Our latest installment of The UnPopulist Live took place on Friday, April 24, when senior editor Berny Belvedere sat down with Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson and New York City New Liberals political director Tibita Kaneene to discuss NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100-plus days in office.
What follows is the full video and transcript (lightly edited for flow and clarity) of the conversation. We hope you enjoy.
Berny Belvedere: Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Berny Belvedere, senior editor at The UnPopulist. I’m joined by Jeremiah Johnson of the Center for New Liberalism. Jeremiah, tell us about your newsletter.
Jeremiah Johnson: I write a blog called Infinite Scroll where I talk about the politics of the social internet—the ways that social media is changing culture and politics and how we discuss things. It’s a little bit unserious nonsense, and a little bit very serious stuff.
Belvedere: As all good cultural commentary is, so you’re within the acceptable range. Tibita, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit?
Tibita Kaneene: Hi, I’m Tibita Kaneene. I’m the political director of the New York City chapter of the Center for New Liberalism.
Belvedere: The topic today is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As liberals, we’re [naturally] interested in how he’s doing as mayor. I was hoping we could start with something that Mamdani himself said at an event marking his 100 days in office, which was about 10 days ago. I have a quote from Mamdani that sets up the first question I want to think about together with you—on this issue of democratic socialism versus other types of liberalism out there today, like an abundance variant or even more mainstream liberalism.
So here are Mamdani’s own words: “On January 1st, I told New Yorkers that City Hall would hold a singular purpose—to make this city belong to more of its people than it did the day before. For 102 days, we have endeavored to do exactly that.” And he cited achievements that he thinks fulfill that claim, such as the opening of new childcare centers and buses running faster. After he did that, he said: “That is the change that government can deliver.” And this is the critical part: “It’s the change that democratic socialism can deliver.” He said: “I was elected as a democratic socialist and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom Mamdani brought in for that 100-day event, said: “I have been on platforms with hundreds and hundreds of mayors and all kinds of public officials. This is the first time I’ve ever been introduced by someone who talked proudly about democratic socialism.”
I want to start on this theme. Thoughts?
Kaneene: I think it’s interesting that the two accomplishments he highlighted were delivering actual positive change, abundance type change. More schools, more seats in preschool—the whole idea of abundance is that we should have more good things, and that government should be functional and competent. And then the buses operating better: more and better transit is a pretty fundamental abundance issue.
Belvedere: Just to follow up on that point: he promised both faster and free busing, and he’s been able to deliver on one of the two—on “faster,” but not “free.”
Kaneene: Yeah. There’s this idea going around: “affordability in the front, abundance in the back.” Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results. I think that’s what his challenge is, and what he’s doing for the most part.
Johnson: The grand rhetorical gestures are what they are, and he has a point of view on how he views the world. I am not a socialist, but if you are going to tell me that I’m going to have a socialist mayor, probably the variant that I would want is what has sometimes been called sewer socialism. This comes from Milwaukee. Generations ago, they had a couple of mayors who called themselves socialist, but rather than focusing on revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, they really focused on civic governance. How do we make the city work better? How do we provide public infrastructure? How do we make the sewers operate without overflowing? And by solving practical problems, they maintained their popularity.
That is what I see Mamdani doing, at least in the first 100 days. He’s not been all that focused on the big rhetorical flourishes, the big ideological ideas. He’ll talk about them if he’s asked. He’ll mention it in a speech. But if you’re in New York and you see what’s actually happening and you see the things he’s doing on the ground, a lot of it is just more like: “We’ve got a big sidewalk shed problem and I’m going to tackle it.” Or we had a big multi-week blizzard here in New York and he had a campaign about shoveling the snow faster than it’s ever been shoveled before. Just competent, good governance stuff.
I think that’s what’s allowed him to maintain his popularity thus far. The question is, as he moves deeper into his term, past the first 100 days, as he starts to actually focus more and more on the grand ideological projects, the publicly owned grocery stores, the free buses, all these big ideas that he has—are those going to work as well as the more basic stuff has worked? Because no matter what you call it, everybody likes it when city government functions efficiently. What comes after that is not quite as clear.
Belvedere: I think a fair assessment of Mamdani would have to include that he is taking a few shots here—not just the kinds of things that might be dismissed as [Band-Aids]. They’ve attempted to put a plan in place for free childcare, and they’re extending that to younger and younger ages—for the first time, two-year-olds are in play for getting free childcare. That’s not a small thing. That’s not like filling a pothole. But he is including enough of that other stuff that makes me think there’s going to be a significant element of incrementalist-style change that he’s going to produce, and then there will be a battle about what is driving that—is some kind of democratic socialist vision driving it, or is this mainstream liberalism or abundance liberalism dressed up as something else?
