Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has prompted triumphalism in his supporters and despondency among his detractors. Depending on your political proclivities, the Big Apple is about to become one of two things: a revolutionary utopia where New Yorkers City-Bike from their socialised studio apartments to their worker-owned creativity pods, stopping off in Times Square to catch the latest proceedings of the People’s Tribunal on Landlordism and Transphobia, or an Islamo-Marxist caliphate in which Wall Street is nationalised, the Statue of Liberty draped in a burqa and the NYPD merged with Hezbollah.
At risk of spoiling everyone’s fun, I’d like to offer a prediction: Mamdani will not be a transformational mayor in either the way his partisans long for or his critics fear. He’ll do things, for sure, some of them satisfying to people who like him and infuriating to those who don’t, but I’d wager that much of what he does will be symbolic, or of greater cultural than material import. For one, the mayor has only so much swing in economic affairs and much of it is limited to signalling and creating either a sympathetic or hostile environment for growth and prosperity. For another, David Dinkins lives long in the memory. The Democrat made history in 1990, becoming the first black politician to win the mayoralty, but a chaotic administration, racial tensions, and ongoing fear of crime (even as it continued to trend downwards) saw New Yorkers turn to Rudy Giuliani and Democrats spent the next two decades locked out of the city’s highest office. Mamdani will not want to become another Dinkins.
So while the rhetoric coming out of the mayor’s office will lurch leftwards the policies are likely to remain mainstream centre-left, perhaps with the boundaries pushed here and there. The NYPD will not be defunded. Its working practices will be hindered, arresting and prosecuting criminals made more difficult, and racial and ethnic communalism promoted even more than it already is. Law and order won’t collapse, but cops will learn to think before making an arrest or pursuing charges in cases where the identity characteristics of the suspect, victim or scene of crime could cause ‘community tensions’.
There will also be lots of symbolic separating of New York from anything to do with Israel, once unthinkable given the city’s large Jewish contingent but now unavoidable since mass immigration has transformed the population and added to the pre-existing anti-Semitism of certain groups. For a large part of the twentieth century, and particularly since the second world war, New York has been one of the most Jewish and one of the most philo-Semitic cities in the world. That will no longer be the case, but this process predates Mamdani. He just won’t be in any rush to halt or reverse it.
The Mamdani years will be frustrating for Republicans and centrist Democrats
Mamdani will bring neither communism nor Islamism to New York because he is neither a communist nor an Islamist. He’s not even a socialist, not really, and is better understood as an identity-politics progressive in the mould of Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, and Barack Obama, three solid examples of leftist candidates who, once in office, were much more vocal on cultural issues than on economic matters. Mamdani will follow the same trajectory and while his most eager backers revel now, they will settle first for triggering the cons, then for pragmatism when Mamdani moderates for re-election, then will come frustration and disappointment and betrayal. By which point they will have coalesced around another great new hope and will be too busy projecting their ideological aspirations and political psychodramas onto him or her to reflect on the lessons of Mamdani.
The Mamdani years will be frustrating for Republicans and centrist Democrats, and perhaps uncomfortable and even unpleasant for self-respecting Jews. Racial wounds will be prodded, sectarianism fostered, Global South causes paid new lip service. But for most New Yorkers the changes in their lives and their city will be achingly modest. Mamdani is not here to tear down the capitalist system. As a child of privilege, raised by an academic and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, sent to private schools and a ‘Little Ivy’ college, Mamdani has done pretty well out of that system and isn’t about to do anything to change that. Like other privileged progressives who talk economic radicalism but practice elite identitarianism, Mamdani will make all the left noises and all the right moves.
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