Can New York City Endure a Socialist Mayor?

Following the shocking upset victory of self-described “Democratic Socialist” Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s Democrat mayoral primary, it is worth examining why this emergent political label is a contradiction in terms – even as it continues to gain popularity in progressive circles.

Mamdani’s victory could perhaps be explained in part by the relatively weak field around him. His only real challenger in the primary was disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who had been forced to resign owing to charges of sexual harassment but was also guilty of various forms of incompetence. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams is running as an Independent after dealing with his own ethics scandal.

But this explanation misses the fact that the core of Mamdani’s appeal was to younger voters lamenting the high cost of living in the city. They were attracted by Mamdani’s promises of “free stuff” to alleviate those costs. Those promises included free public transit, an extended rent freeze for residents of already “rent stabilized” apartments, and publicly owned grocery stores, to be located in neighborhoods that were short of such establishments.

It is easy for sober-minded observers to poke holes in Mamdani’s proposals. The shortage of housing, and the consequent high rents faced by newcomers to the market, is itself the consequence of excessive government regulations, such as unreasonable zoning rules, but especially of forms of rent control. The latter often makes it uneconomical for owners of existing rental housing to invest in their maintenance, let alone for investors to finance new housing. Thousands of apartments have simply been abandoned by building owners, for whom maintenance costs and taxes would outweigh rental income.

More generally, New York City’s high income tax burden (coupled with the state’s) and minimum wage contribute further to the exorbitant cost of living.

Unfortunately, Mamdani’s legion of largely young, white supporters are oblivious to those facts. To the question “Who will pay for all that new stuff?” his answer is simply higher taxes on “the rich.” Of course, short of imposing a high (and doubtless unconstitutional) exit tax on high-worth individuals seeking to escape, as hundreds of thousands have already been doing (hi, Florida!), that remedy won’t work.

But this failure to understand basic cause-and-effect is nothing new for the political movement Mamdani belongs to – the Democratic Socialists of America. Though the press (including even the conservatively inclined New York Post) persist in calling Mamdani a “Democratic Socialist,” that term is an oxymoron. 

When most Americans employ the term “democracy,” they have in mind not merely government based on majority rule, but a constitutional, representative democracy such as the U.S. has been from its inception.

Thus understood, there has never been a socialist democracy. When the term is used, it is commonly thought to apply to the Scandinavian countries, which are actually “social democracies.” This means that they are democratic welfare states, subject to constitutional limits on government, but with considerably higher degrees of social welfare payments, and consequently higher taxes than exist in the United States even after the New Deal, the Great Society, Obamacare, and Biden’s thoroughly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act.”

However, far from abandoning private property or replacing private businesses with state-owned ones, these social democracies are still countries where “capitalism” is allowed to flourish – albeit to a lesser extent than in the United States. Just think of Volvo, Saab, or Nokia.

Socialism means something else entirely. It refers to government ownership of the means of production and distribution. Starting late in the French Revolution with “Gracchus” Babeuf (executed by the Revolutionary authorities because his proposals were too radical even for them), a slew of theorists had proposed, and some even tried to establish, genuinely socialist communities, where private property itself was abolished.

The term “socialism” was coined by followers of the philanthropic British manufacturer Robert Owen, who financed the establishment of the community of New Harmony, Indiana, and foresaw that, without the constraint of economic competition, what historian Joshua Muravchik calls “a life of virtually effortless abundance” for all would result.

Of course, the experiment didn’t last very long. Rather than the residents eagerly working for the sake of the common good, “the streets [were] full of idlers,” and those who did work resented those who didn’t. In fact, as Muravchik reports, while socialist communities based on religion, such as Trappist monasteries, have sometimes endured for long periods, those dozens that had been established purely for the sake of the earthly ideal of socialism by the start of the twentieth century had a “median life span” of only two years. (See Muravchik’s fine study Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism.)

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels understandably dismiss socialist theories and projects like Owen’s as “utopian.” But what distinguishes their brand of socialism – ushering in the earthly paradise of “communist society,” a realm of unparalleled abundance without property, “alienating” labor, or government itself – was its reliance on violent revolution to overthrow the established order, to be followed by an ostensibly temporary “dictatorship” in the name of the working masses.

One need only survey the histories and present conditions of Soviet Russia, Communist China, Vietnam, North Korea, and other such regimes to see how far that promise of freedom plus abundance was carried out.

Neither Mamdani nor his party, the Democratic Socialists of America (claiming 90,000 members) has thus far called for violent revolution – though the party has often expressed sympathy for urban rioters such as those recently seeking to block ICE arrests of illegal aliens in Los Angeles.

