Last week, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani pulled off an upset and beat the establishment’s preferred candidate, Andrew Cuomo, in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral election.
The race drew a lot of attention, in part because New York City is massive, and its mayor governs over more people than the governors of 39 states. But mainly, the primary gave us both the first major piece of electoral data since the election last November and a window into who is winning the struggle for the future of the Democratic Party.
Many have, appropriately, expressed horror that the earliest signs of a successful strategy for the party that’s been floundering since its loss to Trump has been embracing socialism.
Socialism is an evil system built on the violation of people’s rights. It also destroys societies and economies because it tries to ignore fundamental aspects of human action and economic law. Anyone who is at all concerned about the well-being of their communities, their nation, and their descendants should completely oppose any step towards socialism.
And make no mistake, Zohran Mamdani is a full-on socialist. He did not campaign on turning the means of production over to the workers but has been clear that he believes in that end goal and views watering down the message as a strategic necessity in the longer effort to make socialism more palatable for the public. And still, as William L. Anderson wrote last week, his policies only stand to hurt the people of New York City.
It’s clear that the political establishment is not happy about Zohran’s victory. It’s important to understand that, as terrible as they are, establishment politicians do not want America immediately transformed into a full-on socialist country. These folks are ripping the American people off. They’ve built a relatively stable redistribution scheme that benefits them. They do not want their property seized, their ill-gotten profits socialized, and the economy they rely on for their wealth and power to be run into the ground by a socialist revolution.
What the current political class wants is a steady but unyielding expansion of government that makes them and their friends richer while granting them more power and control over more of our lives. While they push the pace during emergencies, they clearly understand that moving too fast puts the entire racket at risk. And to them, politicians like Zohran Mamdani are moving too fast.
His platform calls for a level of government intervention beyond what Democrats typically campaign on these days. He ran on freezing the rent for the approximately two million rent-controlled apartments in the city, establishing government-owned grocery stores that would sell price-controlled produce, and raising the city’s minimum wage to $30.
Establishment Democrats may be upset that a candidate won on a platform they disapprove of, but the blame for this falls squarely on their own shoulders. The political establishment—in New York City and nationally—has created the conditions for the rising popularity of socialism that they’re now acting concerned about.
Although he is a committed socialist, Zohran’s entire campaign was built around a straightforward point: that the cost of living is way too high. That is true. While most of New York will always face relatively higher prices as long as a lot of people want to live in a city built on islands with limited space, the establishment Democrats that have been running the city’s government for decades have done a lot to force prices up a lot higher.
The city government creates shortages in most local industries with heavy licensing requirements for businesses and regulations on the behavior of vendors and consumers alike. Decades of rent control and limits on development have created a shortage of residences that make the houses and apartments that are available significantly more expensive. And the city’s high taxes have already caused many of the highest-income earners to leave.
And that isn’t unique to New York. The political establishment in many states and, especially at the national level, has been making life artificially expensive for most people with heavy interventionism and a crony, government-run monetary system that benefits the political class and well-connected rich at the expense of everyday Americans.
Most people can tell that the high cost of living we’re facing today is not due to some natural disaster or recent material constraint but is a byproduct of unnecessary policies. All Zohran had to do to win was run a campaign that spoke to that sentiment, prioritized it, and presented solutions that sounded different enough from the usual buzzwords and hollow promises the New York establishment has been repeating for decades.
And establishment Democrats are powerless to stop him because, in New York City and beyond, they have spent virtually every waking moment denying that there are any bad consequences to the many government interventions they have pushed for and enacted.
Establishment Democrats have dismissed the many economists who warned about the consequences of rent control for places like New York. And they quickly instituted a massive federal ban on evictions, including for non-payment of rent, during the covid pandemic with no concern about the potential downsides. So, from that standpoint, why can’t there be a rent freeze for New York apartments?
They’ve also helped the government take over many of the most important services in society, such as education, transportation, and the protection of persons and property—all while ridiculing those who argued that the quality of these services would decline while they also became overly expensive. And when, in every single circumstance, that is precisely what happened, establishment Democrats pretended like everything was fine. But if it were, why then couldn’t the government take on more services, such as providing food?
And finally, establishment Democrats have completely denied that the law of demand applies to wage labor and brushed off any concern that raising the minimum wage has any negative effects whatsoever. Why, then, can’t the minimum wage be $30?
The answer is that the establishment Democrats are lying. There are bad consequences to all these policies. Holding the price of rent down and protecting people who don’t pay from eviction creates shortages that make housing more expensive for everyone. Removing the pressures of the profit-and-loss system protects low-quality and inefficient service providers from the consequences of providing poor or overly expensive service. And making low-wage jobs illegal destroys those jobs. That creates shortages, which make everything more expensive, but it especially hurts the people who have no alternative besides the now illegal low-wage jobs.
As long as we continue to find ourselves in an artificial cost of living crisis with political leaders who insist that government intervention can essentially eliminate poverty without any real downsides, the “what are we waiting for” interventionism of socialists like Zohran Mamdani will only get more popular—to the detriment of us all.
