Mamdani’s Rich Voters Are the Good Ones, You See

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 27, 2025

 

Once again, the Republicans who respond to the incentives on social media to be a jackass have made Democrats’ lives easier. Even as mainstream elements of the opposition party grapple with the millstone that New York City’s primary voters have affixed to their necks, the GOP’s most theatrical elements have called the mayoral nominee “little muhammad” and suggested that he should be “denaturalized” and “deported.” It’s ugly and condemnable, even if the legacy press seems to welcome the reprieve from the introspection that Zohran Mamdani’s nomination briefly imposed on them.

 

After all, this is the sort of racial hostility that the center-left media rely on. They cannot see the degree to which Mamdani’s campaign tapped into and harnessed Democrats’ own racial hostilities. How else would you describe the candidate’s promise to shift the city’s property-tax burden onto “homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods”?

 

There are a lot of stereotypes and assumptions that contribute to such a clearly discriminatory policy preference. The appeal in Mamdani’s plan is that it’s nakedly punitive. If the poor and minorities benefit, that’s an ancillary benefit. The catharsis is in the comeuppance that the state is meting out to whole demographics. It’s a base instinct premised on the supposition that America’s population of wealthy whites deserves a comeuppance.

 

Even though many of the low-income and minority city residents rejected this vengeful program, targets of these retributive policies have not. You see, they’re the good ones.

 

This is the thesis posited by the Huffington Post’s Brittany Wong, whose latest article argues that Mamdani’s appeal among the city’s richest white voters — the backbone of his base — indicates that “we don’t understand rich people who want more for others.” Wong grapples with the previously incomprehensible notion that the wealthy white people can be altruists, too.

 

“It is unfathomable to some people that a person can have a good life and go, ‘damn it’d be cool if other people also had good lives, we should make that happen,’” mused one sports journalist while reflecting on Mamdani’s own comfortable upbringing among the rich and famous.

 

“The idea that someone rich or privileged would use their social capital to make others’ lives better can cause an intense reaction,” said Northwestern University psychology professor Michael Kraus. “You can see the intensity of this reaction in other contexts in history, such as the violence perpetrated against white civil rights workers.”

 

Where in the world did that come from? What is the thought process that leads anyone to conclude that those who warn of the unfeasibility of “free” bus fare, universal rent freezes, abolishing prisons and police, and waging war on the Jewish state from Gracie Mansion are the modern-day equivalent of the Klan? It is, perhaps, the same logic that led the professor to presuppose that it’s only conservatives who believe that Mamdani can’t “really be a socialist if he didn’t suffer economic insecurity.”

 

It’s safer to wager that it’s only conservatives who understand that socialism’s loudest proselytizers tend to be comfortable, well-educated theorists. From London’s Toynbee Hall and the Guild Movement in America to the young revolutionaries who decamped from universities to descend on the Russian peasant classes to lecture them about the virtues of socialism, class envy has often been a philosophy taught from above. Indeed, the fact that Mamdani owes his victory to New York’s most well-heeled residents advances the theory.

 

Indeed, in absolute terms, philanthropy in the United States is largely the province of the wealthy. They contribute not just the lion’s share of income tax revenue to the state but, beyond that, the largest pool of charitable donations. Not only has the activist left traditionally looked down on those charitable activities, but some insist that philanthropy not controlled by the state is a scam. Sure, they get a hospital wing named after them, but what do you get? Not much besides, one supposes, the hospital wing.

 

Average-income Americans are also charitable: “America was the world’s most generous country this past decade,” Axios noted in 2022, and this charity “cuts across religion, region, and age.” The left has nonetheless adhered to a stereotype in which the rich and melanin-deprived cling to their possessions with pathological rapacity. But since it was those very malefactors who carried Mamdani to victory this week, the left should update its framework.

 

“Zohran’s win also brings into focus our cultural conception of ‘noblesse oblige,’” Wong wrote. “The idea is that with great wealth comes great responsibility to give back to the community and those in need.” University of Delaware education professor Dominique Baker went so far as to tell HuffPo that the Mamdani’s sudden success is bringing back the very concept of charity — one that seems “foreign to the current crop of uber wealthy people” but that was familiar to the Gilded Age’s robber barons, with their great philanthropic works.

 

Through the magic of political expedience, the left has discovered that the kinds of charitable works possible in an age without the income tax are, in fact, desirable.

 

Precisely no one with the life experience that accompanies adulthood should be surprised to learn that wealthy Americans are — and aspire to be — charitable. Mamdani’s wealthy voters may be just as beneficent as anyone else. Just as likely, some of his wealthy adorers are embarrassed by their own success and hope to secure an indulgence administered by progressivism’s high priests. It’s the generalizations that are unjustified — unless you’re looking to craft a mythology about Mamdani and his supporters.

 

If that was your goal, you would dismiss all of Mamdani’s “affordability” arguments up front. That’s all too parochial, too grubby. Nor can it be that this was yet another banal expression of radical chic, limousine liberalism, or the pursuit of absolution for living well. No, it must be that Mamdani’s voters are a better sort. His voters are the good ones.