Do Not Trust the Ring

On Mamdani’s victory, the seductions of institutional power, and how to turn City Hall into a laboratory of resistance
​By Dyab Abou Jahjah

Today I came across several posts quoting Leonard Cohen’s line, “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” It’s an understandable reflex — that lyric feels made for this moment, a poetic shorthand for triumph at the heart of empire. I thought of it too, the instant Mamdani clinched the mayoral race. Cohen’s political poetry has always fascinated me, and I’ve often written about itt. But what lingers with me now is a quieter line from the same song: “They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom / for trying to change the system from within.”

Cohen understood something fundamental about modern power: it neutralizes opposition not by suppression, but by absorption. The system does not punish its reformers with exile; it rewards them with relevance. It hands them an office, a staff, a schedule, and gradually converts conviction into administration. Now I have no doubt in the good intentions of Mayor Mamdani but this is the first lesson for any insurgent who finds himself in charge — and it applies now to him. The danger begins not when you lose, but precisely when you win. The Ring of Power, to borrow Tolkien’s most durable metaphor, does not conquer by coercion; it seduces. It whispers, it flatters, it rewards your competence. It tells you that you can use it “for good,” and in doing so, it teaches you its logic and it controls you.
In The Lord of the Rings, the tragedy is not only that the Ring corrupts; it is that its corruption proceeds through moral intention. Frodo the Hobbit never wishes to dominate; he wishes to redeem. Yet the very attempt to wield the Ring for benevolent ends leads to enslavement. Tolkien’s insight — often lost in popular readings — is that certain structures of power cannot be instrumentalized. They must be renounced, not reformed.
Cohen, working in a different idiom, arrived at the same conclusion.
His “twenty years of boredom” was not personal despair; it was the spiritual cost of believing that institutional power can be repurposed.
For Cohen, boredom was not lethargy — it was a form of moral anesthesia, the slow numbing of dissent.
The challenge facing Mamdani is precisely this: how to govern without being governed by the grammar of the institution. The temptations are subtle. The mayor’s calendar will begin to fill. The language of “stakeholders” and “deliverables” will start to replace the language of justice. Gradually, the movement that made victory possible will be reclassified as a “constituency.”
The first commandment, then, is defensive: do not trust the Ring.
Do not mistake process for progress.
Do not confuse fluency in the system’s language with mastery of its power.
But there is a second, less romantic truth that must accompany this one: you cannot overthrow the machine from one desk.
Not even from New York’s City Hall. The skills required to win office are not the same as those required to transform the conditions that make such offices corrupt. Governing and transforming are different arts. The fantasy of the “exemplary reformer” — the idea that personal integrity can redeem a corrupt institution — is itself a symptom of the Ring’s seduction.
But now the good news.
A mayor’s office cannot dismantle Empire. But it can be used as a laboratory of counter-hegemony, a place where the instruments of government are quietly retooled for different ends. The trick is to act as a hacker, not a missionary.
That means using administrative tools in subversive ways.
Turn procurement into a form of public ownership.
Redirect budgets to seed experiments in community autonomy.
Use the press conference not as a spectacle of control, but as a stage for the voices usually absent from it.
Protect protest rather than contain it.
Leak what must be leaked.
In short, convert administration into infrastructure for collective agency.
Cohen’s “First we take Manhattan” was never meant as a finale. It was a beginning — the first breach in the walls of power, not their collapse. Manhattan is the entry point, the place where the machinery of modern power is most visible and most intricate. But the song never ends there. “Then we take Berlin” is the real destination — not another city, but the endgame. Berlin is code for the higher citadel: the White House, the global financial core, the administrative brain of empire itself.
City Hall’s task is not to destroy that machinery, but to prepare the conditions for those who might.
It must become an outpost of the movement, a relay station where civic power can be reassembled, disciplined, and scaled. Its purpose is not to concentrate authority, but to radiate it outward — into neighborhoods, workplaces, unions, schools, and networks of solidarity.
If Mamdani can keep that compass steady, City Hall may yet become what Tolkien and Cohen both imagined in different keys: a point of resistance within the architecture of domination, where the machinery of empire begins to turn against itself.
From there, the movement can grow outward — from Manhattan to Berlin, from City Hall to the White House, from the heart of the metropolis to the heart of the empire.
And when it finally reaches the furnace — the global foundry where the Ring of Power was forged, in capital, in hierarchy, in the myth of inevitability — its task will not be to wield that power better, but to cast it into the fire and end its dominion altogether, liberating all who have lived under its spell and enabling the emergence of real democracy.

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