“There’s this idea going around: ‘affordability in the front, abundance in the back.’ Affordability is a very popular campaign issue and idea, but it’s also an empirical goal. So once that’s established, to deliver on it you have to focus on consequences as opposed to ideological or rules-based things. You have to actually make the rent cheaper. [It’s not enough] to merely enact policies that can be seen as pro-tenant and anti-landlord—they have to have the effect of making housing better, cheaper, more plentiful. Now that he’s in office, he has to do that. Democratic socialism is a broad idea, but when it gets down to brass tacks and you’re an executive, then you have to actually do things—appoint competent people and enact policies that actually have results.” — Tibita Kaneene
I think all of us invested in the wider Mamdani discourse have to keep a couple of things in mind at all times. First—and this is the thing from which all other evaluative mistakes about Mamdani flow—you have to know that he is committed to the advancement of democratic socialism. It’s not just something he’s flirting with, it’s not something incidental. Time and again, he brings this up. Now, his actions might be different, but we’re just talking about how he’s casting his own story and the story of his government.
Every politician at this level is capable of downplaying philosophical influences. They know how to make passing nods to their past associations or affiliations while simultaneously creating distance from those views now. They all know how to do that. Mamdani could easily, if he wanted, tell a compelling story about how the ideology was critical to his formation and that he will keep with him the good parts—kind of like Obama after the Reverend Wright situation—but that he owes the people of New York a commitment to their well-being, not a commitment to a political program. Or he could say that what matters are results, not labels. There are a thousand ways for a politician to put a philosophical influence in the passenger seat, the rear seat, or even outside the car entirely. But Mamdani is fully leaning in rhetorically to the advancement of democratic socialism. So the idea that it was empty campaign rhetoric, and that he would, once in office, pivot to a rhetorical downplaying of democratic socialism’s influence on his decision-making—that idea should at this point be put to bed.
When we think about that, the second thing naturally comes up about Mamdani, especially for those of us who really want to analyze him correctly. There’s a lot of people out there who weaponize him as a prop in their broader culture war takes. But for those of us doing our best to give his mayorship a good-faith assessment—we have to focus on the things that he’s doing, not on the story he’s telling about the things that he’s doing. We have to not worry so much about socialism as a term. What he does matters more than what he says. That’s not a grand philosophical conclusion, but I think it has particular application to Mamdani in one extra way. Given that he’s rhetorically committed to advancing democratic socialism, the invocations of it will continue—those won’t go away. But here’s the really interesting thing: he’ll find ways to frame his actions and policies—even ones that aren’t exclusively democratic socialist—as though socialism is the thing driving them.
Johnson: Well, yeah, this is what happens when you win an election and you’re a young, popular guy and you have a very good social media team—you get to set the terms of the debate. You get to set the framing through which you are viewed. And that’s how things operate in the early days. But in the long run, it’s hard to hide from the results. Whether you want to or not, four years from now—three and a half, I guess—he’s going to be running for reelection. People are going to be asking: “Did my rent actually go down? Did groceries get less expensive? Is the city well run?”
The free childcare thing, right now, is just a very limited pilot—it’s like 2,000 seats. They have plans to expand it to the whole city, but for now it’s very limited. The benefit of popularity is that it gives you a little bit of a leash. It lets you kick your own team to some extent. You can betray the cause a little bit and they’ll forgive you. But ultimately, you do have to succeed. You do have to actually make things better. And that’s the open question: Is there going to be enough funding to actually make free childcare a thing city-wide? Or is it going to remain a limited pilot?
Belvedere: I agree—it’s empirically going to be borne out whether he can achieve the things [he’s promised]. He’ll need to. We’ll see in the data whether he’s succeeding. But this actually happens more subtly than just, “let’s check to see if the rents have gone down.” Think about the term you brought up—”sewer socialism.” That is a subtle way for him to retain the democratic socialist mold even though he’s talking about things that mayors from totally different political persuasions would be doing also.
Years ago, when Pete Buttigieg was first emerging as a candidate for [national political office], he went on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Klein gave him a chance to talk about what he was proud of accomplishing as mayor. Buttigieg said: “filling potholes.” He expressed how it can seem silly and mundane, but that it makes people’s lives materially better. He was giving an incrementalist pitch for what he was doing. If Mamdani is doing the same things, but leaning into the frame that instead encompasses all of that under democratic socialism—even when a lot of the policies are the kinds of things that candidates from other persuasions do—that’s why I’m saying it’s not so much the words or how he labels what he’s doing but the actual things he’s doing that matters.
