Zohran Mamdani’s Fantasy Island
"There is a version of American liberalism that treats progress as a shared destiny, social improvement being the gradual and unstoppable realization of the popular hope for a better country and world. This was the rhetoric of the Obama era, a time when the arc of history was bending ever forward and when liberals saw their coming accomplishments as the just and natural fulfillment of past movements and ideas. Leaving aside Zohran Mamdani’s statement that the now widely reviled Bill de Blasio was the best New York City mayor of his lifetime, the 33-year-old state assemblyman and Democratic Party mayoral candidate makes no claims to be completing something that somebody else began. Mamdani dreams of turning America’s capitalist engine into a national beacon of entitlement, a place where the authorities solve all major problems of body and spirit: “A life of dignity should not be reserved for a fortunate few,” Mamdani said in his victory speech on June 24. “It should be one that city government guarantees for each and every New Yorker.”
Who doesn’t want “a life of dignity” guaranteed by City Hall? Reality isn’t so accommodating: Leftist experiments in American municipal governance have been a bloody and wasteful disappointment, swiftly earning the hatred of the people these projects claimed to have wanted to help. In San Francisco, progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin lost a 2022 recall election amid the city’s nationally embarrassing deterioration. By 2021, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the once-renowned progressive mayor of Atlanta, was too unpopular to run for reelection. In New York, the left-wing de Blasio, an admirer of the Sandinistas in his youth and probably beyond, struggled to break double digits in polls for a Park Slope congressional primary after two unpopular terms in Gracie Mansion...
Mamdani wants a $30 minimum wage, which would strangle law-abiding businesses or drive service jobs into the selectively tolerated informal economy; an indefinite freeze on government-regulated apartment rents, which would further warp an already distorted and exorbitant housing market; a halt on hiring police officers and a focus on a new Department of Community Safety, an experiment that might jeopardize the city’s significant but fragile recent reductions in crime; and free bus service, which would deprive the Metropolitan Transit Authority of about a third of a billion dollars in annual revenue in order to turn the city’s transit fleet into a rolling homeless shelter.
These are not changes that a majority of New Yorkers seem to want. The most optimistic polls for Mamdani have him at about 40 percent support among registered voters...
The triumph of a leftism with limited appeal in New York and poor results in the rest of the country increasingly seems inevitable in the New York City that Bill de Blasio built. Inchoate plans for multiple anti-Mamdani super PACs are currently so disorganized that the consultants involved are trashing each other in public: “The usual gaggle of members of the political industrial complex are going to grab as much cash as they can,” Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic political operative, told The New York Times. Centrist Democratic donors in finance and real estate are hesitant to oppose the new face of their party, out of fear of never again being invited to join a museum board or a gallerist dinner or of having their children targeted by private school teachers and administrators who are part of the rising Mamdani voter class...
The city’s Jewish leaders are approaching Mamdani as if he were already in Gracie Mansion...
The reported 63 percent of New York City Democrats who support Mamdani’s policy of arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who often visits New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly each September. Netanyahu’s capture is a titillating left-wing fantasy, speaking to a widely held expectation of a different politics creating an entirely new city and world. The fantasy runs aground fairly quickly. What crime would the city charge Netanyahu with? How would the NYPD even transport Netanyahu to the Hague? The United States is not a member of the Rome Statute and thus is outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, meaning Mamdani and most city Democrats seek to defy the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and enforce laws and treaties that have no status on American soil.
The overwhelming support for this fantasy—an unrealistic, symbolic fever dream—of arresting the Israeli prime minister is true to the city’s current realities, ones that have been obvious long before Mamdani’s ascension. For the past decade, New York has reflected the illusions of its rising power centers: namely, young and often childless transplanted degree holders living off public or family subsidies or sometimes both. This is an inherently mobile and perhaps even temporary population that either is insulated from the consequences of urban decline or believes its own values and worldview to be the solution to the evident problems in its midst. Mamdani’s impending victory isn’t the result of what he believes or promises, but of the slow death of New York’s pragmatic and productive middle class and of its replacement with a new category of city dwellers who serve as the implementing middle layer between an activist government and the society it experiments upon. New York is now a city with hundreds of thousands of little Zohran Mamdanis, an agenda-setting constituency of the subsidized that’s at last found a leader and a voice.
