starting under Obama but certainly strengthened especially in the realm of extrajudicial, unilateral violence.
And yet, none of this seems to follow Barack Obama. The record is public, the violence is documented. None of his moral and legal crimes against his fellow citizens and against populations abroad are hidden. And still, Barack Obama is remembered not as an architect of continuous war, but as its antithesis - not as one of the key architects of contemporary domestic mechanisms of fascism but, again, as its antithesis.
This is what charisma does: it doesn’t erase the record but instead it reorganizes how we are allowed to feel about the person in question. It’s a sort of permission structure that allows the history of violence to exist without fundamentally altering how the person who authorized it is seen.
Two things are held to be true at once, without the acknowledgement that the two things are in direct moral and material contradiction to one another. And this idea also offers empathy and humanity to someone who accurately can be branded as a mass killer - and if that is the moral position we are willing to take, are we willing to take this for other “mass killers”? There can’t be exceptions to positions that ultimately propose a moral conclusion or character, even if through the prism of nostalgia in response to times of crisis.
New York’s Finest (Mayor)
For transparency, I have been a vocal critic of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s acquiescence to Zionists as well as his choice to run within the structure of the same Democratic Party that oversaw the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. His ascent, as I previously mentioned, parallels the mythology of Barack Obama’s rise in some of the most critical ways: an arguably under-experienced but undeniably likeable young guy who emerges in a political moment of great repression and economic fatigue, with a campaign bolstered by grassroots mobilization, to promise a new day in the lives of Americans, to promise that a better way is not only possible but coming.
And both also ascend into not only positions of power but also come to serve in the charismatic resuscitation of a Democratic Party weakened by its own hubris, complicity and complacency in imperial crimes and a general disinterest in serving the needs and moral wants of the citizens.
Mamdani comes from a radical tradition, both theoretically and politically (this is a fantastic profile by journalist Azad Essa), but everyone understands that not only does becoming a leader of a group of diverse communities require a level of ‘pragmatism’ but that to enter the machinery of American electoral politics is to moderate oneself. The Party doesn’t bend to you, you bend to the Party.
It has been less than a year since Mayor Mamdani took office and during that time, he has achieved some of his promises and reneged on others - given how most elected officials govern, it’s not a bad tenure thus far and most New Yorkers agree. But Mamdani’s repeated capitulations to Zionists, and the slow-burn betrayal of the Palestinian movement that helped bring him to power, offer a more recent case study in how charisma blunts accountability -especially as he is positioned to run interference for a political party actively burying the impact of its role in the Gaza genocide on its the 2024 electoral failure.
Even a profile in the New York Times by Astead W. Herndon, days ahead of his election, he was characterized as “Mamdani 2.0” - and event not an anti-Zionist, a characterization his campaign never chose to correct if needed:
The conversations have allowed Mamdani to reframe his previous positions, tweaking the us-versus-them language of his democratic-socialist values to be a tad less punitive. He has made it clear that he wants to support renters, not punish landlords. He wants to support public education, not take a hammer to specialized schools with elite admissions. He supports Palestinian rights; he’s not anti-Zionist. He made key concessions when it comes to policing. Importantly, he made clear that he was open to compromise when it came to his proposed millionaires’ tax. Call it Mamdani 2.0. - NYT, 2025 (emphasis added)
On Palestine - the very issue that anchored his rise - his moderation has been palpable and it has not been incidental - but structural; not an aberration but a pattern baked into the position and world he has assumed. And while many of his critics and non-sycophantic supporters can point to many instances of an increasingly moderate Mayor Mamdani, who betrays candidate and organizer Mamdani, there are three moments in particular that stand out.
In November 2024, days after winning the election, Mayor Mamdani announced that he would retain avowed anti-Palestinian Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner. This move - perhaps his most egregious thus far - ignored calls from his base to remove her over her role given her very long history in consolidating NYPD power, shielding misconduct and expanding surveillance that has targeted Black, brown and Muslim communities, leading the repression of anti-genocide protestors - all while helping entrench “counterterrorism” tactics and philosophy in policing, which have been paired with trainings in Israel (that Tisch herself has done).
Mamdani faced sharp backlash from grassroots organizations, public defenders, and police accountability advocates for this decision, with critics framing it as a betrayal of his campaign pledges to demilitarize policing, abolish the Criminal Group Database (often called gang database) and counterterrorist Strategic Response Group (SRG) units, and prioritize community safety over surveillance and repression. - The Polis Project, 2026
In his reappointment, Mamdani offered glowing praises of Tisch, claiming he “admired her work cracking down on corruption in the upper echelons of the police department, driving down crime…and standing up for New Yorkers in the face of authoritarianism”. Tisch, just months prior, had stood on stage at an ADL event, condemning anti-genocide protestors and accused them of targeting not Israel but “the Jewish people themselves."
