Mamdani, Part II
This post has taken a bit of a different turn than I’d originally intended, as I’ve been thinking about what we, as a political collective, deem normal, acceptable or inevitable on the one hand, and dangerous, extreme, too risky and ultimately unacceptable on the other.
So, I’m going to say something about what the terms socialism on the one hand, and capitalism and “free markets,” on the other tend to connote, focusing especially on the latter two. Because while socialism is generally an epithet in our politics (though much less so among younger people), free markets are considered quintessentially American.
This is, of course, pertinent to Zohran Mamdani’s primary win in the New York City Mayor’s race and the national lightning rod he’s already become.
Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and that organization, which has a meaningful presence in New York state and city politics, powered much of his ground game in his winning primary campaign. Mamdani certainly does not shy away from the term “socialist” — the word appears on his own campaign website and he’s unapologetic about describing himself as such. That label, “socialist” also connotes for many people an ideologue, someone with rigid, extreme views. Some of Mamdani’s policy proposals track with people’s ideas about what a socialist would like to do in power — give away free stuff and have the government run things. Mamdani has proposed that New York City buses be free for riders. And his plan for the City to operate grocery stores is, well, an example of a government running a business.
One thing, however that has struck me in the videos Mamdani puts out, in the interviews he’s done that I’ve seen, and on his campaign website, is that Mamdani himself is not much focused on labels. As has been repeatedly noted, the cornerstone of Mamdani’s campaign has been affordability. And when he explains proposals related to affordability and the rationale behind them, he comes across as pragmatic and open to experimentation.
Take the grocery store plan, which has many people in an uproar. Depending on how you count, there are somewhere between ten thousand and thirty thousand grocery stores of various sizes in the city. Mamdani’s pilot is for there to be *5* total city-run groceries, one for each borough. Each would be situated in what is a currently a food desert. Mamdani has estimated that the pilot would cost $60 million, which would be paid from a city fund twice that size that subsidizes existing grocery stores. As Mamdani told Derek Thompson, host of the Plain English podcast, and co-author with Ezra Klein of the smash bestseller, Abundance, if the pilot doesn’t work, he would end it. If it does, he would scale it up. In no universe would city-run groceries become predominant, or indeed more than a tiny fraction of the total sector.
Mamdani has, at times, been critical of capitalism in overarching terms and he comes from a milieu in which the term “anti-capitalist” is common. On the other hand, candidate Mamdani has also argued that small businesses are the backbone of New York’s economy and among his campaign promises is to substantially reduce the red tape would-be small business owners face when they try to get an enterprise off the ground. Other proposals of his, like raising the income tax of those making over a million dollars a year by two percentage points, and increasing the city corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s rate, fall well within the mainstream of typical policymaking.
My point here isn’t to argue that it’s wrong to call Mamdani socialist, so much as it is to question the relevance of that label for what he might do as mayor. More than that, asking what information the term socialist conveys in the American political context is also to question how we frame all of our discourse on economics, including what we mean by the term “free market,” to which socialism is ostensibly juxtaposed.
Modern economies are structured by myriad rules. These include, to name just a very few, those governing the legal enforcement of contracts; ensuring that whatever means of exchange we use - cash, credit, etc. - are recognized as legitimate; oversight functions to prevent fraud and ensure consumer protection. Further, all economies have some system of taxation to raise the money necessary to pay for public goods, like food safety, roads, bridges, air traffic control and the like. Of course, there are vast differences, philosophical and otherwise, about what goods are properly deemed pubic. Only the tiniest sliver of fanatics think there is no such thing as a public good, and therefore no good cause to ever raise taxes.
All governments legislate these and other aspects of our economy. The lie at the heart of the term “free market” is that it reflects a “natural” state of affairs, what would happen in the *absence* of intervention, while only socialism and related frameworks are founded on artificial intrusions into the otherwise unfettered workings of the market. All systems of production, exchange, taxation, regulation, and legal oversight are the result of the laws a polity enacts, and the ways in which those are enforced. In other words, the fundamental question at the heart of our economic debates ought not to whether governments should or shouldn’t intervene. The question is always where, how and for what purpose
To go back to Mamdani’s plan for paying for the city-run groceries. That fund Mamdani would draw from is a small example of a pervasive reality in modern economies, very much including our own: that government regularly subsidizes businesses. That is, it directs taxpayer money to help certain interests, at the expense of others. At the federal level these include the massive Pentagon Budget, a now one trillion dollar annual monstrosity replete with giveaways to major contractors and widely acknowledged to be riddled with waste and fraud. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk has been the recipient of tens of billions of dollars in government largesse. The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, has produced reports for many years documenting the large sums of federal tax dollars go to prop up businesses. And as Dean Baker has been arguing forever, our so-called “free trade” deals are riddled with rules and regulations that “rig” the global economy, and by extension the US economy, to favor the wealthy and powerful, typically at the expense of ordinary workers.
