Can Zohran Mamdani govern like a grown-up? Reform and social trust go hand-in-hand

If polls are to be believed, Zohran Mamdani is poised to trounce his main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, in New York City’s mayoral election on Nov. 4. His victory would signal a dramatic shift in power away from the city’s Wall Street-friendly old guard toward Millennial and Gen-Z progressives. 

Not since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign has there been this much excitement on the American Left. And for good reason: Mamdani, a Ugandan-born democratic socialist, launched his longshot bid for Gracie Mansion a year ago, before soon achieving AOC-level fame and leapfrogging past his conventional Democratic opponents, past incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and past Cuomo, a scion of one of the most powerful liberal dynasties in the country. A victorious Mamdani would set the tone for Left-wing urban governance to a degree not seen in decades.

Yet Mamdani and his inner circle would be wise to temper their jubilation. The untested Mamdani could singly determine the course of American progressivism and its odds of countering the MAGA realignment: failure would carry an exorbitant cost. While the champion of affordability has promised to restore integrity to City Hall, there are worrisome indicators that Mamdani hasn’t grappled with the other causes of blue-city blues: namely, that crime and disorder appear to be festering once more following the historic lows reached early last decade.

It is hard to overstate the pressure on him. In a party largely bereft of compelling leaders, Mamdani has been heralded as the next great hope of progressive politics. But his opponents predict disaster as confidently as his supporters expect change. Mamdani, his foes charge, is an unabashed creature of the “woke” #DefundthePolice Left, animated by theories of criminal justice that are opposed to the common sense of ordinary New Yorkers. Mamdani and his allies have tried to parry these claims as slander, the fever dream of reactionaries who see a “loony” sectarian agenda in every  progressive cause.

Mamdani’s ground game and the media war suggest he has mostly deflected the blows. Still, his biggest challenge is not to convince ambivalent New Yorkers outside his base that his detractors are delusional. It is to demonstrate he understands unequivocally that ambitious reform and strong social trust must go hand-in-hand.

Since the June primary Mamdani has made a few efforts to telegraph as much. He has apologized for past remarks broadly condemning the NYPD, promised to “discourage” the phrase “globalize the intifada”, and met extensively with rabbis and other Jewish leaders. He has signaled that if elected, he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, one of Adams’s more respected appointees, who has combined a tough approach to crime with encouraging efforts to root out corruption in the force. 

To be sure, some of the attackers exude noxious hysteria (about “Trotskyite” experiments and the rise of American-style “Islamo-gauchisme.” They traffic in sensationalist and bigoted rhetoric that makes Tea Party-era rumors about Barack Obama’s “foreign birth certificate” seem tame by comparison. Desperate and resentful, Cuomo himself has resorted to exploiting unease over Mamdani’s Muslim identity in a city whose Muslim population only modestly trails its Jewish one.

Even so, it would be unwise of Mamdani to dismiss more sober doubts about his ability to manage the city well and ensure public safety — two preconditions of lasting social-democratic reform. Millions of working- and middle-class New Yorkers are hungry for greater economic security and laws that reset the balance of power between the asset-rich and asset-poor. These same New Yorkers, however, also want a city that is safe and hospitable to families with children.

Such concerns aren’t rooted in bad faith. Since Covid, Gotham has been in limbo. It’s hardly the caricature painted by those who say the “bad old days” of the Seventies and Eighties are back, but the city nevertheless radiates an increasingly antisocial ambience. While the pandemic-era surge in violent crime has mostly ebbed, felony assaults on public transit are up. A number of sadistic murders have frightened the public. Despite a recent decline, fatal drug overdoses are above pre-2020 levels. The city’s homelessness crisis — already severe under Adams’s Left-leaning predecessor, Bill de Blasio — hit new records in the last two years. Rough sleeping and panhandling are ubiquitous.

There is a more general sense that the city has grown indifferent to its own commons. The sight of feces and urine on buses and subways is a regular occurrence, even during school hours. Migrant children hawk candies and other goods in the subway and parks instead of attending school. The odor of synthetic drugs hangs in the air, while poorly regulated marijuana shops pop up close to school zones. Working-class and heavily immigrant neighborhoods have struggled with an explosion in prostitution and shoplifting. Vision Zero — a plan to eliminate traffic fatalities that was introduced in 2014 — backslid for most of Adams’s term.