Johnson: What’s interesting about that is this is very different from how democratic socialism normally operates in the United States. Because the median person who is a democratic socialist and is in a position of public power is a member of Congress. We don’t have a lot of extremely far-left, explicitly socialist mayors, but we do have a lot of the Squad [in D.C.]—your AOC, your Bernie Sanders, that group of people. And the incentives when you are in Congress are frankly to just simply be as extreme as you’d like. You’re in a deep blue district, probably D+70, and so you just need to be as pure and say as many outlandish things as you want to. There’s no punishment for any of that.
But being an executive is different. We’re already seeing this with the budget hole that New York City faces. Mamdani has a budget hole that he constitutionally has to fix. New York City cannot run deficits. So he has to fix that, and there’s a limited number of ways he can do it. He can’t just pick the policy he wants. There are state laws about which taxes can be raised and which cannot. So he needs the cooperation of the governor and the legislature if he wants to do certain things.
When he made a video about, “well, we’re going to increase property taxes on second houses,” he made sure to highlight a particular person’s $200 million mansion. But now that guy is upset that he got singled out and is saying, “maybe I’m going to cancel my $6 billion planned center in New York and take it somewhere else.” Actions have consequences when you are an executive in a way that they very much do not when you are a legislator. So that’s something to watch—he’s going to face a lot more constraints than are typical for his kind of politician.
Kaneene: Yeah, that’s true. I think we’ve seen him be very practical on policy [issues]—the biggest example would be the SEQRA reform at the state level that’s been proposed by Kathy Hochul. He supported her version. If you look at it relative to other U.S. states, it’s one of the best environmental review reform bills—better than California’s, for example.
Belvedere: What is SEQRA?
Kaneene: It’s the State Environmental Quality Review Act. It’s an environmental review required for any project, be it housing or energy, and it generally slows things down a lot. Its purview extends far beyond things that you and I might describe as environmental, and it’s a huge source of red tape. The state legislature was trying to attach a prevailing wage requirement to that bill, which would have made building housing particularly expensive. Mamdani did not support that. Carl Heastie, who’s the assembly speaker, is not a DSA person—he’s to the right of Mamdani. You could see a world where Mamdani would attach to that proposal in opposition to Gov. Hochul, but he did not. And it worked: just yesterday, the State Assembly removed the prevailing wage, and that battle has been won. So SEQRA will probably go through now with no prevailing wage.
“Some of this is messaging strategy. Mamdani comes from a family in the arts. His mom is a professional filmmaker. His videos are very well produced. He understands clipping culture—what really matters is not the event itself, it’s the 20-second clip that comes out of it that will get played a million times on social media. Part of it is just the messaging strategy itself. But I also think—look at what Mamdani doesn’t do. He doesn’t dress weird, he doesn’t try to do memes. His accounts never post memes. He’s never dressing in funny outfits. He’s not cursing. He’s well-dressed and presentable and optimistic and he talks like he wants to change things. I think there’s an impulse among middle-aged, moderate liberals sometimes to be like, ‘To chase the kids, we’ve got to do the memes. Someone get me a 20-year-old who knows memes for my internet account.’ And it’s just very cringe-worthy. It’s terrible. What people respond to is when you believe what you’re saying.” — Jeremiah Johnson
Another thing—shortly after the election, a DSA candidate named Chi Ossé announced that he was going to take on Hakeem Jeffries, who’s the Democratic leader in the House, in a primary challenge. And Mamdani not only declined to endorse—he publicly said, “You should not run.” He went to a DSA meeting and made a speech saying, “We should not endorse Ossé.” And Ossé actually dropped out. So that is him going to bat, not for a DSA person, but for a centrist Democratic leader. He’s done very practical things both on the politics and on the broad policy side that I would say deviate from purely ideological DSA framing.
Johnson: I want to give the two possible paths forward if you are Mamdani, speaking in broad generalities. I think what a successful Mamdani mayorship looks like is: he essentially uses his popularity to kick in the teeth of certain special interests. Political popularity lets you do things that piss off your own side, and they’ll forgive you for it. If Mamdani wants to take on certain union requirements—New York has hundreds of regulations about when you have to use union labor, and it drives up costs and there’s a lot of bureaucracy around it—if he wanted to take some of that on, the left would forgive him because he’s so charismatic and popular among his base, and it would lower costs. Whether it’s the environmental laws that Tibita is talking about, or unions, or getting rid of the community board veto that makes it so hard to build housing—using his popularity to kill off some progressive sacred cows could let him get a lot accomplished.
