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Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the next mayor of New York City come November, having won the Democratic Party primary this week. That comes as a surprise for several reasons. The 33-year-old Mamdani was little-known prior to the primary campaign, certainly in comparison to the expected front-runner, former state Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But the bigger surprise involves Mamdani’s platform, having run as an unabashed democratic socialist opposed to establishment liberal party politics.
What exactly makes Mamdani a democratic socialist? Why did he mostly earn support from the city’s middle classes? And how dependent is the city on taxes from the wealthy?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: What qualifies Mamdani as a socialist rather than a liberal? How should we differentiate between the two?
Adam Tooze: I think it’s fair to say that he isn’t a liberal either on the more capacious historical definition of what liberalism is or on the narrower definition that characterizes American political discourse today. He isn’t a liberal in the classical sense because he believes that inequality and hierarchy shape society in a structural way, right, not in an accidental way, but in a structural way. And that reform isn’t just a matter of good ideas and the conversion of people’s minds, but of different types of struggle. And he believes in government solutions and various types of dramatic intervention, or even the suspension of market mechanisms on specific issues. He has an evolving position, but he clearly believes in a large and effective government machinery to guide society.
So, on all of those grounds, by any definition, he’s not a classical liberal. He’s not a liberal in the narrower sense of the modern American political scene because he breaches the conventions of polite American political discourse in making those concrete demands, but also notably on his positions, for instance, on Zionism, of which he is resolutely critical. And foreign policy and the associated culture wars have become a kind of key demarcating line around the boundaries of what counts as respectable liberal opinion in the U.S. Though that boundary, the Overton window, has shifted and been forcibly shifted by the scale of the violence in the Middle East. I think that’s the obvious count on which he just breaks the conventions
Is it really appropriate to refer to him as a socialist? I honestly think that appellation only makes sense in the context of the rather weird language games of American politics and the particular ecosystem of New York and its left wing. Not in the sense of sort of ideological commitments. I mean, he is endorsed by the DSA, is close to the DSA—that’s the Democratic Socialists of America, which comes out of the anti-Vietnam War protests and the Students for Democratic Society, SDS, that for a long time lived a very shadowy existence on the margins of American politics. It was founded formally, I think, in 1983 out of a merger of legacy parties and movements coming out of the anti-Vietnam War protests and the student activism of the late ’60s and early ’70s. And then it suddenly surged to prominence, really, after [President Donald] Trump’s election and the mobilization of the left, that is Trump’s first election in 2016. And by 2017 and ’18, in association with the movement around the Green New Deal, acquired real prominence and also a new cohort of explicitly Marxist followers.
If you follow the politics of the DSA closely, you will see that it has moved to the left quite sharply on issues like theoretical foundations in Marxism and, on the other hand, in its anti-Zionism. But then if you ask what Mamdani actually stands for, it sounds just like social democracy in practice. So it doesn’t sound like a kind of aggressive, radical, revolutionary socialism. It isn’t liberalism. But de facto it really amounts to something much closer to social democracy. In other words, free public education, child care, abundant public transport.
The label of socialism is attached to it for good organizational reasons. And yet when you then ask what the candidate they endorse for mayor actually wants to do, coming to it from a European point of view, it looks like social democracy, or indeed, what once would have been the Democratic Party in the New Deal era. So it’s a weird amalgam typical of American politics in the current moment. And we’ll see an awful lot of mudslinging if he does indeed get elected mayor. And that’s still an open question, because the enemies will mobilize against him in New York now. There will be an awful lot of mudslinging. I think Trump’s already denounced him as, what, a loony Marxist or something?
CA: Mamdani has emphasized the slogan of “affordability” as the centerpiece of his campaign. And the election data shows that primarily New York’s middle classes came out to vote for him. So what has been revealed about the city as a result?
AT: What it reveals is that New York really is an extraordinary city. And we should do a full episode about the economics of New York, maybe several. I mean, it’s a fabulous city, and the Mamdani campaign is also a kind of campaign of pride in the city. Or every politician competing for votes in New York has to say this. And with good reason, it’s an extraordinary place. But it’s also extraordinary in just how expensive it is to live there. So you’re completely right, Cam, that the sort of figures that folks will see quoted as average incomes in New York, which would put them in the higher echelons of the middle class in most of Europe, for instance, are no joke, no exaggeration, difficult to live on in New York, because of the cost of housing, because of cost of child care, because of costs of groceries. It is truly staggering, and it always takes a mental adjustment for me when I return from New York to anywhere else to actually realize that that’s how much food might cost. I literally walk out of German supermarkets generally thinking I must have somehow accidentally not paid for something. There’s such a huge gap in the cost of living.
