The billionaires’ Mamdani freak-out and opportunities for the US left

NEW YORK—There is justifiable delight across the US left over the super-rich’s panicked response to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary last month. Whatever the outcome of the general election in November, the result is good news for all those seeking to build an activist response to the hard right turn in US politics under Donald Trump, including socialists who reject voting for Democrats on principle.

Activists have long focused on the issues that drove Mamdani’s win: a rent freeze, affordable housing, free buses, free child care for kids up to age 5, a higher minimum wage and progressive taxes. But Mamdani’s candidacy, driven by thousands of volunteers, highlights such efforts and their popular appeal in a city where the richest 1 percent controls 44 percent of all wealth, a fourfold increase in three decades.

Mamdani appealed to the one in four people who live in poverty. He won big in immigrant communities and left-leaning neighbourhoods populated by young intellectuals and white-collar workers. This is partly because 52 percent of renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Housing costs that hammer even the middle class mean minimal options for the poor: some 278,000 are on waiting lists for public housing.

These are just some of the long lists of statistics that explain how Mamdani stunned the establishment by trouncing the scandal-ridden former governor, Andrew Cuomo. Hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb sounded the alarm to his cohort, declaring on social media, “It’s officially hot commie summer”. The Mamdani spectre haunting Loeb came even as President Donald Trump tried to drop the hammer on US urban politics by sending the Marines into Los Angeles to crack down on immigrant rights protesters.

Mamdani and his supporters have imposed themselves on the Democratic establishment, including union leaders, who mostly endorsed Cuomo. But the New York state legislator, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, faces the same constraints as any Democratic politician. One need not look too far back in history to see how the party is a shock absorber for left-wing electoral efforts within its structures.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who campaigned for president as a Democrat, became the Senate Finance Committee chair during the Biden administration, carrying the president’s agenda rather than pushing for the reforms he’d advocated on the campaign trail. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate who burst onto the scene with a Democratic primary win over a New York powerbroker, has staked out mainstream Democratic positions and disappointed her socialist backers with her stance on Palestine, union rights and much else.

Barack Obama, who crafted a progressive brand as a candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, made corporate handouts his top priority once in office, while workers suffered through the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. The disappointment of Obama’s successive administrations created the opening for Trump to be elected as a “populist” eight years later.

Mamdani’s success on a more left-wing program and his real shot at becoming mayor of New York won’t make him immune from these pressures, which are especially acute for anyone aiming to run the headquarters of world capitalism. Nor will his success transform the character of the Democratic Party.

What’s different is that Mamdani’s success defies the Democratic pattern of retreat. Most Democratic legislators have done nothing to challenge Trump’s power grab and the passage of federal legislation that will strip health care from millions, increase the immigration crackdown to monstrous proportions, boost military spending and cut taxes for the wealthy. What’s even more remarkable is that the message of resistance to Trump is being carried by a youthful figure with a Muslim background who’s stood up for Palestine amid a witch-hunt across US politics and academia against anyone criticising Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Mamdani’s success has led to two approaches among New York’s financial oligarchs: discredit and destroy, or contain and coopt.

It is hard to tell if those pursuing the first strategy are more outraged by Mamdani’s plan to raise their taxes or his support for Palestinian rights. As journalist Hanif Abdurraqib noted, “far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X that Mamdani wanted to bring both Sharia law and communism to New York City”. But what matters to the bosses most is the threat to their money. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the dean of Wall Street bankers, said that Mamdani is “more a Marxist than a socialist”. Kathryn Wylde, head of a business council, the Partnership for New York City, summed up the mood of her peers: “Terror is the feeling”.

The Wall Street oligarchs aiming to discredit and destroy Mamdani assumed they had succeeded in permanently rewiring New York City politics in their interest. One of their own, Michael Bloomberg, boss of the media and technology empire that bears his name, served as mayor in the 2000s. During his tenure, the Democrat-controlled city council rewrote local laws to allow him to run for a third term as he focused on real estate development in the city, symbolised by multiple super-tall residential skyscrapers as homes for the world’s wealthiest.