It is easy to misinterpret distressing incidents and random violence as reflecting a broader trend. It is likewise easy to dismiss patterns that steadily erode the city’s quality of life. Amid President Trump’s threats to deploy more national guard troops to US cities, progressives are at pains to play down any and all worries about public order. Yet the decades-long effort to build a more cohesive and optimistic city seems to have plateaued, and may be unraveling. That may be an indictment of the city’s current administration and the establishment. But it doesn’t nullify the questions dogging Mamdani. Does he register what working families see with increasing frustration and alarm? And does he have the judgment to avert the dysfunction which threatens to pervade the city?

For all his thoughtfulness, Mamdani has not always conveyed that he does possess such sensitivity. He argues passionately that “New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city” – in which a corrupt and obsequious establishment has sold-out to the kinds of billionaires now racing to defeat him. And he is mostly right. Three decades of cowardly deference to the city’s wealthiest residents has favored the extravagance of the few over the common good. Preventing crime and low-level disorder requires greater poverty reduction, affordable housing, high-wage jobs, policies to reduce youth unemployment, investment in mental-health services, and intelligent programs to curb recidivism. Only through such efforts can the city fulfill its true potential as a beacon of pluralism and opportunity.

Mamdani has stressed this long overdue reform-minded agenda as the basis of his candidacy. His model, he insists, is New York’s legendary three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive Republican who championed workers, fought corruption and organized crime, and partnered with FDR to alleviate the Great Depression. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani has spoken eloquently of making sure “affordability” means genuine financial freedom for the 50% of New Yorkers who are rent-burdened. It’s an appeal to a greater freedom — to enjoy more family time, recreation, and community activities — that also draws inspiration from Northern Europe’s postwar social contract. As Mamdani allowed in a cozy interview on The View, he is like a Scandinavian politician, but “a little more brown.”

Still, there is the occasional sign that Mamdani the reformer does not grasp the issues as working-class New Yorkers might see them. A case in point is his opaque stance on prostitution. When asked about his past support for decriminalizing sex work in a recent interview on Good Day New York, Mamdani emphasized there should be “no tolerance for [sex] trafficking” and violence against women, but that decriminalization is consistent with the recommendations of the World Health Organization and other international agencies. It was an answer that no doubt impressed the advanced degree-holders and NGO workers. But as during the mayoral debates, he missed a simple opportunity to reassure New Yorkers troubled by open-air prostitution and all that it signals. I’ll do everything within my power to get the girls off the street is what a strong leader who understood the ramifications of the problem should have said.

As final polls show Mamdani’s lead tightening, his team is naturally keen to keep the focus on bread-and-butter issues. His converts, moreover, would say that the notion that he, a practicing Muslim, is out-of-step with New Yorkers’ views of crime and public morality is baseless. His hyperbolic critics, they protest, are holding him to an absurdly different standard than Cuomo, who has been disgraced by far worse controversies and abuses of power. To look askance at some of his approaches to social justice and “harm reduction” is to miss the big picture and fall prey to the manipulations of vested interests who don’t want their dominance of the city challenged.

If he is to succeed, Mamdani’s allies must confront his weaknesses. His main mistake in the last days of the race has been to show he still bears the influence of the fringier elements of the Democratic Socialists of America at the very moment he ought to be assuming the mantle of La Guardia. By now he should know well enough the stakes are about more than him. Powerful organized interests want him to fail, for reasons beyond the enmity his campaign has sparked; indeed, a pall over a Mamdani administration would inevitably spread to progressive insurgents in other, more Trump-friendly parts of the country.

On the cusp of power, Mamdani’s greatest test awaits. His election would mark a sea change in city politics whose rumblings began 14 years ago, when Occupy Wall Street mobilized tens of thousands of New Yorkers fed up with what they saw as an insular and bankrupt liberal establishment. What he does with the excitement and good will he’s generated will reverberate long after his first months in office. There is little room for error.

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