And that’s really what’s driving the vote, and it’s what’s driving Mamdani’s program. You see it in the program in this advocacy of a higher minimum wage, a cap on already rent-controlled apartments, an effort to provide a wider array of free child care, and then in this proposal, which is going to grab headlines, which is to establish publicly owned low-cost grocery outlets. Which would strike most people as insane until you’ve actually bought a family’s worth of groceries in New York on any given day.
And it reflects his electorate, which is quite interesting. Because if you look at the gradation in terms of income level, where he really scores is with the struggling middle class, that is folks who are earning on average $65,000 to $70,000—which in New York is a low starting salary, believe it or not, compared to anywhere else, which, you know, that’s a mid-career at the very least kind of salary—through to, you know, $150,000, which most of the world would be like, you know, an extraordinary end-of-career success story and in New York is still part of the struggling middle class because of the cost of living.
And Cuomo has a more kind of Trumpian vote band, which is at the higher end. So college-educated, middle-income, in New York terms, people are the classic progressive voters, but it goes all the way down into the public-service sector. And the lower-end voters with lower incomes in predominantly Black neighborhoods actually tended to vote Cuomo. So it’s a very interesting left-right, if we can call it that, division within the city, which is driven by interpretations of the problem of the affordability crisis and what might be the best solutions for it. It’s not really clear to me that Cuomo has any answers at all, but that’s certainly the line on which Mamdani ran, around which if he does govern, that’s where he will be judged. And it’s a tall order, because addressing the cost of living in a city with such exaggerated incomes as New York is going to be really hard.
CA: Cuomo argued that Mamdani’s promises of increased public services will require increased taxes, which will lead to the wealthiest New Yorkers leaving New York and thus deprive the city of taxes that it relies on. How seriously should this threat be taken? And how dependent is the city on taxes from the wealthy?
AT: So this is really bare-knuckle class politics, and it’s its most very straightforward form. You’re absolutely right. Big money piled in, Bloomberg and other billionaires put their money behind Cuomo—despite the fact the guy was disgraced in office. It’s really quite extraordinary that they thought that this would be an appropriate comeback job for him. Mamdani is suggesting a surtax on people owning over a million dollars. And the threat really is that of a double blackmail. I mean, A, the wealthy, the rich, the largest corporate earners will leave the city, and in the meantime, they’ll run an independent candidate
The disparity in incomes and wealth in New York is so enormous that it is directly reflected in the tax system. So there’s about 28,000 people in the city of about 9 to 10 million that declare over a million dollars in income a year. There’s about 4,400 who declare $5 million, and there’s 1,600 people who file taxes for incomes of over $10 million. So this is this sort of hardcore group. And the people who filed over $1 million contribute about 42 percent of the personal income tax liability. And this is the nature of the American tax system, it doesn’t bite very deeply on anyone, but it’s really quite progressive and it bites hard at the top. For New York state, the New York component of that doesn’t actually progress, and part of the proposal from the New York left is to actually make the New York component more progressive and to actually raise that. So that’s the kind of proportions we’re talking about. We’re talking about a couple of 10,000 extremely affluent New Yorkers who are resisting a politics that is pushing in the interests of millions of people.
And so the ultimate threat is that wealthy taxpayers will escape and they’ll move to lower-tax jurisdictions. And they do do this, but they do it much less than you would think, because the vast majority of people earning those kinds of salaries are earning them as a result of success in employment. And employment is actually quite closely tied to location. And so it’s only really in certain sectors and it’s certain sorts of wealth and prosperity that are mobile. And the one that really attracts all the headlines in New York is the financial sector and the exodus that we saw during COVID on the part of several significant fund management firms. And they all really go to two places. They either go to Florida or they go to Tennessee. And both of these are red states. Tennessee is particularly attractive with the crypto crowd, and Florida has emerged and Miami has emerged as a major high-end finance center. And about 158 companies relocated after COVID; they took about a trillion dollars in assets management with them.
But that was the limit of it, and that was under the extreme shock of COVID. And Mamdani is not threatening to do anything that would suggest an attack on the interests of Wall Street per se. And so I think one should take these threats with a pinch of salt, to be honest. I think they’re a kind of bluff, they’re a kind of aggressive intimidation tactic. And one should challenge rich Americans. I mean, on the whole, the real problem of living in New York is that it’s expensive. And if you’re that kind of wealthy, you can afford it. Living in New York is actually a privilege that only really the affluent can easily afford, right? That’s the logic. And so it’s kind of perverse to say, “We’re gonna make living in New York a little bit more expensive and therefore I’m going to take my huge wealth somewhere else because at the margin, it’s now slightly, slightly more expensive.” When one looks at these people’s incomes, these people’s salaries, their wealth assets, the idea that a marginal increase in tax should shift them one way or another, I think, it’s blowing smoke, to be honest. And the left should call their bluff.