The other thing that could happen is that he falls into the “everything bagel” paradigm—where, “I want to maintain my popularity, so I’m not going to try to piss off anybody in my coalition. I’ll give the environmentalists all the environmental regulations they want, I’ll give the unions everything they want, I’ll give this group and that group” … until you end up in the same place the Biden administration ended up. They passed a lot of really ambitious legislation without actually being able to accomplish any of it because of this thicket of red tape, this kind of anti-abundance approach. There’s a middle ground in between, but those are the two paths I see in terms of how he actually uses and leverages his current popularity. It’s an open question. It’s still early days.
Belvedere: So, Tibita, I wanted to bring up the piece that you wrote for us a while back, where you did a profile of Mamdani.
What I thought was brilliant about that piece—and I hadn’t seen it anywhere else—was that you took the abundance liberalism frame, assessed his democratic socialist tendencies and some early manifestations of what that could look like, looked at some of his projected hiring, and assessed what his mayorship was trending toward. I wanted to see if you had a follow-up to your own pre-Mamdani-in-office assessment now that he’s governing. The title was: “Will Mamdani Govern More as a Democratic Socialist or as an Abundance Liberal?” And the subtitle was: “His policy evolution and the team he’s assembling suggests that he could be moving in a market-friendly direction.” What do you think about that now?
Kaneene: Sure. So that piece came out three days before the election. On election day, Mamdani came out in support of the pro-housing initiatives on the ballot. Those were very abundance-oriented. We already thought he supported them, but that was good confirmation. Then his first deputy mayor, Fuleihan, is just a very experienced, very competent person to run the city. He’s not ideological—he’s competent, has experience under a variety of past administrations; he’s older, senior, knows a lot of people, and just helps get things done. Would be a good deputy mayor for a Democrat of a variety of political stripes. His Deputy Mayor for Housing, Leila Bozorg, is just an amazing person. She was Deputy Commissioner of HPD. Everyone there who I know thinks she’s amazing. The most prominent DSA person would be Cea Weaver—she’s a longtime tenant advocate. But there’s really not a super ideological DSA person in the senior executive team.
Then I mentioned some of the things he’s done from a policy standpoint. On the rent freeze—since that piece came out, he’s reconciled somewhat with the guidelines board. They’re voting on May 7. They’re probably going to freeze it for a year. But he has had to come up with ways to offset the rent freeze by lowering costs for landlords. He looked at the math, he has good advisors around him, and so for the first year he’s going to provide some relief on insurance costs. Affordability in the front, but abundance in the back in the sense that he has to make the math work. He can’t actually force landlords to lose money because many of these buildings are already underwater. What would happen is we’d just lose supply because these buildings would fail to operate.
Belvedere: Let me ask you about that, because “abundance in the back”—abundance is very far in the back there. I don’t know many YIMBY advocates who on this point would say the answer is to freeze rent.
Kaneene: Yeah, I mean—among his housing policies, it’s the most problematic. That’s why I focused on it in the piece. It’s a price control, which reduces supply, which is counterproductive for trying to increase housing supply and thereby reduce the price of housing. Now, he has done some other positive supply-side things. For example, the ELURP—the Expedited Land Use Review Procedure—he’s actually used that process to approve a housing development in the Bronx that was previously blocked by Vicky Paladino, the only MAGA city council member who, prior to the ballot initiatives, was able through member deference to unilaterally block development in her district. She even made a speech saying, “before, I blocked it; now because of this expedited process, I’m not able to block it.” So she’s letting it happen. So that’s a victory. He was able to green-light new housing supply within the first few months based on a new law that he has shown no shyness in using.
There are a bunch of other projects. There’s one in my community board district, the Bloomingdale Library, where they put out an RFP for a private developer to come in, build a new library and build a bunch of housing—mainly market rate with some affordable housing built in—at no cost to the city. He also has the Sunnyside Yards, a project in Queens above a rail yard that should produce over 12,000 homes. He famously went to see Trump at the White House and convinced him to sign on.
Belvedere: I want to get to his relationship with Trump in a second. But first, you’ve given us good information about how Mamdani is doing on the housing front, and you’ve mentioned some things you wish he’d do differently. Let’s move on to some of his food policies for a second. He had the food vendor reforms, and then the grocery store stuff. He wants essentially a publicly run store—one per borough?
Kaneene: Yeah, one per borough.
