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The Rapid-Fire Political Education of Zohran Mamdani

Can New York’s mayor govern as a democratic socialist?

My route to Knockdown Center—the cavernous music venue in Maspeth, Queens, where New York’s mayor and his supporters celebrated the first 100 days of what the Mamdani team likes to call the “new era”—took me past the Onderdonk farmhouse, built in 1709 by some of the region’s first Dutch settlers, and the new murals on Troutman Street. To a reporter old enough to remember the Well—long the city’s most notorious open-air drug market—the peaceful streets were already a harbinger of change. But then for many Mamdani voters, Bushwick (which cast 82 percent of its votes for the mayor) was just another place to live.

Inside the venue, hundreds of supporters held printed signs extolling “Pothole Politics,” alongside curiously generic exhortations to “Tackle Corruption & Waste.” Many in the crowd were city workers, including a high-spirited contingent from the Sanitation Department who told me they’d been invited “as a kind of thank-you for clearing the snow.”

“Every filled pothole is ‘a love letter to the city,’” Renee Boyd, a 37-year veteran of the Department of Transportation, proclaimed from the podium.

The crowd roared its approval, but it was only when Mamdani took the stage that the connection between socialism and the city’s streets was made clear. “‘Socialists might be able to win a campaign,’ they said, but we could never ‘advance an agenda,’” he began, paraphrasing his critics. By way of answer, he repeated his Inauguration Day promise: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” prompting even louder cheers.

“Socialism,” Mamdani explained, “is the choice to fight for every New Yorker, to extend democracy from the ballot box to the rest of our lives.” The mayor had a story to tell—about Daniel Hoan and what used to be called “sewer socialism.”

First elected mayor of Milwaukee in 1916, “Hoan was considered young for the job—only 35 years old when he took office,” said the 34-year-old Mamdani, pausing for effect. “I know. Crazy, right?” Hoan’s administration, he continued, “built the greatest public park system in the nation…. Under Mayor Hoan, Milwaukee built the first municipally sponsored public-housing development in the nation and transformed the city’s sewage-disposal system. He believed, just as we do, that to deliver this great society, we should tax the rich.” The crowd erupted with chants of “Tax the rich!”

But the mayor wasn’t done. “If government can’t do the small things,” he asked, “how could you ever trust it to do the big ones?” Delivering a résumé of recent and projected road works across the five boroughs, he brought his point home: “This is pothole politics, our 2026 answer to sewer socialism.”

“When I think of the change that government can deliver, I think, too, of the leadership of Mayor Bernie Sanders of Burlington, Vermont. And while I am truly sorry that he can’t be with us here today—” At which point, the sound system launched into AC/DC’s “Back in Black” and the Vermont senator loped onto the stage. The crowd went wild.

Daniel Hoan, it may be worth recalling, was reelected by the voters of Milwaukee six times, serving as mayor until 1940.

The first time I met Zohran Mamdani, he was asking for money. This was in December 2024, at a fundraiser in a friend’s apartment in Tribeca. The audience was a mix of younger activists from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and older academics and writers, many of them friends of Mamdani’s parents.

In his trademark black suit and black tie, the young assemblyman looked more like a hired pallbearer than the future mayor. But when he started speaking, his energy and intelligence were immediately apparent, and I found the radicalism of his ambition a refreshing change from the prevailing gloom. Besides, I was there with my daughter, who had friends working on the campaign, so I made my first-ever donation to a candidate for citywide office even though, as I confidently declared on the way out, I didn’t think he had a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming mayor.

The second time we met was three months later, when Mamdani came to The Nation to ask for the magazine’s endorsement. He was still at 1 percent in the polls but had already put together the organization that would take him to victory in June and again in November. Although he lacked the deep mastery of the city’s affairs displayed by both Brad Lander and Scott Stringer in their interviews, Mamdani’s theme of affordability seemed like a shrewd reading of the times. It was also becoming increasingly clear that the enthusiasm of his supporters gave him the best chance of stopping Andrew Cuomo—which seemed more urgent than parsing the details of his platform.

I mention these facts both as a confession of my limitations as a prophet and as a reminder that, given what Mamdani has already accomplished, only a fool would declare his mayoralty a failure this early in his term of office. And yet it must also be admitted that, when compared to the scale of his ambitions, Mamdani’s record of achievement so far has been less than spectacular. As any sentient New Yorker is aware, Mamdani rode to office on three cardinal pledges: to make the city’s buses fast and free, to freeze the rent for the city’s 2 million rent-stabilized tenants, and to provide free universal childcare.

With an average speed of under eight miles per hour, New York’s buses are still the slowest in the country, and while I’ve seen many passengers ride without paying, the fares remain unchanged. As for the........

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