The New Generation of Urban Radicals

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 21, 2025

 

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Democratic nominee for mayor, claims that he confessed his sympathies for “democratic socialism” only after Senator Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful presidential bid in 2016 gave him the confidence to do so. If he is being honest about this, he has taken to his philosophy with the convert’s zeal.

 

On paper, Mamdani’s economic plans are about as sound as the business model for the blood-testing start-up Theranos. Since his first election to New York’s State Assembly, Mamdani sponsored legislation that would make New York City buses “free” — by which he means funded by extracting even more wealth from the city’s already fleeing tax base. He has backed reforms that would expand rent freezes, which would increase the commercial pressure that has already made construction an unprofitable pursuit and truncated the city’s housing supply. He has backed the creation of state-run grocery stores as an alternative to market-based grocers. The municipalities that have tried them found they only absorb great sums of taxpayer funds while providing consumers with substandard products and shortages. He sees wealth creation as a zero-sum game. Hence, Mamdani’s recent profession that “I don’t think we should have billionaires” (in New York or elsewhere). Mamdani seems earnest in his desire to push wealthy city residents out by boosting punitive taxes on individuals and corporations, which would “increase quality of life for everyone.” Somehow.

 

“We need to abolish private insurance, institute single-payer, [and] nationalize the medical supply chain immediately,” the candidate stressed at the outset of the Covid pandemic. Paraphrasing Marx, Mamdani summarized his philosophy as “each according to their need, each according to their ability.” At the tender age of 29, the wide-eyed mayoral candidate endorsed unreconstructed Leninism, calling for the exacerbation of “class consciousness” with the “end goal” of fomenting a putsch aimed at “seizing the means of production.”

 

These are all sources of grave concern given Mamdani’s likely imminent accession to Gracie Mansion. Or, at least, they should be. But the mayoral candidate’s outlook on crime and justice may be the most disquieting. Mamdani’s defenders are quick to note that the candidate has evolved from 2020, when he found himself swept up in the progressive enthusiasm for a social contract in which police were written out of the equation. Yet neither Mamdani nor his allies retail a convincing conversion narrative. One could be forgiven for thinking the candidate’s change of heart was little more than pragmatic compromise with political reality. After all, his rhetorical record speaks for itself.

 

“Violence is an artificial construction,” Mamdani told supporters at a rally outside a New York City courthouse. “What is happening here with these district attorneys,” he continued, “that is violence.” New Yorkers “don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer, [and] a major threat to public safety,” he wrote. “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked [and] corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”

 

In April, the New York Times soft-pedaled Mamdani’s stance on police reform, as elaborated in his campaign’s 17-page white paper on public safety. Mamdani still sees “a critical role” for police, but he would also “eliminate the Police Department’s huge overtime budget” and disband “a unit known as the Strategic Response Group that responds to protests.” In addition, Mamdani would establish a “Department of Community Safety,” which would deploy “mental health teams” to “respond to 911 calls.”

 

Mamdani’s rise to the forefront of Democratic politics in America’s largest city might be written off as a historical accident — the culmination of a series of unfortunate events that pitted him against a corrupt and unloved Democrat-turned-independent incumbent mayor and a disgraced former governor. But the candidate’s success also represents a repudiation of the accumulated wisdom Democrats gleaned from their failures over the course of this decade. That repudiation isn’t limited to New York City.

 

Few American cities experienced the convulsive unrest that typified the summer of 2020 quite like Seattle. Every major American metro experienced riotous violence to some degree. But the assaults on courthouses in Seattle, the running street battles with police, and the establishment of a quasi-autonomous canton inside the city run by warlords and characterized by lawlessness and squalor set a high bar for urban dysfunction in a year replete with it.

 

Unsurprisingly, the city’s residents revolted against their lot. A self-described police “abolitionist” lost her bid to serve as the next city attorney to a Republican, Ann Davison, who ran explicitly against the Democratic Party’s disregard for law and order. Bruce Harrell, a moderate, was swept into the mayor’s office after defeating a city councilwoman who, along with the majority of the body, voted to slash the city’s police department budget by half. But that was four years ago. Today, a backlash against that backlash is on.