Belvedere: Maybe that’s an incremental approach where he wants more over time, but the plan is for one per borough for now. Some essential goods would be at a significant discount, and not necessarily all products. The rest would be at normal price. Thoughts?
Johnson: Yeah, I think this has the potential to quietly undermine … and none of this has broken ground yet, none of this is happening as of right now, but there’s a plan, and the details of the plan do not fill me with confidence. What you need to know is that grocery stores, by their nature, are a very competitive, very low-margin business. This is already a fiercely competitive field. It’s very hard to make money in it. And so anybody with any sort of rational expectation here should expect the publicly owned grocery stores to lose a lot of money, because they’re going to be poorly run relative to traditional private grocery stores. And maybe you just don’t care—maybe you’re like, “I don’t care if they lose money because I just value having a public grocery store.” But this is one of those things where it really easily could turn into that second scenario I talked about: he makes sure to give unions a lot of giveaways when he’s building this type of grocery store, the actual building of the thing takes twice as long as we thought and twice as much money because of all the rules we had to follow.
“I think there is moral clarity. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think that [Mamdani] can say, ‘Trump, I want you to pay for this housing development in Queens,’ and morally there’s been no compromise at all. … he still says Trump is a fascist. He still speaks out against a lot of his policies. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think he’s like a moral beacon in a time where we don’t really have any kind of moral leadership in the executive branch in Washington.” — Tibita Kaneene
He’s already talking about the one they want for Manhattan. They’ve picked out a site. It’s going to be something like three years and an obscene amount of money—far more money than it should take. Thirty million dollars to build one grocery store, which is far above what it would cost a private actor. And on top of that, the original justification for this whole thing was that there are food deserts in the city. Where he’s chosen to build it is not a food desert. There’s like five grocery stores within a 10-minute walk of this place.
Belvedere: He talks about people being priced out of essential goods. And so he would need to substantiate that in a way that justifies this kind of cost and disruption.
Johnson: We have tools to address that. If people can’t afford food, that’s why SNAP exists, that’s why food stamps exist. Giving people money is such an easier solution than trying to build an entire public-sector grocery store that is going to be terribly run. Every time anything happens at that grocery store, the media is going to pounce on it. There’s going to be shoplifting. If Mamdani lets them shoplift, it turns into a national story. If he has them arrested, also a story—that pisses off the left. There are landmines all over this, and it seems to me like he’s going to end up stepping on some of them. There’s going to be needless scandals about how they were built, which contractors got cushy deals. If you have a limited amount of political capital, one grocery store per borough is meaningless. It doesn’t do anything. Why would you waste your time on this?
Belvedere: And what you were saying, when you called food assistance just the easier option—not only is it the easier option, but it’s the option where there is the least amount of state intervention required to achieve the eventual goal of getting people these goods. You don’t have to have a state-run market—you can give people the tool that they use to then exchange at that market. It’s a more back-end kind of assistance. But it also, as you were saying, allows you to focus on a whole lot of other things you said that you wanted to do for the city, rather than engaging in something where, yes, you’re connecting a campaign promise to an actual thing that you’re doing—there’s consistency there, you can win from that—but the potential pitfalls you noted could really be an albatross. And as a different kind of objection to just “easier”: as liberals, we want to do the least government-involved version that we can whenever we can.
Kaneene: I’m a little more sanguine about it. I’m agnostic about whether we should have a state grocery store or not. The main thing for me is I don’t think it’s going to provide any savings, for the reasons Jeremiah said—they’re low-margin businesses. This one is a 17-minute walk from a Costco. You’re not going to beat the ability to use your SNAP card and order from Amazon. All that being said, this was a campaign promise he focused on. I think during the campaign he realized that these stores are not going to actually be able to provide cheaper food without the city simply taking a big loss—and that’s why he kept repeating that it’s going to be one per borough, it’s going to be a pilot. So I think it’s something that he needs to do. He’ll struggle to break even, he’ll do his five, and the positive side is it will actually prove that these grocery store chains, whatever you might think about them, are operating pretty efficiently. And we might have reasons to hate Amazon, rightly or wrongly, but that’s actually the cheapest food you can get. So I don’t think it’s as terrible as maybe Jeremiah thinks.
But I do share the concern of it becoming a bigger issue, where he says now we’re going to have publicly owned gas stations. I don’t think there’s any risk of that. I would bet money there’s not going to be more than five. There might not even be five.
