My City Just Voted for Socialism

Plus: Israel and Iran both get trophies, tariffs suck, steel dome, and more...

Zohran Mamdani is the presumed winner of New York City's Democratic mayoral primary: Technically, ranked-choice votes will take a week to fully tabulate, with the final results being declared on July 1, but second-place Andrew Cuomo has formally conceded to his opponent. Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who advocates a rent freeze, hiking taxes on the rich (and corporations), defunding the police (though he's walked this one back), and a $30 minimum wage by 2030, has taken 43.5 percent of the vote, to Cuomo's 36.4 percent, with 93 percent of votes in at publication time.

With ranked-choice voting, the candidate must still clear the 50 percent threshold, but once a candidate crosses that 40 percent line—and has some distance from their runner-up—they're the presumed winner. Mamdani's team is getting wasted, Cuomo's a bit depressed, and everyone in the city capitalism built is waking up to this crazy upset, wondering what happens next.

So what does Mamdani actually want to institute, if elected in November, and why would it suck so much?

Consider free childcare, which his canvassers seemed to believe would be persuasive to me as I walked past them last night with my 2-year-old. Under Mamdani, the state would provide childcare—via taxpayer-funded daycares, akin to the universal 3K program currently in place (which doesn't always provide parents with options they actually want)—for all aged six weeks to 5 years old. But if the idea is to lighten parents' financial load, why aren't all forms of childcare treated the same? Why don't stay-at-home mothers get vouchers from the state to recoup loss of income? Why don't neighborhood babysitting collectives get help? Why is one form of childcare—administered by the state—privileged above all others? Many education savings account programs, such as the one administered by Florida, recognize that assistance from the state, if it is to exist at all, ought to be handed straight to families so that they may use it as they wish. For socialists to offer universal state-run childcare as some great liberator is frankly insulting to many mothers; in the magnificent post-work future the socialists herald, won't many women choose to spend more time with their children, not less?

City-run grocery stores—another of Mamdani's proposals—look like a solution in search of a problem. Food deserts—geographic zones where there aren't any affordable, healthy options available to residents—don't exist in New York City. Here, let me prove it. Here's what East New York's grocery store scene looks like. And here's Bedford-Stuyvesant.

You cannot seriously convince me that food deserts exist in New York City. This is Far Rockaway, which is far out there in Queens, so a bit less dense, and super poor. And it *still* has walking-distance grocery stores, and bus lines that make a short ride fast. pic.twitter.com/QJFqnmMDPG

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) June 25, 2025

Smaller grocery stores and bodegas, some of which don't even display on Google Maps, can be found dotting the blocks. City-owned grocery stores just aren't needed, and the reasons food stamp recipients don't fill their granny carts with fresh salad greens isn't because they can't find them.

Then there's Mamdani's rent freeze. He hopes to fully eradicate all rent increases for the roughly 2 million New Yorkers who are currently the beneficiaries of the city's rent-stabilization scheme, claiming this will be a boon to the working class. What he does not realize is that decades of city-sanctioned housing market distortion is what has led to untenably high rents in the first place (plus it being too difficult to build), and that many of the beneficiaries of rent stabilization are not the poorest of the poor, but rather people whose friends or family have treated other people's real estate as their own inheritances.

And don't even get me started on the will-he-or-won't-he of defunding the police. Mamdani, like all progressives swept up in the cultural fervor of George Floyd Summer, once talked big talk about defunding the police (a feminist issue, he says!), but has now motte-and-baileyed his way back to more social workers and investing in mental health services including voluntary rehabilitative programs. Other hints about what Mamdani believes: "Jails are not places where people can recover from a mental health crisis, and they often have punitive responses to mental health needs" and lots of talk about reducing stigmas and improving access to care. As with food deserts, Mamdani seems to genuinely believe that violent people in the midst of mental breakdown just don't have access to care, and that if it is simply offered to them, they will no longer resort to terrorizing their fellow man. This strikes me as a simplistic understanding of this problem which would erase the improvements in crime rates made so far in 2025.

