Zohran Mamdani’s progressive intifada will be a disaster for New York

Whoever is elected New York City mayor in November, Zohran Mamdani’s impressive win this week in the Democratic mayoral primary marks a breaking point in the party, the city and US society as a whole.

New York, where my family settled 120 years ago, is special. It is America’s capital of intellect, art and, most importantly, capitalism. New York’s financial elite have largely tolerated the ‘progressive’ excesses of the Democrats in recent years, but the prospect of a self-described ‘socialist’ running the city may be a bridge too far. We can expect them to renounce the Democrats altogether or join the mass migration south.

Yet while the financial elites might be reeling from the result, Mamdani’s win was no working-class uprising or revolt of the lower orders. His main rival, former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, did best in heavily black and ethnic white enclaves, many of them quasi-suburban, as well as some elite precincts in Manhattan. Mamdani won most convincingly in the far-from-impoverished hipster belts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Upper East Side and Lower Manhattan. These precincts now dominate a Democratic Party once driven by white ethnics and working-class African Americans.

The key element here is the younger, mostly white, economically marginalised new proletariat – sometimes called the ‘precariat’. They are most lured by Mamdani’s propositions like frozen rents, free buses and childcare – all funded by higher taxes on the wealthy. Their angst reflects the realities of today’s New York, which works for the wealthy elites but suffers very high levels of inequality. Job growth has been weak and concentrated in low-wage sectors like hospitality and tourism. While incomes for most have stagnated, housing costs have not – rising to record levels this year.

The New York these young people have inherited is no longer the epicentre of economic opportunity. It flourishes largely as a hub for trustafarians, top-tier professionals, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. While New York’s overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has continued to grow. There’s nothing like the job prospects that earlier generations of New Yorkers had – neither in manufacturing nor in business or financial services.

This leaves a new, angry class of Democratic voter that looks not to the likes of the milquetoast, uninspiring Kamala Harris, but to the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the figure most cited as the true face of the Democratic Party and who endorsed Mamdani. AOC and Mamdani share not only a political base but also hard-left economic, anti-Israel and green views.

Mamdani has embraced the woke left’s cultural agenda fully, on race, gender, climate and defunding the police – views that are rejected by the vast majority of Americans outside the urban cores. But there is some salience in his left-wing, economic populism beyond New York City. By roughly four to one, Americans favour much higher taxes on the rich, longer holidays and government-imposed cuts to pharmaceutical prices. Rising inequality and the fear of downward mobility drive support for expanded government and wealth redistribution.

Yet it would be a mistake to see Mamdani’s success in New York as a precursor to left-wing victories at the national level. The problem for such candidates is that most middle- and working-class Americans don’t protest, much less riot, when their cities and states go downhill – they just move somewhere less stressed and more promising, mostly to the suburbs. Those who remain in the cities are now totally unrepresentative of America as a whole.

The economic trends are also against cities like New York. In major metropolitan areas, more than 75 per cent of jobs have long been based outside downtowns and large commercial centres. Later data show that between 2010 and 2017, 91 per cent of employment growth in major metros occurred outside central business districts. High-rise offices, the economic structures that define places like New York, have experienced declining occupancy rates since the turn of the century. New construction has also slowed. This matters: commercial property taxes account for around one-third of New York’s budget. Note to future mayor Mamdani: when offices are empty, the city loses revenue. That’s your future tax base disappearing.

The left seems not to have noticed this or perhaps doesn’t care. We can expect Mamdani to persist with his fantasy politics of rent control, free buses and government-owned grocery stores, even as those expected to fund his projects flee for sunnier, redder states. Mayors of a similar progressive stripe – such as Chicago’s Brandon Johnson and LA’s Karen Bass – have already left legacies of staggering mismanagement and have overseen significant population flight.

All of this amounts to an undeserved gift to the Trumpians, formerly known as the Republican Party. Vice-president JD Vance was quick to congratulate Mamdani as the ‘new leader’ of the Democrats. The GOP seems eager to identify Democrats with the Mamdani / AOC wing and to foreground their potty views on transgenderism, defunding the police and anti-Zionism.

Certainly, Mamdani’s triumph will do little to slow the ongoing migration from blue states like New York and California to the red states. Key industries like aerospace are relocating to Texas and Florida, while cities like Miami and Dallas jostle to replace New York in finance. The Democrats are not just undermining their own cities – they’re also creating fertile ground for a Republican resurgence.

Meanwhile, New York’s Jewish community – long a mainstay of Democratic voting and finance – seem understandably traumatised by the result, given Mamdani’s endorsement of the slogan ‘globalise the intifada’. He says it’s a call for ‘equality and human rights’; Jews see it as a call for violent anti-Semitic terror.

Is there a possible counter to the rise of the progressives? Business-minded moderates have recently won mayoral races in blue cities like Houston and San Francisco. Some anti-police, pro-criminal district attorneys have been recalled or voted out in recent years.

Somewhere, even in the bluest cities, there must still be enough intelligence to realise that Mamdani’s politics is no way to deliver the prosperity, liberty and security that voters deserve.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.