Johnson: And my thing is more just—look, this is not going to sink the city, the fact that we try this experiment with five grocery stores. This city of nine million people will be fine. But it’s one of those things that if I were him, if I put myself in his shoes trying to accomplish his goals, I would not want to waste my time on this, because there are just landmines everywhere. You’re going to get caught up in some extremely stupid controversy—some worker at the store is going to complain that their boss mistreated them. And all of a sudden, it becomes DEFCON 5 because you’re a socialist and how can you not side with the workers? There are so many things like that that have the potential to sap away your political capital. Why would you want to spend your political capital on something that frankly does not matter? It will not make food more affordable for nine million New Yorkers. It will be a cute little thing for like a couple hundred people who live near it. Why are you wasting your time on it?
Kaneene: The base wants it. So he has to—while he’s doing all the efficient and effective things that we want him to do, he does have to maintain his base. There are a lot of people who, if you ask them—casual people who don’t follow politics—“name three things that Mamdani says he’s going to do,” they would say: freeze the rent, fast and free buses, and grocery stores. They might not know anything else about him.
Belvedere: And there’s a listener who just chimed in and said: “I thought the idea was to bring fresh food to food deserts, not replace grocery stores.” That tees off a question about Mamdani that we’ll find out as his mayorship continues: is this incrementalist approach—this sewer socialism, now recast in a positive light as something worth doing, this more bite-sized approach to reform—is it a beginning point to a far broader vision for how things need to be organized and done? Or is it the terminal point, where he’s okay with one per borough?
I think that question goes to how we interpret these actions. Are they a kind of red carpet for a farther-reaching democratic socialist reconfiguration? Or something you’re just sprinkling in? Some people fear that it’s the prelude to a far greater push. The way they’re doing childcare is in that kind of phased, gradual way—by this year we’re going to hit this amount of two-year-olds, then eventually we’re going to cover down to six-week-old children, etc. So are we fine with the grocery stores because of their limited nature? If they were a prelude to a greater push, would people worry about them a little more?
Johnson: Well, I’m sure there are some people out there who have that view, that Mamdani is doing this and we’re going to build on it, it’s going to be more and more of this kind of thing until we finally reach utopia. But reality has a way of smacking you in the face. The grocery stores are not going to be very successful, and therefore you won’t get many more of them. The childcare is nice right now as a pilot for just 2,000 kids, but it’s also very expensive even for just 2,000 kids—the price tag is well over a billion dollars. Somebody’s going to have to pay for that, and it’s not going to be the city. The city absolutely does not have that money. So it has to be the state.
Belvedere: Can I tell you what he said? You evaluate it—you and Tibita. What do you think about this promise? He said: if you make less than a million dollars, you don’t have to worry about any further taxes. And if the tax burden doesn’t increase on people making fewer than a million dollars per year, that’s something that many New Yorkers will find palatable.
Johnson: Well, but it’s also nonsense. Like—reality will slap you upside the head. This is the thing that Democrats have been doing that pisses me off, frankly. Mamdani says it’s up to a million dollars. Cory Booker is trying to introduce some bill in Congress: if you make less than $120,000, you shouldn’t have to pay income taxes. Everybody’s saying no tax on tips, no tax on pet products, no tax on Social Security, no tax for the elderly, no tax on property. Everybody wants to be the anti-tax party, and say only millionaires and billionaires should ever have to pay a tax of any kind.
Look, I’m not on the far left, but if you want to have a welfare state, if that’s a thing you desire out of your government, the middle class has to pay taxes. There is no way to make the math work, that you can just tax billionaires exclusively and have this rich, lush, Scandinavian-style social democracy. It does not work. Reality will kick you in the face. You’re going to eventually have to break your promises or deal with the reality that you can’t deliver. Some of this stuff is fantasy land, and that’s where it ultimately will come down.
Kaneene: Yeah, I mean—that’s the main bulwark against any expectation or fear of him really bringing on real European-style socialism, is that he’s not willing to tax the middle class. And that’s the real reason we don’t have to expect—or worry, to put it neutrally—that we’ll have any such program in the United States, because a middle-class tax increase is just politically untenable.