 

In a low-turnout primary race this August, Seattle Democrats backed left-wing activist Katie Wilson over the incumbent mayor. Wilson was a vocal supporter of the anti-police budget proposal that made Harrell mayor in the first place. Her views may also have evolved from the days when she said her city needed “to move towards a future entirely without SPD,” but there are few indications of that. Davison, too, looks like she will be voted out in November. In the city’s nonpartisan primary, Davison won just over 33 percent of the vote to Erika Evans’s 55 percent. Her victory, too, is attributable to Seattle Democrats’ exhaustion with law and order. As one local PBS report indicated, Evans owes her status to her claim that “Davison’s approach to the office and her focus on prosecuting low-level misdemeanors like shoplifting and trespassing is expensive and ineffectual.”

 

And in Minneapolis, the city at the center of the George Floyd moment, mayoral incumbent Jacob Frey was denied his party’s endorsement for a third term in favor of Omar Fateh, an activist Minnesota state senator. Fateh’s platform looks a lot like that of his progressive allies: freeze the rent, tax the wealthy, promote anti-Israel messages, and, of course, “reform” the police. He has glommed onto Mamdani’s preferred circumlocutions, calling for “peace officers” who would supplement a “department of public safety,” which would absorb the police’s budget and do policework, albeit with stricter rules of engagement. Explaining how that departs from the 2020-era “defund” campaign is a matter of drawing fine distinctions.

 

Democratic primary voters in the urban enclaves to which the party has been relegated are rejecting the conventional wisdom that emerged after the party’s Biden-era setbacks. In 2020, urban progressives sought to transform their cities into vehicles designed to export their idiosyncratic policy preferences to the rest of the country. When that backfired on the party, its more seasoned political professionals advised their compatriots to do better with the power they already had before soliciting more.

 

America’s cities should make themselves “models of efficient service delivery and public safety” if they hope to “change perceptions of the Democratic Party” at the state and national level, Missouri Independent columnist Jeff Smith opined. The Economist agreed: “The biggest problem Democratic cities face is that high taxes and a high cost of living have not correlated with excellent services.” It added: “Contrast cities like New York or San Francisco with Republican-run states and the failure is evident.” And as the American Enterprise Institute’s Ruy Teixeira put it, “Why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly?”

 

Vital City blogger David Schleicher spared no progressive shibboleth in his indictment of what ails the modern American city, which faces compounding crises of maladministration: restrictive zoning regimes enforced by special interests; the failure or refusal to police quality-of- life crimes, which beget neighborhoods more susceptible to violence and property crime; profligacy and indebtedness at an embarrassing scale; public services that serve no one save the bureaucrats, whose perpetual employment seems more important than the programs they’re supposed to administer.

 

The consensus was clear: Democrats should focus first on making cities work. Then and only then could America’s major metros serve as beacons for the sort of social change that progressives hope to popularize.

 

Last December, the New York Times intervened in this debate. Sure, in 2024, America’s cities delivered an unsparing verdict on Democratic governance when “core urban” voters shifted toward Donald Trump by a shocking eight points. And yet, as asserted in a report that examined the data, a “closer look at county-level results . . . offers little sign that urban woes were a primary driver of this rightward shift,” Times reporters Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano declared. After all, if you survey results in counties that are “majority white,” you see that the progressive urban coalition is largely intact.

 

The Times reporters continued: “When we look at all 68 urban core counties — counties encompassing what we would think of as the ‘inner cities’ of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas — the Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle areas notably didn’t shift much at all. They’re also among the least diverse.”

 

The fact that urban Democrats can still rely on the unfailing support of white progressives, one of the most unrepresentative demographics in the American political spectrum, should be cold comfort. But disoriented progressives latched onto this report’s conclusions as though it were flotsam in a shipwreck.

 

They’re doing so without reckoning with the rough seas that wrecked them in the first place. A prescient October 2024 Financial Times audit of data from Echelon Insights found that America’s population of white progressives “now hold views far to the left of American minorities” on questions pertaining to U.S. culture and law enforcement. That fact was supported by Donald Trump’s overperformance in American cities that November. It is also backed by the New York City primary race that delivered the mayoral nomination to Mamdani. When the final tallies came in, Mamdani overperformed in most areas save two: the city’s majority-black and lower-income districts, which he lost by 17 and 11 points, respectively.

 

There is opportunity in all this for clever and entrepreneurial Republicans. There are probably more opportunities available to Democratic reformers who can articulate a vision for a progressive social contract that falls short of Maoism. For now, however, backed by some of the most eccentric voters in America, a new generation of urban radicals is on the march.