In order to pay for all these proposals—the grocery stores, the daycares, the corps of social workers, the fare-free buses (which 48 percent of New Yorkers fail to pay for in the first place, unfortunately)—Mamdani will simply press the button socialists love: Institute a 2 percent flat tax on those earning over $1 million. What Mamdani does not realize is that you cannot abuse the "tippy top." It is the HENRYs ("high-earners, not rich yet") or the "working rich" who are perhaps the best examples of meritocracy in action; they're not the "idle rich"—those who've inherited their wealth or made it long ago, who are now mostly price-insensitive and untouchably well-off—and they're frequently glued to Manhattan for industries like finance, law, and tech. Meet your tax base, Zohran. You should worry if they flee to the outlying suburbs.

My friend Santi Ruiz, who writes Statecraft and is a little less dramatic about all this than I am, points out that, yes, high earners and young families will both leave as the deal worsens for them, and that the young family exodus has already been happening for a while. Mamdani may just function as an accelerant for trends already underway:

The flight of young families from NYC, from @cojobrien. https://t.co/kzbKO2coSQ https://t.co/55UU8K7Igg pic.twitter.com/7k540AENz3

— Santi Ruiz (@rSanti97) June 25, 2025

But it's not just that Mamdani's proposals rely on a tax base that would be likely to flee; that they'd be ineffective at improving poverty rates; or that they'd fail to improve the provision of city services. It's also that they, like all socialist policies, fundamentally misunderstand who we are, then make us worse.

Socialism asks the individual to put the good of the commons ahead of the good of their own family and self. In its most radical forms, it asks the individual to snitch on those who are disloyal to the joint project, to forgo privacy. It asks the individual to lose motivation to work toward their own betterment, as all will be leveled once it is gotten. It asks the individual to subvert their own values in favor of the ones mandated by the government.

For someone like Zohran Mamdani, whose mother is a high-net-worth famous movie director and whose father is a Columbia professor, who went to Maine's Bowdoin College (total annual cost of attendance as of this year: $93,000) and the elite public high school Bronx Science (which he wants to end so that children like mine can't receive a similar-quality education), who has been the beneficiary of other people's largesse, maybe none of this seems so insulting. But to agentic people who have worked for their money, the idea that the spoils ought to be seized is rather frustrating. Enjoying the spoils, to be clear, does not preclude you from giving to charity, or taking care of those in your family or community who've fallen on tough times. And spoils here don't necessarily mean omakase dinners and boat rides in Montauk; it means the financial security to know that you can weather tough times, that you can provide quality education for your children, that you can help your parents in their old age, that a medical bill or a crazy accident or a natural disaster won't ruin you. That you can, when needed, just pay for convenience. Sometimes it means the financial cushion to retire a few years early, to enjoy more time with those you love.

The socialist project tells people that these values don't matter, and that they are wrong for caring about them. It tells people that they haven't earned the security they've been working for, that it ought to be redistributed to their neighbor and that the government can ensure their welfare (even though it never really does). It tells people that being motivated and industrious is greedy, and that they ought to accept less and be happy about it.

But resentment always builds when people are told they can't live out their values, work for their own betterment, and decide for themselves what the good life consists of. People do not become model citizens—the selfless, enthusiastic, fit, respectful, honest, and TOTALLY IMAGINED novy sovetsky chelovek—once you hector them hard enough. They wilt. They cut down the tallest poppy in sight. They do not wish to go on.

The socialist project is fundamentally wrong, both morally and in its understanding of human nature. Mamdani won't get us quite there, but he sure is taking us one step closer.

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Scenes from New York: 

New Yorkers visiting Hoboken after Zohran Mamdani nationalizes the bodegas and destroys the grocery supply chain pic.twitter.com/tfbXktXRjA

— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) June 25, 2025

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