“This is what happens when you win an election and you’re a young, popular guy and you have a very good social media team—you get to set the terms of the debate. You get to set the framing through which you are viewed. And that’s how things operate in the early days. But in the long run, it’s hard to hide from the results. Whether you want to or not, four years from now—three and a half, I guess—he’s going to be running for reelection. People are going to be asking: ‘Did my rent actually go down? Did groceries get less expensive? Is the city well run?’” — Jeremiah Johnson
But to go back to the idea of the childcare pilot—actually, if you look at it, already the numbers of new seats are behind the ramp-up he had said he was going to do. And if you look at the budget, he’s not budgeting for more money for pre-K seats. There’s no more money. He’s not increased the money coming from the state. And other examples—like the city FHEPS, which are basically housing vouchers—during the campaign he said he would support a lawsuit to increase housing vouchers, a classic demand subsidy which, as we know, is not good for increasing housing supply or lowering prices. But he came into office and now he’s not going to increase housing subsidies. Again, the reality presented itself and he’s made a choice. There are things he has to continue with as pilot programs, as ideological statements, that he’s not going to bust the budget for or increase taxes on the middle class for. He’s at least being advised correctly that even on taxing the wealthy, there’s a maximum point of revenue—there’s a point beyond which if you increase the marginal tax rate, you actually bring in less money. Taxing the rich has an actual objective limit, which he has to take into account because he cannot run a budget deficit at the city level.
Belvedere: I want to ask about his relationship with Trump, but in the form of a thought experiment, to put the point provocatively.
Imagine we’re all sitting around 30 years from now talking about this era in politics, and we’re talking to people who didn’t live through it, telling them about the world-historical awfulness of Trump, and threat that he was—the would-be authoritarian who did more than any other president in our annals to degrade our institutions and veer us off a liberal democratic path, even in a fascist direction. Biden famously said “semi-fascist,” some people have moved beyond that [and have dropped the qualifier]. This is the kind of figure we’re talking about. The man who defied federal judges to deport hundreds of people to foreign gulags. And they’re now flipping through images and footage from this era and they see Mamdani in photos with Trump. They see and hear him in interviews, maybe downplaying his awfulness. He’s had a recent interview where he said he has a “productive relationship” with Trump. Trump threatened to deport Mamdani—a U.S. citizen. What do you think about his stance toward Trump? Is there any worry there? Is it refreshing that he’s able to just work with him despite his awfulness? I have some issues with the way he’s approached the Trump relationship. What do you guys think?
Johnson: Yeah—again, this is something I’ve said several times here, but the purpose of popularity is that it lets you kind of stab your own team in the back, at least a little bit. If a moderate Democrat went down to the White House and shook hands with Donald Trump and took a smiling picture with him and said, “I have a productive relationship with him and we’re going to work together on important things,” the left would howl in outrage about how this is an unbelievable betrayal, that this person is a Republican in disguise enabling fascism, and so on. If Mamdani does it—he’s popular. He’s their guy. He’s so charismatic and popular among his base that they’re like, “oh cool, it’s a strategic play, he’s doing this for us.” It lets you get away with things that you otherwise couldn’t get away with. From the perspective that Mamdani’s got a strategic streak to him, it makes sense that he would rather the president not be persecuting the city, and so he’s going to try to make that happen.
Kaneene: I’m a consequentialist. He went to the White House with a goal of getting funding for the Sunnyside Yards project. He thought making that a Daily News cover would be a means to that end. He was correct. He went down there, took a picture, came back. During this time he was asked if he still thinks Trump is a fascist. He said yes. Trump has since lashed out at him on social media saying he’s terrible. I don’t think that privately he’s saying nice things to Trump, or that Trump has any illusion that Mamdani likes him. I think Trump is actually impressed with Mamdani and kind of respects what he did—something that Trump could never do, which is get elected mayor of New York City, winning over the kind of elite Manhattan class that never liked Trump. He realizes Mamdani has a very powerful political base that he has to reckon with.
So I don’t have any issue with what he’s done with Trump. He’s constantly opining on issues—whether it’s the Iran war or tariffs—on which he disagrees with Trump, doing so eloquently and powerfully on social media.
Belvedere: Take the Iran war, for example. He told a story in an interview of a woman who was being harassed because she maybe looked Iranian or Middle Eastern, and it’s a powerful story about how the war is creating divisions at home. He told it through a vivid narrative. You hear it and you start to gravitate toward his side because he’s telling something that matters to human beings. He’s a really capable politician. I’ll give him that, and I want to see how he continues to navigate what is an extremely thorny proposition, but I’m a little worried. He’s been able to keep ICE off New York City streets based on whatever overtures he’s made to Trump—that is a real gain, for sure. He’s essentially told Trump, “You can be the FDR to my LaGuardia.” He’s casting Trump as someone who is actually going to make a positive contribution to New York. It’s just too glowing, for me, about a guy who’s undoing a lot of what we think of as important in America.
In the most prominent interviews he’s given [recently], he’s backed off from that strong language about Trump. That’s something to think about moving forward, how he handles that relationship. I would like a little more moral clarity from him when it comes to Trump, [even given that he has to have a working relationship with him].