Then there was Mamdani’s support for Hakeem Jeffries: in late November 2025, during an appearance on Meet the Press, Mamdani was asked “If Democrats win the midterms do you want to see Hakeem Jeffries become the Speaker of the House?”. Without hesitation, the Mayor-Elect said “yes”, to a man who not only waited until the very last moment to endorse Mamdani himself but also has been coined as “AIPAC Shakur” (by Charlamagne, no less) for being one of the Democratic Party’s most unwavering supporters of Israel (who continues to be one of the biggest recipients of AIPAC money as well as general pro-Israel lobby money). A vocal and ardent opponent of socialism as well, Jeffries had also - just a couple of days prior - voted to pass a resolution condemning “the horrors of socialism” ahead of a proposed meeting between Mayor-Elect Mamdani and President Trump. Prior to the vote, Mamdani also made clear he would not support NYC Councilman Chi Ossé, a left-wing challenger who sought to primary Jeffries, claiming “now is not the time”.
Finally, there’s Mamdani’s recent photo op with President Barack Obama, as part of a promotional campaign for his universal childcare program. which serves as perhaps the most punctuating image of how insurgent politics reabsorbed into power, restoring the same structures of violence as palatable and loosening any demand for accountability. And what makes it so especially striking - so punctuating - is that Mamdani once called President Barack Obama “evil”, stating in a tweet that “hasn’t Barack Obama shown us that the lesser of two evil is still pretty damn evil?”.
It is difficult to look at the footage of the two men together and not see it as a moment where the torch is passed.
It’s not just that the ruling class allows glimmers of critique or dissent; it’s that these glimmers then serve a very real function, which is to tame and redirect people’s political energies into the orbit of the two-party system. - Dr. Nazia Kazi, MEE, 2025
The Civility of Empire
There are undoubtedly many who may not like these moves by Mamdani but would argue that, for better or for worse, they reflect the politics of pragmatism - that as mayor for all New Yorkers, his goal is to achieve what he can for residents who have long dealt with leadership that ignored their needs and changing daily realities and burdens. And for many, Mamdani’s overall ‘pro-Palestine’ positionality is still seen as revolutionary within an American political landscape that continues to deny Palestinians basic humanity and rights beyond approved talking points.
But nothing exists in and of itself. Mamdani does not exist simply as a mayor or as his own charismatic, good-looking self. He exists as the leading representative of the most popular and powerful form of insurgent politics in the United States - one that stands not only against the architecture of economic servitude designed by the rich and powerful, but against the architecture of violence that allows the American empire to govern, that has exterminated entire bloodlines and decimated life-sustaining infrastructure in an open-air prison.
It is a political movement that has grown out of Occupy, out of BLM, out of Bernie 2016/2020. A movement borne of years of anti-Israeli occupation organizing, built on the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan - the forever wars. Mamdani stands not on the shoulders but shoulder to shoulder with movements and politics that emerged in response to the devastating domestic and global changes designed by the violence of the War on Terror. He is not a tag-along with these movements, he too emerged from that world, those politics, those movements.
Today, by choosing to operate within a political party that oversaw, supported, denied, and continues to obfuscate the crime of genocide in Gaza, Mamdani stands in direct opposition to the movements he once claimed. What grounds that opposition - what renders it a betrayal - is his continued (and unnecessary) acquiescence to the Party’s need to be resuscitated among a base that is increasingly unwilling to engage any elected official who refuses to commit to, at minimum, a total arms embargo on Israel and an end to funding the apartheid state.
The wave is turning toward the very politics that brought Mamdani to power, even as the Democratic Party works to redirect it. And in that tension, Mamdani increasingly finds himself not as its representative, but as its mediator; he has become a sort of piper, similar to Barack Obama, who not only funnels the disenchanted back into the Democratic Party but also offers electoralism as the best and necessary route of accountability for genocidaires, for fighting against the influence of pro-Israel lobbies and influence.
It also begs the question: if the purpose of running was to push back - significantly, materially - against and within the party of genocide, then why acquiesce to it and its most powerful actors? What is the point of insurgency if it immediately moderates itself, if it allows itself to be used, offering only unthreatening moments of dissent?
It is in this effort that we find the manufacturing of the civility of empire: the United States not as it is, but as it prefers to be seen. An empire made tolerable not through the absence of violence, but through the presence of figures who make that violence easier to set aside - whose supporters urge patience or dismiss all critics as addicted to loss and misery, rather than as observers of history and students of political patterns who understand exactly where these capitulations lead.
The production of these figures - including the very poor attempted manufacturing of them - and the elevation of their charisma, is part of how empire sustains itself without appearing to do so. It does not rely solely on coercion or force, but on the constant renewal of belief: belief that change is still possible within the very systems that have consistently foreclosed it, belief that proximity to power is the same as transforming it, belief that the right person can make an inherently violent structure humane.
This is how accountability is deferred, again and again.
And so what remains is not just the endurance of empire, but its ability to reproduce itself through charismatic, out-of-the-box figures who feel like a break from it, even as they are tasked with carrying it forward.
Re effin tweet: “And in that tension, Mamdani increasingly finds himself not as its representative, but as its mediator”
I have both Mamdani fans and people who share your critique in my friend group. I feel like this article makes the critique legible to the fans! No small feat.