Mamdani Discourse
By 
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of writing out there on the Mamdani-governed New York. That’s based on the centrality of New York to discourse always (annoying to everyone else in America), curiosity over the man, and the hopes that so many on the left have placed on him.
That bold assertion delighted many of his admirers on the left while confirming the fears of his critics on the right and center. But in terms of what he aims to accomplish and in the context of history, it was not really true. Mamdani does not intend to give wage earners control of their workplaces or to turn private businesses into public property, as Karl Marx advocated (along with other renowned socialists he inspired like Eugene Debs, who was also a small-d democrat, and Vladimir Lenin, who was decidedly not). He does not call, as did the U.K. Labour Party right after World War II, to nationalize major industries and have them run by government employees.
Hizzoner wants instead to make transportation, childcare, and housing more “affordable” for every New Yorker. That makes him not a democratic socialist but a social democrat. What’s the difference?
The latter term has never caught on in the United States, but its adherents have a long and successful history in Europe and in developed nations on other continents. Social democrats seek to create a more egalitarian order within a capitalist market society. They build welfare states that provide health care, family leave, and union protection to their citizens and reject the tyrannical one-party states created by the likes of Lenin, Mao, and Castro. There have been many full or partial social democracies; the most successful ones exist throughout Scandinavia. But democratic socialism, aside from the utopian colonies that existed rather briefly in the nineteenth century in the United States and Great Britain, has always been an unrealized vision.
The good news for Mamdani, and the models for him to follow, come from the last century, when practical socialists governed, for a time, dozens of small and midsize American cities where the gap between the wealthy elite and wage earners had widened alarmingly, much as in New York City today. In St. Mary’s, Ohio, they expanded sewer lines, provided gas and electric service to all neighborhoods for the first time, and made sure working-class children felt welcome in the newly opened high school. In Milwaukee, socialist mayors erected the nation’s first public housing project, won an eight-hour workday for municipal workers, and developed an extensive system of public parks.
These terms actually do matter. For that matter, it would be nice if American socialists actually called for socialistic principles instead of mainstream New Deal ideas, but that’s where we are I guess.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept into power with a promise of “fast and free buses,” a slogan that captivated New York City voters and policymakers alike.
But it’s the free part — a proposal that could cost the state more than $1 billion a year in lost fare revenue — that is vexing some transportation experts, who consider the plan implausible or misguided.
Now, one influential planning group is trying to change the mayor’s mind with an even bigger moonshot plan: to expand the city’s century-old subway system.
The money that would be spent to make city buses free could instead fund the construction of 41 miles of subway extensions, according to a report released on Friday by the planning group, the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University.
The added stations would be in overlooked parts of the city where new transit options could spur the construction of thousands of new units of affordable housing, the researchers said.
For New Yorkers who have watched the state spend many years digging some of the most expensive subway tunnels in the world, the plan could be hard to fathom.
But Eric Goldwyn, a program director at the institute and an author of the report, said that even if just a fraction of the plan were to be completed, the subway expansion would be a far better use of state funds than the bus subsidy, and it could help tackle the affordability crisis in a more meaningful way.
“Free buses, from my perspective, is not transformative or generational in the way that this is,” Mr. Goldwyn said, arguing that the subway plan would be more likely to hasten real estate development. A citywide zoning change under former Mayor Eric Adams allowed for greater housing density near train stations, and this plan could encourage more building in the neighborhoods, he said.
“People are not leaving New York City because the bus fare is too high. They’re leaving because they can’t afford the rent,” Mr. Goldwyn said.
I don’t make any claims about transit expertise, except to say that I personally vastly prefer riding subways to buses. But I can see this from a number of ways. In a vacuum, sure, the subways are more important and in the very long run, might do more to help people. And from a traffic perspective, replacing buses with subways is great. But Mamdani has to govern right now. Going toward a free bus program makes sense as something that could at least theoretically happen in the next few years. So I leave this debate open to all of you. One exception though–I do have some limited patience with the arguments around things being “free.” Services do cost money and if the bus fare isn’t there to fund the already underfunded subways, well, it does have to come from somewhere and there does need to be real answers about this, no matter the issue. That’s too often handwaved away among left policy people these days.