AFP via Getty Images
The mayor of New York City is a figure of national importance, even though no one in the past century has risen from City Hall to play a meaningful role in American politics.
Why? Because New York City is the canary in the coal mine for ideas about how to govern.
When bad ideas are enacted here, they spread like the Spanish flu and sicken the rest of America. And when good ones come along, like the policies that ended the crime wave in the 1990s, they spread like sunshine on a cloudless morning and brighten the daily lives of the entire country.
So it’s not just because New York is the center of the universe (which it is) that its mayors matter. It’s that what happens here reverberates.
And right now, what seems to be reverberating as New York’s Democrats prepare for their June mayor primary is Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani has risen from complete obscurity to second in the polls (albeit 20 points behind leader Andrew Cuomo) and has raised an astounding $9 million-plus.
That makes Mamdani the breakthrough star of the Democratic Party so far this year. And that’s pretty amazing, because this 33 year-old nobody state representative is an out-and-out utopian lunatic.
He wants to freeze all rents, have the government run grocery stores, and make both childcare and bus transit free for all.
How would this work in practice? Oh, don’t be a stickler! Get on board the free bus!
Indeed, Mamdami is so pure in his ideological vision that he evokes one of socialism’s crackpot founders, Charles Fourier (1782-1837).
Fourier had a plan to reorganize the earth into a series of exactly equal-in-size-and-money communal farms called “phalansteries” in which happy children would do the work of contented adults and the resulting social harmony would literally transform the oceans into lemonade we could all drink.
How would this all work? Never mind how! Just drink the Kool-Aid — I mean, the lemonade!
The glory was in the doing — the process of creating the new order Fourier called Harmony, in which social conflict would disappear and wealth would rain down equally upon everyone.
This vision of a society run from the top down to eliminate all human conflict — OR ELSE — led more practical radicals of his time to think about they could do to bring about this revolution in consciousness.
This effort began in earnest in the publication of “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848 — and came to its conclusion following the slaughter of more than 100 million people under the yoke of totalitarian socialism by the time the Berlin Wall fell nearly 150 years later.
So by all means, let’s bring it to New York City in 2026!
Simply this: The policy proposals Mamdani is running on will be literally impossible to enact — but if enacted, would turn the city into an economic and social hellhole so fast we would long for the days when our greatest fear was being pushed onto a subway track by a schizophrenic.
What do I mean by comparing Mamdani to Fourier?
At various turning points in the city’s history since the 1960s, we have been presented with a choice. The choice is between reality and delusion. In reality, New York is a mess desperately in need of practical solutions to make an increasingly unlivable city livable again.
The delusion is that this can be affected by increasing the power of the incompetent, corrupt, and foolish city government and its workforce.
Mamdani, whose father is a radical professor at Columbia (oh, great) and whose mother is a has-been movie director who boycotts Israel, gets his middle name from Kwame Nkrumah, a progressive anti-colonial African politician.
Nkrumah was democratically elected in 1957, but, big surprise, by 1964 had turned his country of Ghana into a one-party dictatorship with himself as “president for life” before he was justifiably deposed.
Zohran Mamdani is the inheritor of bad ideas from the 19th century, is named for a socialist totalitarian from the 20th century, is the child of a 21st century anti-Semite, and wants to bring all of this to bear in New York City in 2026.
I have an idea. Let’s not let him.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary Magazine.