Zohran Mamdani first reached elected office in 2021. He defeated four-term Democratic incumbent state assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, a 46-year-old former lawyer, City Hall staffer, and Community Planning Board member who belongs to the century-old Greek immigrant community of northwestern Queens. Mamdani, then 29 years old, had been rejected from The Nation’s internship program after graduating from college. He then tried to launch a rap career and worked as a music coordinator on a Disney-produced film directed by his mother, Mira Nair. His sole qualification for public office was his relatively brief time as a housing counselor for Chhaya Community Development Corporation, an organization that works with low- and middle-income South Asian communities in Jackson Heights, in central Queens.
To dismiss this résumé as a multinational trust-fund kid’s laughable excuse for a career is also to misunderstand how power is now organized within Democratic Party verticals in major cities. Groups like Chhaya have become one of the primary instruments of public policy in New York, where social programs are often carried out through the public subsidy of nonprofit private-sector partners—groups with the freedom to be less accountable, more sectarian, and more ideological than government tends to be. In New York City, nonprofits received $20 billion in public money in 2021. In 2019, Chhaya got $595,000 in government grants, accounting for one-third of the organization’s revenue...
The public-private trough would prove even more helpful to Mamdani when he entered politics. In New York City, a taxpayer-funded matching program pays candidates eight dollars for every one dollar they raise from city residents whose donations are $250 or lower. This is twice what New York’s public match rate was in 1998, and a generous multiplier by national standards: In contrast, in Baltimore mayoral elections, candidates get a nine-to-one multiplier on the first $25 of a sub-$150 donation, which drops to five to one on the next $50 and then two to one up to $150. So far, Mamdani’s campaign for mayor has received $2.5 million in private funds and $9.8 million in public funds. His celebrated campaign videos, a Cocomelon-style overload of quick cuts and lush lighting, were largely paid for out of the public coffers.
A lot of New Yorkers now have jobs and backgrounds very similar to Mamdani’s. New York is thought of as the sink-or-swim epicenter of American capitalism, but that’s not true anymore. The city is home to more than 600,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector and a roughly equal number of jobs in government. Nonprofits now employ nearly 17 percent of the city’s total private-sector workforce, compared to 10 percent nationally. Wage growth in the nonprofit sector healthily outpaced the rest of the private sector statewide in New York between 2017 and 2022, 29.3 to 25.3 percent.
Nonprofit-dominated sectors are also adding jobs at a far higher rate than any other part of the city’s economy. Of 67,000 new jobs added in New York City in the year before May of 2025, 63,800 were in “private education and health services.” During the same period, the city created an anemic 600 jobs in trade, transportation, and utilities and lost 4,900 jobs in manufacturing and construction. This continued a long-standing trend: Between 2010 and 2015, the time when leadership of the city shifted from the centrist liberal patrician Michael Bloomberg to the progressive Bill de Blasio, the city added 158,000 total jobs in the nonprofit-heavy health care, education, media, and arts sectors, compared to 58,400 total in traditional outer-borough industries like construction, transportation, wholesale trade, manufacturing, and real estate.
It is natural that the nonprofit masses have organized themselves into a political force. One of the first major organizations to endorse Mamdani in the mayoral primary was Region 9A of the United Auto Workers, which may sound strange to outsiders because there’s almost no automobile manufacturing in New York. The ever-flexible UAW is instead one of the key organizers of the city’s subsidized professional class...
The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s massive public school employees union, endorsed Mamdani in early July. The group has a $4.5 million annual political budget, which in fairness is a small fraction of the $175 million it receives in revenue each year.
Many of the most recognizable faces in New York politics are now creatures of the subsidized knowledge economy. People such as Randi Weingarten, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Zephyr Teachout, the activist and legal theorist, remain fixtures and power centers despite never having served in elected office. No serious politician attempts a run at a major office in New York without meeting with Al Sharpton, nonprofit industry pioneer and longtime director of the National Action Network. Sharpton appeared at a Harlem rally with Mamdani in late June, days after he locked up the Democratic nomination despite his notably poor performance in Black neighborhoods. Antonio Reynoso, Brooklyn’s young progressive borough president and a possible future mayor, began his working life as a community organizer for ACORN. Linda Sarsour rose to local and national prominence as director of the Arab American Association of New York. Sarsour’s good friend Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a crucial Mamdani primary endorser, headed a nonprofit development corporation in Park Slope and the nonprofit Pratt Center for Community Development before entering electoral politics in the late 2000s...
