Can Teddy Roosevelt Save America from Zohran Mamdani?

Last Tuesday, self-avowed “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani stormed to victory in the New York City mayoral race, completing an astonishing rise to power for the previously unknown 34-year-old Ugandan immigrant. While most of the reaction on the right to Mamdani’s victory has focused on what it says about ongoing demographic shifts in the United States, conservatives shouldn’t ignore the economic anxieties that fueled his popularity – and how the Republican Party must address them.

Most of the outrage over Mamdani has centered on the fact that his policy platform reads like a communist wish list: “free” public buses, rent control, and government-run grocery stores. These are ideas that should rightly be mocked and rejected as both unrealistic and unworkable. History shows that every attempt to implement socialism has led not to greater equality or affordability, but to misery, shortages, and stagnation. Groceries don’t become cheaper under socialism – they simply disappear from store shelves.

Yet what many conservatives are missing is that the root of Mamdani’s appeal is his focus on affordability.

The young, urban voters who propelled Mamdani to victory weren’t driven primarily by ideology or identity politics (although that undoubtedly played a role – particularly when it comes to foreign-born voters). Their number one anxiety is the crushing cost of living. They can’t afford rent. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford healthcare.

For many Americans in the Big Apple and elsewhere, the so-called “American Dream” now feels like a cruel joke. Mamdani’s woke virtue signaling and talk about preventing deportations may have gotten the headlines, but the emotional heart of his campaign was economic.

The reality is that life in modern America is unaffordable for an increasing number of people. Politicians on both sides of the aisle talk about it, but neither party’s establishment really seems to do anything to address it.

Of course, Mamdani’s “solution” of exorbitant taxes on corporations and the wealthy and more centralized government control of the marketplace can only end in disaster. But rather than simply dismissing Mamdani’s supporters as misguided radicals, conservatives should ask: Why did they turn to him in the first place?

It’s easy to just say that many Americans, and especially young people, hate capitalism and are amenable to socialism because they are historically illiterate. But do they truly hate capitalism – or do they hate what they believe is capitalism?

As Steve Bannon recently put it, “They got all these interviews with kids and polls with kids that come back and say these kids hate capitalism, they’re all socialists. Well, they never had a shot at capitalism; they’re at the receiving end of corporatism.”

Bannon’s point is crucial. What many young Americans are rejecting isn’t capitalism at all – it’s corporatism. In a healthy capitalist system, success is earned through competition, innovation, and hard work. But corporatism replaces that meritocracy with a rigged game where massive, faceless companies and entrenched interests use their influence to crush competition, distort markets, and consolidate power – often with the help of career politicians who are in on the scam.

Consider the housing market. A young couple in Iowa scrimps and saves for years to put down a deposit on their first home – only to watch an investment firm in New York City or Chicago swoop in and buy the same house with cash, sight unseen, at 20 percent above the asking price. Then that firm offers to rent it back to a family like them for more than their mortgage would have cost.

That’s not capitalism. That’s corporatism – an unholy alliance between Wall Street and Washington that has turned the dream of homeownership into a corporate asset class.

Or take the 2008 financial crisis. Millions of families lost their homes, their savings, and their livelihoods. Regional banks collapsed. Yet the biggest banks – the ones whose reckless bets and unethical practices caused the crash – were bailed out by the same taxpayers who had just been ruined. That wasn’t the “invisible hand” of the market at work. It was the heavy hand of government picking winners and losers.

The same dynamic plays out in healthcare. Right now, insurance companies are lobbying Congress to pass Obamacare subsidies that will cost taxpayers $400 billion over the next ten years. That money will line the pockets of corporate c-suites at those same insurance companies – and fill the campaign coffers of the politicians who sign off on the wealth transfer.

In the same way, when asset managers use ESG criteria to decide which companies deserve investment, they’re not promoting capitalism; they’re imposing political orthodoxy on the market.

