The next issue of Jacobin, out next month, centers on the promise and limits of municipal socialism. Subscribe now at a discount to make sure you secure a copy in print.
Zohran Mamdani is just weeks away from being inaugurated as New York City’s next mayor. He’ll be the most important American socialist to ever hold executive office. So naturally, many are wondering what he can actually accomplish.
For a Mamdani administration, success would mean at least two things: effectively running the city government while implementing a significant portion of his progressive agenda. Both are tall orders. New York City is notoriously hard to govern, with a sprawling municipal bureaucracy of more than 300,000 city workers serving 8.5 million New Yorkers who are famously harsh judges of their mayors. More challenging is the new mayor’s list of ambitious proposals, which includes free buses, free childcare, a rent freeze, and new affordable housing construction, all paid for by taxes on the rich.
The political hurdles to enacting the Mamdani agenda are widely understood. In Albany, much of Mamdani’s agenda will run up against New York governor Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat who has consistently opposed taxing the rich. In Washington, there’s President Donald Trump, who may use the federal government to undermine the new administration by withholding funding, deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the city streets, or finding other ways to make life hard in New York.
Less well understood are the economic and fiscal challenges that will require real policy solutions and problem solving. Making sense of Mamdani’s prospects of success therefore requires a brief tour through the budgets of New York State and New York City. In contrast to federal policy debates, which are shaped by the federal government’s substantial ability to finance deficits and regulate the national economy, state and local policy debates are predominantly budgetary in nature —…
Auteur: Nathan Gusdorf
