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The key to radical reform, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani clearly understands, is to be pragmatic as all hell.
Mamdani’s ultra-disciplined campaign focused on a handful of policies that New Yorkers both needed and wanted: affordable housing and universal child care above all, along with free buses and a handful of city-owned grocery stores. Like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani is a democratic socialist, but also like them, his agenda is garden-variety social democratic. To win its enactment—in a word, to deliver—requires a host of accommodations with a political establishment that is not all that social democratic itself. The price for delivering on his core issues is compromise on other issues. And like all successful principled political leaders, Mamdani gets that in his bones.
Part of getting that means he must avoid making political enemies when doing so would imperil his agenda. Back in July, when I wrote that Democratic primary victor Mamdani would likely start picking up endorsements from establishment Democrats, I noted that he needed a progressive challenge to House Democratic leader and Brooklyn Rep. Hakeem Jeffries like the proverbial hole in the head. In time, Jeffries did endorse Mamdani, and today, Mamdani has made clear that he does not back progressive Democrat Chi Ossé’s challenge to Jeffries in next year’s congressional primary and has even persuaded the New York chapter of DSA not to endorse him. Opposing Jeffries after Jeffries had endorsed him (however half-heartedly) would upset Jeffries ally Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose support Mamdani needs to fund and create universal child care.
Nor does Mamdani need to further estrange New York’s police, even though his previous critiques of the force are no less true than when he levied them. A disconsolate or even rebellious force can undo a mayoralty or even a city, and New York’s patrol-officer union made clear during Bill de Blasio’s term in office that it was more than willing to lie down on the job at the slightest sign of what it interpreted as disrespect. Mamdani’s reappointment of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch was a sign that he’d try to avoid inflaming the easily flammable police. Creating an uncomfortable civic peace on that one front gives him the space to focus on child care and housing.
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So far, New York DSA appears to understand that such compromises are the price of social democratic power. Their refusal to endorse Ossé indicates that they know the stakes for municipal socialism depend on Mamdani’s success in delivering on his agenda, and not on his adhering to any form of doctrinal socialist purity (never mind that DSA has never fully agreed on what socialist purity constitutes). This realpolitik in the ranks is increasingly characteristic of DSA locals in most large cities, where DSA candidates have won electoral office only with broad liberal support and govern in informal coalition with non-DSA progressives. In many smaller locals, where DSA candidates remain on the electoral outs and have failed to form alliances with the broader left (often, where the broad left itself is too weak to win elections), a more sectarian outlook often prevails, and is overrepresented on what passes for the organization’s national political committee.
Since Mamdani’s election, New York DSA has continued to grow and may soon reach a new high of 15,000 members. That said, Mamdani’s campaign mobilized roughly 100,000 volunteers, an astonishing achievement that means his base overwhelmingly does not consist of DSA members, and that he’s answerable, even in the most narrow definition of “answerability,” to a much broader group than DSA. Just as Mamdani must govern within a broad left coalition, so New York DSA must—or at least, should—understand that its fortunes and capacities are maximized only when it acts within a broad left coalition, too. So far, that appears to be the case.
Maintaining the unity and clout of that coalition will be required if the Mamdani agenda is to be realized. The city lost its fiscal independence—the ability, say, to levy its own taxes—during the near-bankruptcy of the 1970s, when it ceded that power to the state. If Mamdani’s legions stay mobilized in support of the higher taxes on Gotham’s gazillionaires that are required to fund universal child care, they can certainly compel the state legislature to enact them. And if they can stay mobilized to swell Hochul’s vote in her upcoming re-election contest, they can likely persuade her to sign that bill. It’s not as if a 2 percent tax hike on New York’s richest is unpopular with anyone other than New York’s richest.
Even without New York’s one-off dependence on Albany, a progressive city can’t be an island, entire of itself, if it’s to be successful. Mamdani rightly judges Fiorello La Guardia to have been the city’s greatest mayor, but La Guardia’s success in building a social democratic New York was in no small part due to his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, who made sure that abundant federal aid flowed to the city. (On federal employment programs like the WPA, the feds established a direct liaison office with each of the [then] 48 states—and with one city, New York, which it treated like a state of its own.) The best Mamdani can hope for from our current, sub-ideological president is that he doesn’t clog the city with his deportation goons, but that’s a relationship Mamdani needs to continue working on as well. Radical reform can sometimes require radical pragmatism.
We’ve seen such concessions before. In 1589, Henry of Navarre inherited the French throne, but he was a Protestant in a majority-Catholic country, and parts of that country—most particularly, its capital and largest city—refused to recognize his rule so long as he was a Protestant. Henry had an ambitious agenda of domestic development and (largely anti-Hapsburg) foreign alliances, but his religious affiliation stood in the way of his rallying the nation to the causes (none of them religious) that he deeply believed in.
So he converted to Catholicism, with the famous, if likely apocryphal, words: “Paris is worth a mass.”
New York, Mamdani most surely understands, is worth a Tisch.
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