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Proximity breeds contempt.
New York is not the only capital of financial capitalism to face the specter, much less the reality, of a socialist mayor. In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, we should recall that “Red Ken” Livingstone, who stood on the very left fringe of the U.K.’s Labor Party as Mamdani does on the Democrats’, was twice elected mayor of London, serving from 2000 to 2008.
Having Wall Street and the City (as London’s financial district is called), respectively, looming over the locals clearly doesn’t endear them to the citizenry. For one thing, financiers—unlike the moguls of manufacturing, transport, retailing, or digital technology—don’t make a product or deliver a service directly to ordinary Brits or Yanks. In the mid-20th century, when the rules set by the New Deal here and social democracy in Europe reduced finance to a modest-profit sector serving industry and developers, the intangible work of bankers wasn’t a source of public woe and rage. But ever since the Reagan and Thatcher Eighties, when deregulation swelled finance to the point that it called the tune for other sectors (demanding, for instance, that manufacturers offshore their work to low-wage nations), and shifted the balance of nations’ incomes (particularly in the U.S. and U.K.) from wages to investments, the level of public woe and rage has risen accordingly.
Economic inequality in the post-Reagan-and-Thatcher world is at its highest in major cities, nowhere more so than in London and New York, where financiers with stratospheric incomes create neighborhoods that attract the whole planet’s billionaires in sufficient numbers to warp housing costs. In New York today, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $4,500; for a two-bedroom; it’s $5,500. According to a study the New School’s James Parrott, the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers accounted for roughly 12 percent of New Yorkers’ income in 1980—on the eve of the Reagan ascent—but that share had risen to 36 percent by 2022. (Nationally, the rise was from 10 percent to 24 percent.)
So, the New York billionaires and centi-millionaires who are freaking out at the ascent of Mamdani should try to understand that they are the proximate cause of that ascent—that, and the fact that Mamdani is a brilliant campaigner. As their London counterparts demonstrated 25 years ago, a city divided against itself—horizontally, with the weight of the wealthy bearing down on everyone else—may still stand, but it will periodically buckle. While the Dan Loebs, Paul Singers and their hedgehog ilk rage at the threat of a more egalitarian metropolis, they should be thankful that democratic norms provide a peaceful path to de-oligarchization. After all, back in the 19th century, before ordinary New Yorkers had any real political power to affect the economy, they once chased robber baron Jay Gould down a Manhattan street. Mamdani’s agenda features no such near-lynchings, merely a series of reforms to make New York more affordable.
Mamdani’s centrist Democratic critics have focused on the cultural and foreign policy causes with which he’s been identified, but those aren’t the issues on which he based his candidacy. “We salute Mamdani’s running on affordability in the city and putting the cultural issues on a back burner,” Stan Greenberg and James Carville, longtime critics of Democrats’ self-marginalization, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
Perfecting his balancing act between his populist progressive economics and those other issues will be necessary if Mamdani is not only to win the November general election but also to govern successfully. London’s Ken Livingstone put some important civic economic reforms in place, but ultimately was undone by his fatal attraction to anti-Semitic speech and deeds. Mamdani is no Livingstone; he doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, but he needs to focus on New Yorkers’ aspirations and fears. As mayor, his greatest challenge isn’t likely to come from the billionaires, but, rather, the cops. The city’s police unions have vituperatively opposed any political leader who has so much as suggested some departmental reforms or incremental increases in accountability. Somehow, Mamdani will have to work out some modus vivendi with the cops, who could otherwise bring down his mayoralty in a matter of weeks by a wildcat strike.
As Greenberg and Carville pointed out, Mamdani’s focus on affordability isn’t his alone. Just across the Hudson, Mikie Sherrill, the moderate Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election this November, has also made affordability the central issue of her campaign. While I doubt that she’ll call out the Wall Street billionaires (many of whom have spare palaces in Jersey) as pointedly and effectively as Mamdani, and isn’t likely to be stumping for free bus rides, there still are a host of issues, such as the unaffordability of medical care, on which Democrats of all stripes can and should be campaigning. Their prescriptions will vary—while Bernie Sanders makes the case for Medicare for All, others will argue for expanding Medicaid coverage—but most of them will be moving in the same direction. |
