Zohran Mamdani and the Limits of American Progressivism

When New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani as their mayor on 4 November, many commentators and politicians treated the result as a political earthquake. In his victory speech, Mamdani also adopted the language of epochal change. “New York will remain a city of immigrants,” he told supporters, “a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” Then, quoting Jawaharlal Nehru, he cast his election as a wild new watershed: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new. … Tonight, we have stepped out from the old into the new.”

For progressives, Mamdani’s rhetoric was exhilarating. The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan reported that his message possessed “a clarity that stands in sharp contrast to most Democratic politicians,” while others on the Left saw his win as proof that the city’s younger voters—many of whom are renters struggling with the cost of living—were finally asserting themselves against decades of failed centrist compromise. On the Right, meanwhile, people reacted with the same intensity but the opposite emotion. Republican Representative Nicole Malliotakis spoke for many conservatives when she warned that the result would be “a disaster.” Her mother, she added, “fled communist Cuba to not live in a communist New York.” President Trump went further, calling Mamdani “a 100% Communist lunatic” and predicting economic ruin (although he hasn’t given Mamdani a Trump nickname yet).

Both sides, in their own way, reinforced the sense that something extraordinary had just happened. However, history and the constraints of American federalism suggest that the euphoria and catastrophism are misplaced. Campaign idealism may have propelled Mamdani to power, but the arithmetic of governing New York tells a different story. The city has been here before, after all, from Fiorello La Guardia’s New Deal municipalism to Bill de Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities.” The details change, but the structural constraints on ambitious mayoral candidates do not.

Zohran Mamdani during the New York City mayoral primary election, via SOPA images

Mamdani’s victory rests on authentic and deeply felt grievances. For a generation priced out of home-ownership and crushed by rising rents and expensive debt, “affordability” has become a sore spot. His campaign spoke directly to that anxiety by promising rent freezes, fare-free buses, and a US$30 minimum wage funded by higher taxes on the wealthy. But the city’s fiscal architecture is not designed for this kind of experimentation. Roughly half of New York’s operating budget comes from state and federal transfers, and major tax changes require legislative approval in the state’s capital city of Albany. Unless state law changes, the city cannot legally spend more than it takes in taxes.

During the campaign, Mamdani’s team framed taxation as a moral issue. In an interview with NBC on 29 June, Mamdani flatly declared, “I don’t think we should have billionaires” because no individual should control such disproportionate resources in a society where basic needs remain unmet. It is a view rooted in his democratic-socialist belief that wealth beyond a certain threshold is inherently exploitative. But this sentiment alone won’t generate any revenue. Millionaires already provide over forty percent of personal-income-tax receipts, and the wealthy are the most mobile. A one- or two-point hike in top-rate city taxes of the sort needed to finance universal transit or expanded housing subsidies would yield far less than the slogans suggest once out-migration and creative accounting are factored in. And the macroeconomic context is brutal. Remote work has hollowed out Manhattan’s commercial base, and property-tax collections are still below their pre-pandemic peak.

The closest historical parallel to Mamdani’s moment is probably La Guardia’s first term in office during the 1930s. When he began his tenure, New York was crippled by unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and a municipal budget on the brink of insolvency. But La Guardia was able to turn the city around by forging a close partnership with president Franklin Roosevelt, who saw New York as a testing ground for his Keynesian New Deal. Between 1934 and 1939, federal agencies channelled over a billion US dollars—an astonishing sum at the time—into a succession of New York City-based projects. Those funds paid for the construction of the Triborough Bridge, La Guardia Airport, dozens of schools and playgrounds, and thousands of units of public housing. They also allowed the mayor to greatly expand the municipal workforce without bankrupting the city, and he used federal backing to centralise authority as he restructured the city’s bureaucracy.

The combination of Roosevelt’s firehose of cash and La Guardia’s administrative nous produced infrastructure renewal, fiscal stability, and a brief restoration of public confidence in city government. The trouble is that Mamdani enjoys no such partnership with the hostile Trump administration, nor is he likely to forge one. The federal government today is neither ideologically aligned with his programme nor inclined to subsidise it. And there is no modern equivalent of Roosevelt’s alphabet agencies to absorb the cost of local experimentation.

