Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani is a self-avowed “democratic socialist,” and his policy proposals include free public transit, free child care, city-run grocery stores, and free everything else, all funded by increasing taxes on corporations and wealthy city residents. Mamdani has based his suddenly rocketing popularity on telling people what they want to hear, untethered from reality. His promises are the flip-side of MAGA promising to revitalize fossil fuels, domestic manufacturing, and heavy industry, which by now should be clear to everyone were a con game that could never happen. MAGA was not even able to reduce the price of eggs.
I really despise Donald Trump, and I pretty much called him a fascist a week before he won the 2016 presidential election. I wrote then, “In many respects, the extremes of right and left are indistinguishable, leading to serious challenges of basic definition… Presumably when Adolf Hitler called himself a ‘national socialist’ and Bernie Sanders called himself a ‘democratic socialist,’ they had two different meanings in mind for the same word – but they did, nevertheless, use the same word.”
While one could make a plausible case for higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy on a national basis, especially as a way to limit disastrously growing inequality, it is outright absurd on a citywide basis. Firstly, trying to impose heavy taxes within a city, even New York City, will motivate the parties heavily taxed to consider simply moving elsewhere. It is a hassle for a major corporation or a wealthy individual to exit the United States, but much easier to move from New York to Texas. Secondly, imposition of such taxes is beyond the power of the New York City government, and would require action by the state legislature in distant Albany; even New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has explicitly opposed the Mamdani tax plan.
As Mamdani will soon find out, telling people what they want to hear may be a strategy for short-term increased popularity and even election victory, especially when running against opponents who are seriously flawed – disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo and extremist talk-show host Curtis Sliwa, who came to prominence almost 50 years ago as the founder of the Guardian Angels, a roving band of vigilantes.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, New York City was widely perceived and portrayed as a dystopian wasteland in works of fiction such as Escape from New York and in real life by bad actors such as subway shooter Bernhard Goetz. MAGA seems stuck in this false mythology of decades ago, as when Donald Trump bought a full-page ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five – five Black boys, aged 14 to 16, charged with raping a jogger, who turned out to be innocent after their confessions were shown to have been coerced.
Indeed, some of Mamdani’s proposals have merit if they could be funded. In 2015, I endorsed making bus rides free in RI by eliminating fares entirely, arguing it would lead to economic growth. I asked the then-executive director of RIPTA, Scott Avedisian, about this, and he replied, “Find me $50 million and I’ll do it.” Ironically, as the former mayor of Warwick, population 83,000, Avedisian was far more in touch with the basics of practical governance than the newly elected mayor of New York City, population 8,800,000.
The real danger from Mamdani is not that he will prove to be a disappointing mayor unable to keep any of his key promises, which seems inevitable, but that Democrats will mistake the sources of his popularity and embrace his unworkable ideas. That is exactly what has trapped Republicans in the unreality of MAGA, where “alternative facts” and “truth isn’t truth” (Rudy Giuliani), have come to define post-truth politics.
Since his student days, Mamdani has defined himself as anti-Zionist and sought to delegitimize the State of Israel, and more recently has defended his use of the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” criticized by ADL Executive Director Jonathan Greenblatt as “An explicit call for violence. ‘Globalize the Intifada’ celebrates and glorifies savagery and terror…” On another occasion, Greenblatt said, “Antizionism is antisemitism. Antizionism as an ideology is rooted in rage. It is predicated on one concept: the negation of another people.” Entire articles have been devoted to documenting many conflicting and inconsistent statements, including “What Zohran Mamdani has actually said about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.” After the election the ADL announced a public tracker called a “Mamdani Monitor.”
More than one thousand American rabbis signed an open letter, “A Rabbinic Call to Action: Defending the Jewish Future,” stating, “When public figures like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide, they… ‘Delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews.’”
It would be a mistake for Democrats to learn from this a perhaps fatally flawed lesson that normalizing anti-Zionism is a recipe for electoral success, as Republicans learned from the remark famously attributed to James Baker, secretary of state under George H.W. Bush, “Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us, anyway.” In the world’s city with the largest number of Jews, Cuomo, despite his liabilities as a deeply disgraced former governor, outpolled Mamdani among Jewish voters by a 2-to-1 margin, indicating the profound distrust the Jewish community has for Mamdani. Exit polls found 67% said the candidates’ positions on Israel factored into their vote, with 38% calling those positions a major factor.
Democrats enjoyed remarkable electoral success on Nov 4, winning the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by much greater margins than expected, and winning a few races they were not expected to win, such as attorney general in Virginia, and surprisingly increasing their majority in the Virginian House of Delegates from 51 to 64 seats. Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the legislature of Mississippi, an overwhelmingly Republican state. California Proposition 50, allowing the state to redistrict congressional seats to offset a competing move in Texas, passed 63.9% – 36.1%, possibly deciding majority control of the US House of Representatives in the Nov 2026 election.
Both the far-right and the far-left, by their nature, need to find scapegoats to blame when their policies fail. Each lives in a fantasy world where their utopian policies would work if not for the nefarious forces conspiring against them. Cheaper eggs? Climate change? Free child care? You’re angry that the only job you can get is gig work with no benefits? That can be fixed by sending masked thugs to abduct Latinos off the street and prevent them from competing with you. You’re angry that you’ll never be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle and buy a house? That can be fixed by punishing those foreign globalist bankers stealing your money. Trump and Mamdani will be pandering for scapegoats, but different scapegoats for different failed policies. History demonstrates that it is never just the Jews even if it starts with the Jews.
Democratic success was in large part a reaction against MAGA insanity, including masked ICE thugs kidnapping people off public streets and boasting about shooting others; a government shutdown that puts at risk food aid for the poor, weather prediction, and safety of air traffic control; and physical demolition of the East Wing of the White House. Countering MAGA effectively is going to be helped neither by promising free stuff that cannot really be delivered nor by demonizing Jews.