The nonprofit sector occupies the lower-earning tier of the generally high-earning New York knowledge economy and is effectively a system for either mobilizing or warehousing idealistic college graduates. It happens that the degree holders who voted for Mamdani in overwhelming numbers in the June primary belong to one of the city’s fastest-growing demographic groups. In 2010, some 38.7 percent of adult New Yorkers held bachelor’s degrees; today the number is 44 percent, seven percentage points higher than the nationwide number. In 2023, 6 percent of all four-year degree holders who moved to a new city within the United States moved to New York, which is roughly twice the rate at which they headed to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Degree holders are clustered in neighborhoods that went heavily for Mamdani: 79 percent of residents in the pro-Mamdani brownstone-belt neighborhoods of Park Slope and Cobble Hill hold a bachelor’s degree or higher; in Mamdani’s own Astoria, the rate is 55 percent.
It is proof of the city’s continued vitality that it can attract
educated and ambitious people. What’s strange is that the influx
occurred at a time when life became untenable for large numbers of New
Yorkers who have lived here all their lives. The New York City
unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, worse than the national figure of 4.2
percent. Rents have shot up by about a third since 2019, both despite
and because of a 2019 rent control law passed in Albany. The ability to
live comfortably in New York increasingly depends on either home
ownership or the protection of the government from the forces of a
housing market that it warps by decree. Today, only about a third of
housing units in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens are unregulated. The
roughly 40 percent of Brooklyn units, 43 percent of Manhattan units, 54
percent of Bronx units, and 25 percent of Queens units that are either
regulated or counted as public housing are home to yet another vast
population of subsidized New Yorkers.
The subsidized classes rose in
power as the city’s productive industries faded. New York has gone from
about 1 million manufacturing jobs in 1955 to fewer than 45,000 today,
with construction and wholesale seeing a similar decline during the same
period, from 750,000 to a shade under 500,000 jobs. The NYPD, a
longtime source of lower-middle-class employment and social mobility,
has gone from 40,000 active officers in 2000 to 34,000 today. The
multigenerational working class—the remnant of the city’s
mid-to-late-20th-century mix of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Irish,
and Italians—has shrunk in relative size and power. New York’s Black
population has contracted this century, from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.7
million in 2020. Similarly, the city’s Puerto Rican population plunged from 715,000 to 574,000 between 2017 and 2022 alone.
While NGO activist types often sneer at departures from the city as cases of “white flight” or of people too dainty or bigoted to endure life in New York, the numbers say otherwise. Some 200,000 Black people left New York between 2017 and 2022, along with 300,000 Hispanics and 200,000 Asians. Nearly 450,000 white people left during the same period—but white inflows from within the United States numbered roughly 275,000, nearly equal to the domestic inflow totals from the Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations combined.
The well-educated, heavily subsidized global citizens who have replaced the middle-class and industrial working-class New Yorkers of prior decades have an outlook almost surrealistically different from these earlier cohorts. You can glimpse their values in the increasing freakishness of the physical environment. The bike-sharing program Citi Bike is convenient for single individuals but useless for anyone who has to travel with kids or with more than one person. Rows of bikes now take up sidewalks and parking spaces, a blunt announcement of who the urban environment is supposed to be for: namely, childless or single people with short commutes or no commute. The one green space in the neo-Bohemian theme park of Bushwick―a once heavily Puerto Rican area where 75 percent of the white residents hold college degrees, compared to 25 percent of their Hispanic neighbors, who the white arrivals barely interact with—is named after Maria Hernandez, a New York-born activist of Puerto Rican background who organized efforts to evict drug dealers from the neighborhood. In return for this good work, the pushers assassinated Hernandez, a 34-year-old mother of three, in her home across the street from the park in 1989. Today, virtually the entirety of Bushwick is an open-air market for trendy recreational drugs, including the park that bears Hernandez’s name. Across town, in tony Park Slope, a marijuana “dispensary” with Apple Store-like aesthetics is mere feet away from the youth soccer fields at the Old Stone House. Few people seem to find this close juxtaposition of children’s sports and state-sanctioned drug-dealing the least bit odd or see it as an obvious sign of a society whose values and priorities have reached the point of moral surrealism. Flailing governor and current mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo legalized the use and sale of recreational marijuana, much of it of brain-melting potency, in 2021, long before Mamdani ran for the city’s highest office.
Mamdani’s success is the culmination of a series of hard-earned victories for the left-wing nonprofit-industrial complex, a winning streak that no one in the city has been able to stop or even arrest for a very long time. In September of 2023, Eric Adams’ administration announced that it had reached an agreement with nonprofits that were suing the city over the NYPD’s treatment of demonstrators during the 2020 Black Lives Matter unrest, a group that included the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society. It was Adams, not Mamdani, who prohibited the NYPD from interfering with unannounced protests until they had reason to believe a crime was in progress, among other novel restrictions on the department’s tactics and conduct. New York City voters approved Adams-supported ballot initiatives that created a new government racial equity office and inserted the objective of establishing “a just and equitable city for all” into the city charter preamble in 2022. Over $2.4 million in City Council member discretionary funding went to organizations that planned and executed the anti-Israel campouts at New York universities in the spring of 2024, funding that had started a decade earlier, when Mamdani was getting rejected as a Nation intern. A compost mandate, whereby the city can theoretically fine anyone found not to be composting—a process that uses up far more energy than it saves—is a Mamdaniesque absurdity that became law in April, months before he won the mayoral primary.