This system – crony corporatism – breeds resentment because it violates the basic promise of capitalism that effort and merit should be rewarded. When people see that the deck is stacked against them, that the rules are written by and for the powerful, they begin to lose faith in the system altogether. That’s the emotional void into which politicians like Mamdani step.

The tragedy is that Mamdani’s medicine is poison. His policies won’t make life more affordable; they’ll destroy the very engines of growth and innovation that make prosperity possible. But he’s tapping into a real sickness that career politicians in both parties have largely ignored.

If conservatives want to understand how to confront this, they should look to history. A century ago, America faced a remarkably similar crisis. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the so-called “Gilded Age” – the gap between rich and poor was wider than at any point before or since. Factory workers toiled 12-hour days for starvation wages. Children worked in mines. Families lived in crowded tenements, barely surviving while a handful of elites amassed unimaginable fortunes.

To be fair, those industrial titans also built the foundations of modern America. They laid the railroads, electrified cities, and created new industries. But as their monopolies grew, competition withered. Prices were set not by the market but by oligarchs. The dream of upward mobility – of a small business owner or farmer building a better life – began to fade.

Enter Theodore Roosevelt. A Republican and ardent believer in the free market, Roosevelt nevertheless understood that true capitalism depends on fair competition. When competition dies, so does freedom. His “Square Deal” wasn’t an attack on capitalism – it was a defense of it.

Roosevelt broke up monopolies not because he was anti-business, but because he believed in a system where anyone could start a business and compete on equal footing. He believed the role of government was not to control the economy, but to ensure that no one player – corporate or political – could dominate it.

Roosevelt’s crusade against the trusts revived the spirit of the American founding as a nation of small farmers, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs invested in their communities. That was the original American Dream – a society of independent citizens, not wage slaves to distant corporate masters.

The Founding Fathers didn’t envision a country run by bureaucrats or billionaires. They envisioned a country where government existed to protect opportunity, not stifle it.

Conservatives must recover that vision to stop the Mamdanis of the left. The answer to corporatism isn’t socialism – it’s capitalism restored. Leaders who stand unapologetically for free markets that actually reward innovation and hard work, not political connections, will succeed.

President Trump has already embraced Roosevelt’s legacy by calling out Big Tech monopolies that silence dissent, financial institutions that manipulate credit to enforce ideology, and pharmaceutical giants that collude with regulators to fix prices. He is the closest Republicans have had since Roosevelt to a “trustbuster” that defends competition.

Just this past week, President Trump called for any new Obamacare subsidies to be sent directly to consumers, not insurance companies. That may not be a perfect solution, but it does show that Trump recognizes the corrupt game that has gone on in Washington for decades. He and Mamdani could not be more different when it comes to governing philosophy and what they value, but both men are experts at harnessing voter frustration with crony corporatism. 

Republicans should be the party of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and working families – not the party of corporate boardrooms. That doesn’t mean embracing Mamdani’s redistributionist fantasies. It means reclaiming capitalism from those who have corrupted it. It means returning to the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt’s America, where competition was sacred and too much concentration of power – public or private – was the enemy of liberty.

Yes, Mamdani’s election was just one race in New York City. But the frustrations that fueled it are national. Across America, people feel the system isn’t working for them. They see the rich getting richer, the middle class shrinking, and their own prospects dimming. They hear conservatives defend “capitalism,” but what they see looks precious little like legitimate free-market competition.

If Republicans want to win the next generation, they must confront that reality head-on. They must speak to affordability – not by promising handouts, but by promising fairness. They must restore faith that in America, hard work still matters more than political pull or monied interests.

That doesn’t mean parroting the left’s vapid talking point that billionaires “shouldn’t exist” or calling for wealth taxes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being wealthy or even extremely wealthy. But government and big business shouldn’t be able to collude to crush the little guy.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is a warning. The socialist tide will keep rising until conservatives once again champion a capitalism worthy of the name – one that is free, fair, and truly American. Teddy Roosevelt saved capitalism once before. Perhaps President Trump and a new generation of America First politicians embracing that spirit can help save it again.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.