(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Is Zohran Mamdani a ‘Crazed Socialist?’ — A Closer Look [1]
['Chris Green']
Date: 2025-07
Since democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won a decisive victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s June 24th Democratic mayoral primary, leading establishment personalities in the political and economic sphere have attacked him with a combination of Islamophobia, anti-immigrant racism, smears of anti-semitism and predictions of economic apocalypse should Mamdani win the mayoral general election in November. New York’s billionaire businessmen have had meetings strategizing about ways to derail Mamdani’s seemingly likely election victory in November. These business elites are frightened by Mamdani’s proposals to significantly raise NYC’s minimum wage, open government run grocery stores, and raise taxes on millionaires and businesses in order to find free childcare, social housing, free bus service and free tuition at the city’s public colleges.
The red baiting has been particularly heavy. Fox Business Network journalist Charles Gasparino, writing in the New York Post, called Mamdani a “crazed socialist.” President Trump called him a “100 percent Communist lunatic. In a hysterical June 30th Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, billionaire NYC supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis compared Mamdani to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, predicting that were he to be elected and implement his proposal for government run supermarkets in the city, the result would be “poverty, rationing and hunger…[it] would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.”
Other establishment commentators have been somewhat calmer but offered no less dire predictions about the consequences of a potential Mamdani mayoralty. For example, Lucy Biggers, social media editor at The Free Press, wrote a June 30th column, criticizing Trump’s crude red-baiting of Mamdani as too harsh; she nonetheless argued that his democratic socialist policies would “literally ruin civilization.” Larry Summers, former treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, asserted that Mamdani’s democratic socialism ideology has “a history of perpetuating poverty and poor social service”; he predicted Mamdani’s election would cause a massive capital flight–entrepreneurial talent as well as money–out of the city toward the Republican states of Florida and Texas. Similarly New York’s business friendly Democratic governor Kathy Hochul attacked Mamdani’s proposals for increasing taxes on NYCs’ wealthy and businesses as likely to cause significant capital flight.
Are any of the commentators quoted above correct? Is Mamdani a “crazed socialist?” Will the inevitable result of the implementation of his policies be: “perpetuating poverty and poor social service?”
My answer to each of these questions is: no. I will point out that Mamdani’s policies are not particularly extreme and are actually in line with historical and contemporary models showing that, under the right conditions, they have the potential to significantly strengthen a population’s overall well being and can even contribute to strengthening a capitalist economy. However, the policies do require at least the toleration of the capitalist class: in some countries historically, various cultural factors–including the power of organized labor and established social democratic parties–have compelled the capitalist class to accept economic policies similar to Mamdani’s. However, in a country like the United States–where capital is more dominant over labor than almost anywhere else in the western world–the capitalist class is in a relatively easy position to sabotage the implementation of Mamdani’s agenda were he to become mayor.
Government Run Grocery Stores
Take the Mamdani’s proposal for municipally owned grocery stores, one that seems to have rankled his right wing critics more than any of his other proposals. To dispose of this idea, Biggers wrote in her Free Press column: “just spend time at the DMV and tell me if you want a government run grocery store, as Mamdani is proposing”, implying that such a grocery store would have long lines and poor customer service.
In a commentary for MSNBC’s website, democratic socialist publicist Ben Burgis pointed out that Mamdanis’s proposal for government run grocery stores matches the principles behind government run commissaries on military bases and state government run liquor stores –not the DMV. There are 17 states in the country with public monopolies on liquor sales. Burgis notes that New Hampshire’s public liquor stores are renowned throughout New England for their plentiful and cheap supply of many brands of beer and spirits.
To be clear, as Burgis points out, Mamdani’s idea for a government run grocery store is actually not that extreme. All he has called for is a pilot project whereby one municipally owned grocery store is opened in each of NYC’s five boroughs. This pilot project is designed to address a market failure: the existence of food deserts in some of the city’s neighborhoods: because of lack of profitability, grocery stores have neglected to open–or opened only to a limited extent–in some of the city’s poorer, predominantly black and brown communities, depriving residents of access to fresh meats and produce. In poorer NYC neighborhoods, 30 percent of residents have been classified as “food insecure,” meaning they have limited or uncertain access to nutritious food.