We had a catastrophic financial crisis in 2008, one fueled largely by an insufficiently regulated mortgage market, that resulted in millions of foreclosures and shook the financial system to its core. The government responded by providing hundreds of billions (or trillions of dollars) in various forms of aid to some of our biggest, most well connected financial institutions. This was all deemed necessary to ensure stability, to provide “responsible stewardship” of the economy. The result was that many of the wealthiest, most well-heeled actors, including those most responsible for the crisis were made whole. At the same time, millions of ordinary Americans lost their homes to foreclosure and many millions more lost their jobs in the ensuing economic downturn, one that took the US economy years to recover from for the non-rich. One can argue that all of this was necessary, correct, etc. One *cannot* seriously argue that this massive and highly selective intervention in the face of the crisis reflects “free market” principles. Instead, it’s a paradigmatic illustration of what critics of United States economic policy have long argued — that our system is characterized by “socialism for the rich, free markets for the poor.”
Inequality in the United States has increased enormously over the past few decades. To take one data point, according to the Federal Reserve, in 1989, the top one tenth of one percent of US households had two and a half times the wealth of the bottom half of all households combined, an already gargantuan skew in wealth. In 2025, that ratio is five and a half to one. In plainer terms, the roughly 130,000 richest households possess aggregate wealth of over 22 trillion dollars. By contrast, the roughly 65 million least well off households have a total combined wealth of about four trillion. There’s nothing more “natural” about the wealth gap in 2025 versus 1989. Those differences result substantially from policy choices.
Indeed, it’s a fundamental failure of our political discourse that terms like “free market” retain such universal currency, when they so fundamentally misrepresent the true nature of our market system. The appeal to “nature” is a powerful tool for obscuring the ways in which our economy is structured by policy, not nature, to benefit some at the expense of others.
New York reflects some of these choices. By one standard measure, the Gini coefficient, it’s the most unequal city in the United States. It’s long been an expensive place to live and has become significantly more so in recent years. The growing problem of affordability, combined with the enormous concentration in wealth, resulted in an unusually stark choice for Democratic primary voters. On one side was Mamdani, the self-described democratic socialist, who built a massive army of volunteers and maxed out his public matching funds from small dollar donors. And on the other, Andrew Cuomo, backed by a Super Pac, Fix the City, that raised at least $25 million, including $8 million from billionaire former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, with additional support from the likes of Walmart heiress Alice Walton, and billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman (who has promised to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Mamdani this fall) among other upper crusters. Much of Cuomo’s platform was pretty standard liberal fare. But he entered the race in March clearly intending to thwart the rise of the upstart Mamdani, whom he and his donor allies have treated as a Defcon 5 level threat to city, as has Eric Adams.
At the heart of the big money freakout over Mamdani’s candidacy, I would argue is an elite sense of entitlement stemming from what I said at the outset — that what they regard as a natural, meritocratic order and their rightful place atop it is being threatened. This in spite of the fact that Mamdani’s most controversial proposals includes a grocery store experiment that has been implemented with little fanfare elsewhere; proposed tax increases (if New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, allows them) that would still leave taxation levels on the rich vastly lower than they were throughout the New Deal era; and free buses, which Belgrade, the capital of Serbia now has! Indeed, just today, it was reported that Mamdani is seriously considering retaining New York City’s Police Chief, Jessica Tisch, herself a billionaire heiress. The Bolshevik Revolution this ain’t.
Even in the best of circumstances, if he wins, a Mayor Mamdani won’t be able to accomplish everything he wants to do, of course. Mamdani can’t control what is happening at the federal level, or in Albany, the state capital that has significant control over the city’s finances. New York is a huge, notoriously unwieldy place to govern. That’s in the future, however. For now, candidate Mamdani has gained political traction by taking seriously the very concrete, day-to-day challenges facing many New Yorkers, while framing those challenges in ways that provide us with an opportunity to turn the focus back on, and scrutinize more fully, our existing arrangements. Americans may not like the term socialism, in the abstract. In 2025, it’s also more ludicrous than ever to use the term “free market” to describe the US economy. It’s possible, therefore, that many Americans today may be more open to politicians who challenge the status quo, both by speaking to their everyday needs and their basic sense of fairness, or indignation about the lack thereof, in an age in which today’s super rich — the billionaires — play a more prominent public role than any since their robber-baron forebears in the late 19th century. Maybe there’s an opportunity to run on that, without demonizing the least well off and most vulnerable among us, whatever one calls onself.