Bloomberg’s successor, liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio, served the following two terms, ushering in some reforms such as extended public preschool. But he failed to reverse Bloomberg’s reductions in public sector pay and benefits and tended to his own real estate allies as his popularity waned.

De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, a Black former police captain who first gained a public profile by calling out police racism, took office in 2022 on a program prioritising law and order. He was backed by Bloomberg and other wealthy residents. Multiple scandals led to Adams’ indictment on federal charges. But Trump’s Justice Department dropped the case—an obvious exchange for the mayor’s support for Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Adams, who had no chance of winning the Democratic mayoral nomination, skipped the primary and created his own party from scratch.

This created an opportunity for Cuomo to make a political comeback. Cuomo, who’d been forced to resign as governor following a series of sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of COVID deaths in elder care facilities, immediately attracted tens of millions in campaign contributions. Bloomberg was again at the centre of the fundraising action.

Now, money is again flowing to him for the general election—Cuomo created his own party in case he came up short in the primary. (Democratic politicians who denounce the left for attempting to build third parties have no hesitation in doing so when it serves their interests, as was the case in the mayor’s race in the city of Buffalo a few years ago.)

If the wealthy Mamdani-haters can’t stop him from being elected, they will resort to Wall Street’s playbook from New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975. At that time, the federal government refused to provide financial aid, and the state governor and legislature put the city under the effective control of an unelected commission dominated by Wall Street bankers. The result: tens of thousands of layoffs of municipal workers and cuts to social services. The Trump-era version of such measures would be harsher still. The White House has already promised to punish New York if voters elect Mamdani.

A Mamdani victory is a very real possibility. Cuomo’s failure in the primary and his uncertain-at-best prospects in the general election have led to a contain-and-coopt effort by some prominent business leaders, who scoff at the notion that Mamdani’s victory would drive the ultra-rich and Wall Street banks to move to Miami en masse. Dubbed “Mamdani millionaires” by the Wall Street Journal, this group has a broad range. It includes younger well-off professionals who nevertheless find New York intolerably expensive, are aghast at the intensifying social inequality and would prefer moderate forms.

Others seeking to engage Mamdani include pragmatic deal makers who realise that blindly carrying out the program of the billionaires is courting a mass resistance far more threatening to their interests than Mamdani’s program. These liberal elites view Mamdani’s campaign promises as a milder version of the municipal program of the 1930s and 1940s under liberal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who won elections by making concessions to a powerful labour movement and a big left dominated by the Communist Party. The result was a New York City-specific enhancement of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. Mamdani’s program seeks to revive such programs—but in the context of a far weaker labour movement and dramatically smaller left.

Given this balance of class forces, the business liberals calculate that a Mayor Mamdani could be curbed. Their plan is modelled on their approach to the 1989 election of David Dinkins, a DSA member and the first Black person elected mayor. Dinkins defeated a Democratic incumbent and Republican Rudolph Giuliani in large part because of widespread outrage over a series of racist murders. The corporations quietly strangled Dinkins’ agenda and funded a successful Giuliani comeback on a law-and-order, pro-business program.

If victorious, Mamdani should expect similar treatment. If he does not accommodate these liberal ruling-class elements, they’ll join the hardliners in backing an opponent. And most business elites who pragmatically support or tolerate Mamdani today would back his opponents in a future election anyway, even if Mamdani were to make big concessions to them.

With some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet on one side and a democratic socialist with many thousands of grassroots volunteers on the other, the left is under a lot of pressure to get involved in the electoral campaign.

Yet it is not necessary to join Mamdani’s campaign and vote Democrat in order to take initiatives around the issues raised in this campaign. Rent freezes and housing costs are just one example: the nearly century-old tradition of rent control and stabilisation in New York will have to be revived as an activist movement for tenants’ rights, as will the struggle for a higher local minimum wage. Such fights can now be stepped up in New York and beyond, along with the ongoing struggles for Palestine and immigrant rights.

Whatever the outcome of the New York mayoral race, a mass, activist left independent of the Democratic Party will be needed to win the social gains Mamdani’s supporters seek.

G. Stewart is a socialist and journalist in the US.