In recent years, similar food deserts in rural areas, deep in the heart of MAGA country, caused the municipalities of Erie, Kansas and Baldwin Florida to open publicly run grocery stores. In the past year, after multiple years in operation and the accumulation of financial difficulties, the Erie store was leased to a private company and the Baldwin store was closed entirely (leaving Baldwin as a food desert). Perhaps the most successful example of a municipally owned grocery store is in the tiny town of St. Paul, Kansas, which the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 had been run successfully for 16 years, and, according to one report, secured a 3 percent annual profit margin, better than average for rural grocery stores.
Housing
In a TikTok video, the above mentioned right wing commentator Lucy Biggers suggested that the average young Mamdani voter is drawn to what are, in her telling, his promises of “free food, free college, free apartments,” because they have immature brain structure (their “frontal lobe is not fully developed.”). In contrast, I believe the real answer for Mamdani’s support is embodied in a recent Wall Street Journal headline: “New York’s Housing Crisis Is So Bad That a Socialist is Poised to Become Mayor.” The Journal reported that the average monthly rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in the city was $5,560, up 17.5 percent over the previous year. In October 2023, the Community Service Society of New York reported that more than a third of NYC renters were paying half their income on rent.
Mamdani’s program revolves around a rent freeze for NYC apartments subjected to rent stabilization regulations (about half of the city’s total apartments) along with significantly increased spending on public housing, reform of zoning laws and the borrowing of $70 billion to subsidize affordable housing and social housing construction. Critics have suggested that his plans may be at least partially sabotaged by the fact that his housing spending plans exceed New York City’s debit limit by $30 billion; that debt limit, under the New York state constitution, is enforced by the New York state government against NYC and all other state municipalities. The chance seems faint that governor Hochul would approve of any significant increases to the NYC debt limit–she has also expressed hostility towards Mamdani’s call for tax increases in NYC which she is legally empowered to veto if she wishes.
Nonetheless it is undeniable that democratic socialist housing models around the world show that if Mamdani can somehow, under very difficult circumstances, cobble together the right amount of revenue and right mix of regulations, he can succeed in providing widespread affordable housing for NYC residents. There are prominent examples around the world of governments providing plentiful, affordable, safe, clean, architecturally attractive and environmentally sustainable housing for working and middle class people. Finland and Norway are just two examples of successful public housing provision around the world; Vienna, the capital of Austria, is perhaps the prominent example in the world of successful public housing provision. In 2024, The Economist named Vienna as the world’s most liveable city. 43 percent of its housing units are public housing: half of these are owned by the local government and the other half are social housing owned by limited profit organizations and heavily regulated by that government. Mamdani has cited the Vienna model as an inspiration to his own housing plan.
In the United States, public housing has the stereotype of being crime infested hellholes. In fact, as The Atlantic reported in 2015, cities like Austin, Texas; Portland, Oregon; and St. Paul Minnesota have developed successful government run housing models. In NYC, the most successful examples of public housing are rooted in the Mitchell-Lama Act passed by the New York state legislature in 1955. Mitchell-Lama measures created a form of social housing in NYC: substantial government subsidies for building mortgages as well as for residents’ apartment down payments and monthly rents or maintenance fees in apartment buildings and co-ops. The result was the creation of safe, affordable, relatively efficiently operated apartments for a small number of working and middle class New Yorkers. Jonathan Tarleton–editor of the NYC newspaper The Indypendent–in his 2025 book Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing and a New American Commons–describes the historical success of social housing in NYC.
Mamdani’s Precedents
There are precedents for successful free market economies following policy along lines posed by Mamdani, in some cases engaging in government economic intervention far more extensive that what he is proposing. There are many worldwide examples of successful government programs that have strengthened the human capital of capitalist economies and produced better quality of life indicators than that achieved in the arch-capitalist United States. This essay does not have the space to list them all but–like the Vienna housing model cited above–here are a few more examples cited below.
In his 2023 book Crack-Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian references the 1978 meeting of the worldwide association of pro-free market academics and business persons, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), in Hong Kong. As they met, leading MPS member Milton Friedman also filmed the first episode of his PBS series Free to Choose in Hong Kong, celebrating the city (then a British colony) as a prime example of free market success with worldwide status as a financial and manufacturing powerhouse. However, Slobodian notes, MPS members discovered something disconcerting while they met in the city: a third of its residents resided in public housing; there was even rent control, something particularly anathema to them. Public housing in the city was significantly expanded after riots among the city’s poor and working class in 1967–the city’s ruling class sought to ensure greater social stability by granting ordinary people concessions.
