Meanwhile, Zohran Is Just Getting Things Done

The Mamdani administration, like his campaign, deploys whimsical humor. He is having Cardi B judge a contest to come up with a jingle for his new free childcare program. He had city residents vote in a “Mayoral Madness” bracket on which infrastructure fix he should perform himself. A press conference about street safety opened with jokes about New York City’s famous “pizza rat.” Another press conference, announcing a legal settlement with the HungryPanda delivery platform for ripping off restaurants, was held in front of the red panda exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo. (Mamdani: “This hungry red panda at the Prospect Park Zoo? Adorable. The HungryPanda delivery app scamming hundreds of small businesses? Not adorable.”)

But there is a serious purpose behind all this. Mamdani realized early on that stunts are valuable if they are done to draw attention to something that otherwise wouldn’t get attention. The jingle contest is a way of publicizing a social democratic program. The panda photo op is about getting eyes on a legal settlement against a predatory corporation. Even the fun stuff is very carefully engineered to make a point, and it’s all part of Mamdani’s overall mission to restore faith in the public sector and pave the way for the big, transformative changes that he aims at long term. You can see this as the “compromise” of a radical who has run into reality, but as a socialist (and the author of a book literally called Why You Should Be a Socialist) I think Mamdani is extremely smart to focus early on on delivering small things that people can see and feel. This was the approach taken by the “sewer socialists” in the early 20th century, and by Bernie Sanders when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s, and it resulted in popular mayoral administrations that served as living disproof of propaganda about socialist politicians bringing “disaster” and “ruin.”

Mamdani needs to be given some time before we judge him on the major campaign promises about police reform, free buses, cheaper housing, etc. This stuff doesn’t happen overnight. What he is doing right now is what he should be doing, which is overcoming the presumption that a young democratic socialist cannot handle the nuts and bolts of day-to-day governance. If people have much more positive experiences with city government under Mamdani, if they notice their potholes getting filled, their snow being shoveled, and their landlords being held accountable for violations of the law, Mamdani will have the public support necessary to push for big things. He needs to ensure, first and foremost, that the quality of life in the city is getting better in ways that are impossible for even the New York Post to ignore. As Jacobin’s Liza Featherstone writes of this “blitz of conspicuous municipal competence”: “Clean, attractive streetscapes with fewer rats and working sewers could strengthen his case for a robust, well-funded government and give him credibility as a steward of our tax dollars, including a future infusion of new public resources obtained by taxing the rich.”

So far it seems to be working, although Mamdani is unfortunately working with a sizable budget deficit left over from the previous administration that is forcing him to get creative. The murder and shooting rate is even at its lowest point in recorded history for the first three months of the year, though it’s hard to think how Mamdani could have caused that except by spreading good vibes and civic pride. There will always be critics who say that he has “zero accomplishments except fanning Jew-hate,” but if New Yorkers notice that after they attend one of Mamdani’s “rental ripoff hearings,” there start to be changes in their building, they may start thinking to themselves that democratic socialism seems like it might be worth believing in.

Amid all the bleak news in this country right now, the Mamdani mayoralty is giving me a lot of hope. As Trump commits war crime after war crime, plunging the economy into chaos and fixing nothing, Mamdani is in New York taking seriously the job of governing, and showing what it would look like if we had a functional country where the state served the people. I do not know how much democratic socialism he will achieve over the course of his tenure, but if he can show that electing democratic socialist mayors is the way to get our infrastructure fixed, while Washington is proving that electing MAGA leaders is an international catastrophe, Mamdani’s tenure will be very good for the left.