The more recent precedent, de Blasio—who endorsed Mamdani’s campaign for the mayoralty—achieved far less than La Guardia. De Blasio’s attempt to govern through redistribution stalled amid inertia and tax-base fragility. Elected on a platform that promised to champion the interests of the working class, by the end of de Blasio’s administration, New York’s Gini coefficient—the standard measure of income inequality—was essentially unchanged from the level he inherited, hovering around 0.55. While average incomes rose across the city, the gains were mostly concentrated among higher-earning households.

This is not peculiar to New York. In municipalities across the Western world, progressive and socialist movements have triumphantly muscled their way into power but struggled with the mechanics of governing once they got there. Their rise is often driven by the same litany of legitimate grievances—inequality, housing shortages, and so forth—but their administrations seem to falter when cherished ideals collide with political reality.

When Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council attempted to turn the UK’s capital into a laboratory for socialist policy in the 198os—subsidising transit fares and expanding social-welfare programmes—the Thatcher government simply abolished the council and reabsorbed its functions. More recently, when a housing activist named Ada Colau was elected mayor of Barcelona, she promised to transform the city into a model of “municipal feminism.” Ambitious pledges to cap rents and curb tourism collided with legal and economic constraints established by Spain’s national government and the European Union. By the end of her tenure, Colau had achieved little and lost her support.

In the United States, this pattern repeats. San Francisco’s progressive mayors have found themselves presiding over worsening homelessness and declining public services. Minneapolis’s progressive council promised to “defund the police,” only to retreat amid rising crime rates and state-level legal barriers. In each case, the same paradox appears: movements that win by denouncing the system soon discover they have no choice but to operate within its constraints, while utopian rhetoric is confronted by the daily reality of governance. Idealism might play well for milquetoast socialist ideologues, but it does little for voters who just want to live a normal life without being bludgeoned by crime or economic decline.

Zohran Mamdani: The Face of New York’s Gentrified Socialism

Zohran Mamdani’s brand of socialism appeals to the luxury beliefs of New York’s middle classes. If his preferred policies are implemented, New Yorkers will suffer—and the poorest of them will be most impacted.

QuilletteJohn Aziz

The American state remains fiscally centralised and constitutionally constrained. Cities cannot print money, and federal transfers arrive encumbered by conditions. European municipalities face similar restrictions under national budget rules and EU fiscal compacts. Local leaders can redistribute only within the narrow margins of what national treasuries permit.

Of course, Mamdani’s ascent also reflects a generational shift in how global issues reverberate in local politics. An outspoken critic of Israel’s post-7 October military campaign in Gaza, Mamdani has framed solidarity with Palestinians and opposition to Israel as a core tenet of his platform. But as mayor, he has no say over foreign affairs. The most he can do is use the platform of City Hall to express a position, pass symbolic resolutions, and direct the city’s pension funds to review their investment portfolios. Gestures like these may make headlines, but they will do nothing to affect or resolve the Middle East conflict. The tension between the scale of the global and generational issues he invokes and the narrow scope of municipal power captures the broader contradiction of his administration.

In the end, the importance of Mamdani’s victory will depend on whether his movement can be translated into national power. Fiorello La Guardia was able to build bridges and airports because Franklin Roosevelt’s Washington underwrote his ambition. Unless a future president—someone in the mould of, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—captures the White House and aligns the machinery of the federal government with that of the local Left, Mamdani’s project will remain largely rhetorical, and his followers will be left floundering against nebulous labels like “capitalism,” “neoliberalism,” or “Zionism” for getting in the way.

None of this diminishes the symbolic force of Mamdani’s victory. Movements often begin in cities before they reach the statehouse or the presidency. But history also shows that without national conversion, urban radicalism tends to be noisy, but short-lived. The question now is whether Mamdani’s New York will be remembered as the beginning of a broader political realignment or as another chapter in the recurring story of municipal idealism meeting the hard wall of American federalism and decades of fiscal conservative entrenchment.

Mamdanism can only hope to reshape the country if it can capture the centre. For now, the mayor elect’s supporters may see in his radicalism the first stirrings of a new era. However, his achievements will depend less on what happens in City Hall than on what happens in Washington DC.