The list goes on. The city is required by statute to close the Rikers Island jail facility in August of 2027, regardless of whether it has built any replacements. Bill de Blasio finalized that decision in October of 2019, a time when Mamdani was still working for a housing nonprofit in Queens. The generous matching fund program, a large public boost for candidates too new or extreme to have an existing support base, dates from 1988 and went from a 6:1 to an 8:1 match in 2018. The ranked-choice voting system for Democratic primaries, another boon to political entrepreneurs, exists because of a successful city ballot question in 2019, which is the same year the state passed the most sweeping rent regulation law in its history. De Blasio packed New York’s rent guidelines board and instructed it to freeze all regulated rents on three occasions, in 2015, 2016, and 2020, a move that seems to have done nothing to stanch the city’s very real affordability crisis and, in fact, conceivably worsened it. Mamdani proposes free regular MTA bus service, even though city buses already run off of a de facto pay-what-you-wish system: More than half of riders dodge their fares as it is, costing the MTA $315 million a year. Those likely to decry the destructive failures of the upcoming Mamdani mayoralty are also likely to forget that we have already been living the dreams of the subsidized class for some time, while they said and did nothing to stop the city’s obvious decline.
The subsidized were instruments of the decline, which they inflicted on their fellow New Yorkers through their ground-breaking adventures in housing, urban planning, public order, and racial and environmental justice. New York is their city now: In a place where civic life is organized around the imperatives of nonprofits and their adjuncts, like law firms and media organizations, finding productive employment and a secure life becomes a matter of education, personal connections, individual political beliefs, and class. This is an ideal place for the global rich and their children, who embrace the religion of civic virtue in part as a way of disguising what they refer to in others as “privilege.” They are part of a rising tide. An astonishing 40 percent of New Yorkers now live in a household with a pretax income of $115,000 or more. Meanwhile, the lowest-earning 40 percent of the population makes $66,000 or less in a city where the median rental price of a two-bedroom apartment is roughly $4,000 a month. It is the former, not the latter, to whom Mamdani appeals.
The New York of the nonprofits is a place where people of diverse backgrounds no longer see a future for themselves. People without great wealth, or lives paid for by trust funds and public subsidies, find it difficult or impossible to raise children here. In 2000, the city’s public school enrollment was 1.06 million. In 2024, it was 938,189, a nearly 9 percent decline at a time when New York’s population rose from 8 million to an estimated 8.4 million.
Mamdani aims to finance his proposals with new levies on the city’s high earners—but New York City residents were already paying the highest taxes in the country outside of California in the late 2010s, even before then Gov. Cuomo authorized a new millionaires’ tax in 2021. It is because of Mamdani’s strained relationship to his mainstream liberal inheritance that his rhetoric on Israel is something more than a side issue. Mamdani’s enthusiasm for arresting leaders of the Jewish state in defiance of U.S. law is a signal that he intends a decisive break not just with New York’s history of pragmatic urban politics but also with its existing and already victorious progressive tradition, which he sees as too limited, too soft, and too local in outlook. He has cultivated the aesthetics of someone from beyond any conceivable status quo, offering the pose and promise of something totally new. In a move as discussed as it was misunderstood, Mamdani cannily filmed himself eating a Halal cart platter with his hands in public, a practice unknown among New York’s Middle Eastern or South Asian immigrant community and thus an innovation designed to broadcast how little the candidate believes he owes to anyone else’s sense of the possible...
His supporters think they are protected from the changes he proposes, or they hope that the consequences of his experiments will fall only on the deserving. Voters in San Francisco, Atlanta, and the New York of the 2010s were stung by similar hopes. Perhaps in a few years, when the tide of human damage reaches the brownstones, New Yorkers will make the belated discovery that a mostly unwilling city of 8.4 million people isn’t the best insulating material for subsidized dreams. By then, at least some part of the NGO class will have decamped to Austin or someplace that isn’t yet broken. Once settled, they can try their experiments on a fresh batch of human beings who will then claim to have been unaware of what was happening to their city until it was too late."