But the party does officially call for “depolicing” and emptying the country’s jails, reducing if not eliminating our military, and the establishment of open borders, along with “social ownership of all major industry and infrastructure” and “nationalization of businesses like railroads, utilities, critical manufacturing, and tech companies” as well as our “institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate, and finance.”

Mamdani has not come out for any of these policies except for “defunding the police.” (In seeking election, he didn’t have to.) But unlike other mayoral candidates who advocated increased police hiring in view of the city’s growing rate of violent crime, he instead wants to create a new Department of Community Safety focused on increasing mental health outreach teams in the subways, and maintains that police are too often being relied on to deal with what are really “failures of the social safety net.”

It isn’t difficult to see in Mamdani’s other proposals, however, their socialist direction. A system of publicly owned grocery stores (unparalleled to my knowledge anywhere else in America) will undoubtedly weaken the ability of private supermarkets and groceries to compete. Unlike the publicly owned stores, they’ll have to pay taxes. Nor, any more than the U.S. Postal Service, will the public groceries have to break even, let alone earn a profit: they can always be kept in business with taxpayer subsidies.

The consequence of one government-run store will inevitably be more government-run stores. Similarly, a freeze on rents will only increase rather than reduce the city’s housing shortage. As private apartment owners are driven out of business, taxpayers will be compelled to pay for increased public housing projects – despite the dismal record of public housing over the past half-century. As taxes are raised still further, while crime rates rise, generating an exodus of middle- to high-income earners, just who will be left to pay for such giveaways?

There is also one other, highly troubling aspect of Mamdani’s public posture: his virulent opposition to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and expressions of sympathy with anti-Semitic violence. Interviewed on the podcast “The Bulwark” just before the election, Mamdani, who is Muslim, refused to renounce calls to “globalize the intifada” and the chant, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Instead, he dodged the question, saying “I know people for whom those things mean very different things,” and equated the chants merely with the expression of “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”

In fact, contrary to Mamdani’s gobbledygook, the meaning of those two slogans is perfectly clear. “Intifada,” which means “uprising” or “shaking off” in Arabic, was the name of two violent Palestinian uprisings, including one from 2000 to 2005 that killed an estimated 1,000 Israelis in terror attacks. The reference to the land between the (Jordan) River and the (Mediterranean) Sea, meanwhile, means that the entire land of Israel – not just Gaza and the West Bank – must be “free” of Jews. Mamdani is surely not unaware of these facts. 

While Mamdani professes to reject “antisemitism,” his refusal to renounce either of those militantly anti-Zionist, pro-terror slogans refutes his denial.

There is also a connection between anti-Semitism and socialism. I first heard of the slogan “from the river to the sea” when reading an account of its being proclaimed by the attendees at a national meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America some five years ago.

The nation of Israel, the only constitutional democracy in the Middle East as well as America’s staunchest ally, is also a model of the prosperity that genuine freedom of enterprise generates. (See Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s book Startup Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.) Both politically and economically, Israel’s success is a standing rebuke to the autocracy, poverty (aside from oil), and anarchy that characterize Arab and Muslim nations throughout the region. (It should be noted that Israel grants full political and economic rights to all of its Arab citizens.)

The envy and resentment that Muslim nations have felt toward the success of Israel and the West (as documented in the great Islamicist Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong?) parallels, on a broader scale, the passions that cause some ill-informed Americans to blame “capitalism” rather than unwise government intrusions in our economic life for problems like unemployment, inflation, and housing shortages. (See the new book by Phil Gramm and Donald Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism.)

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mamdani’s primary victory was that he was supported by some 20 percent of Jewish voters, and was even reciprocally endorsed by one of his rivals, self-styled “progressive” (and Jewish) City Comptroller Brad Lander, through the city’s complex and anti-democratic “ranked choice voting” system. The progressive (really, regressive) impulse has become so strong in some circles that it outweighs not only common sense and economic and historical understanding, but even individuals’ attachment to their own professed faith.

Beyond this, even though the core of Mamdani’s support in the primary came from heavily white neighborhoods populated by largely young college graduates, Mamdani has announced a plan for imposing higher income taxes on mostly white areas while lowering them on black ones. (Fortunately, such a blatantly racist proposal, even if it won approval from the state legislature, would undoubtedly be struck down by the courts.)

The citizens of New York City and the entire people of America deserve better than the snake oil that Zohran Mamdani, himself an immigrant child of privilege, is trying to sell them. May enough New Yorkers come to their senses by Election Day to avoid that fate.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.