In the same region of Hong Kong sits Singapore, a paternalistic right wing dictatorship that has been, over the decades, a world leader, in terms of finance and manufacturing, featuring extensive governmental intervention in its economic life. Slobodian notes that Friedman in 1980 blustered that Singapore had become an economic powerhouse “despite extensive interventions of government.” However, Slobodian writes, the reality is that government economic intervention was decisive in Singapore’s economic success:
“…The government built industrial estates and added hundreds of acres of new land to its coastline through massive land reclamation projects. Many of its biggest companies were owned by the state, and huge sovereign wealth funds invested Singaporean savings domestically and globally.”
In addition, nearly 80 percent of Singaporean citizens today live in government run housing–the situation is different for the third of Singapore’s residents who are foreign migrant workers and thus are not entitled to government housing, much less any legal or citizenship rights.
Then there are examples of government economic intervention in ways that strengthen a country’s national economic development as well as strengthen its human capital through government controlled health care.
Take some of the most successful economies in the world: the Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden and Norway). The economic interventions by governments of these three countries make Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to launch a pilot project of a few government run grocery stores in NYC look very puny in comparison. All three Nordic countries have dozens of state owned enterprises operating successfully at the heart of their economies. There are other worldwide examples, like CODELCO, the largest copper company in the world, a state owned enterprise based in Chile (where copper is the largest export), a country which has often been cited by neoliberals as a successful third world model of free market economic development. CODELCO was created under the Pinochet dictatorship in 1976 after the government which Pinochet overthrew, that of Salvador Allende, nationalized Chilean copper resources in 1971.
As for health care, that is where Canada and almost every nation in Western Europe outperforms the US. Of course, Mamdani as a candidate for NYC mayor only marginally addresses health care in his platform and would have no real power as mayor to implement any substantial health care measure. However, Mamdani is a strong supporter of Medicare for All and the latter is usually included as a major part of democratic socialist policy agendas, those which Larry Summers alleged to be guilty of “perpetuating poverty and poor social service.” It is also worth citing something that Dr. Mehmet Oz stated in May in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo:
“We spend twice as much as any other developed country per person on health care–twice as much! And yet the quality of the care we’re getting continues to decline. When I was in medical school, I saw a life expectancy of Americans pretty much equal to Europeans; now we’re five years behind. The number three cause of death in America is a medical error and yet, we’re paying a lot of money to experience results that don’t match that kind of investment.”
Capital Flight
There will be innumerable hindrances facing Mamdani should he win in November. Among them are the seeming unlikeliness of the business friendly governor Hochul approving either his plans for raising NYC’s debt limit or to raise taxes on city businesses and millionaires. Most importantly there is the risk of capital flight: the risk the city’s tax base will be wrecked as investors and businessmen move their money out of the city if Mamdani wins and attempts to pursue his mildly democratic socialist agenda. In order to rein in Mamdani, right wing libertarian Washington Post columnist Megan McCardle, posted on X a call for both Hochul to block Mamdani’s proposed expansionary fiscal policies and for NYC bond holders to conduct a sell-off of the city’s bonds. In order to govern NYC, Mamdani will have to gain the cooperation of NYC’s business elites, convincing them that his policies will be business friendly enough for them to remain in the city.
It is unclear at this point how much capital flight will occur if Mamdani wins election–or how far he will go to accommodate the establishment. One step in that accommodation was his decision to hire Jeffrey Lerner, former political director at the Democratic National Committee, as his communications director. Another is his reportedly frequent friendly conversations with ex-mayor Bill de Blasio, who has advised him about staffing his administration. De Blasio, whom Mamdani has pronounced as his most favorite of all recent NYC mayors, largely hewed to the neoliberal status quo while in office.
Mamdani is a serious person and it would be a shame if his mayorship turned into a resemblance to the mayorship of London, England by Ken Livingstone from 2000 to 2008. Livingstone, known as “Red Ken,” a left wing social democratic firebrand in the 1980s, substantially accommodated his policies to the city’s powerful financial and real estate interests–while also engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, including criticism of Israel.
It will be very interesting to see what happens. Grassroots movements will have to relentlessly hold Mamdani’s feet to the fire.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/is-zohran-mamdani-a-crazed-socialist-a-closer-look/
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