Kaneene: I think there is moral clarity. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think that he can say, “Trump, I want you to pay for this housing development in Queens,” and morally there’s been no compromise at all. I think that in a time where we have …
Belvedere: … He was asked directly, “Is Trump trustworthy?” And he said, “I’m going to keep talking to him.” To me, it’s like—are we at a point where we can’t say he’s not been trustworthy? He absolutely has not been trustworthy. Declining to say he’s untrustworthy … it’s just a small warning to me that he’s not willing to interact with Trump in the way Trump deserves.
Kaneene: Yeah, but—it might be the case that he feels he can trust what Trump says to him in a personal meeting. That might genuinely be true. And he still says Trump is a fascist. He still speaks out against a lot of his policies. I don’t think there’s been any moral compromise. I think he’s like a moral beacon in a time where we don’t really have any kind of moral leadership in the executive branch in Washington.
Johnson: It’s just, what are you trying to accomplish? Is anyone’s life better off because he called Trump a fat pig who deserves to die? What are we talking about here? It would be one thing if he was being like, “Well, Trump is going to help us fund this housing project, so we’re going to help him with ICE in the city.” But he’s not doing that. He’s just being less than maximally mean.
Belvedere: We’re almost out of time, so let’s get from you guys your broadest possible assessment of his mayorship so far. A hundred days in, a little more than that now, what do we think? What’s your assessment?
Johnson: Given what I expected out of him, seven out of ten so far.
Belvedere: Tibita?
Kaneene: I’d give him a B so far. A big reason—we’ll see what happens with the city budget and with the rent freeze. Those are, I think, the two things for the first year. He has a chance to move to a B-minus/C-plus or up to a B-plus in the next 60 days based on those two things.
Belvedere: What would it look like for him to crush the next part of the year, from your perspective?
Kaneene: On the budget, on the merits, I think the city council is correct. If he came around to that, that would be a big deal. If he followed through on proposing substantive property tax reform—which I think he will do eventually—but if he did that, that would be a big deal.
Johnson: That’s the white whale of New York politics, actually reforming our property tax system.
Kaneene: In particular, if he got rid of the tax disadvantage for multifamily homes, I think that part is doable. That would be a big deal.
Johnson: If you’re outside New York City, you should just know our property tax system is a mess. We have high property taxes, but beyond the fact that they’re high—maybe that’s fair, New York does a lot of things—the system itself is just a confusing maze. The valuations are all over the place. There’s just weird stuff all over the place with our property tax system. Every mayor would love to regularize it, normalize it. And there’s enough special exceptions that it’s really hard to do without people getting furiously angry who benefit from the special exceptions. So if he could get that done—holy crap, yeah.
Kaneene: Yeah. Speaking of pissing off some supporters—I think he has the political capital to piss off some homeowners in order to reduce the costs for apartment dwellers. I think he can do that, especially if he’s seen as someone who is freezing the rent and doing the grocery stores and what have you.
Belvedere: Jeremiah, one last question for you. You’re a culture watcher. You spot trends and memes and people’s reactions to politics. What do you think it is about Mamdani—and some of the others in his cohort—that they seem to do really well with younger people? What can liberal politicians learn from this cohort? They have vastly different characteristics—Bernie Sanders is an old white dude, Mamdani is very different—and yet they have the same kind of buzz and ability on that front. What can liberal politicians do better to match that?
Johnson: Yeah, I mean, some of this is messaging strategy. Mamdani comes from a family in the arts. His mom is a professional filmmaker. His videos are very well produced. He understands clipping culture—what really matters is not the event itself, it’s the 20-second clip that comes out of it that will get played a million times on social media. Part of it is just the messaging strategy itself.
But I also think—look at what Mamdani doesn’t do. He doesn’t dress weird, he doesn’t try to do memes. His accounts never post memes. He’s never dressing in funny outfits. He’s not cursing. He’s well-dressed and presentable and optimistic and he talks like he wants to change things. I think there’s an impulse among middle-aged, moderate liberals sometimes to be like, “To chase the kids, we’ve got to do the memes. Someone get me a 20-year-old who knows memes for my internet account.” And it’s just very cringe-worthy. It’s terrible. What people respond to is when you believe what you’re saying.
Belvedere: That wraps up our time together today. Thank you guys for joining me. I’m Berny, senior editor at The UnPopulist. Tibita is the political director of the New York City chapter of the Center for New Liberalism. And Jeremiah Johnson is co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, and his newsletter is excellent. Thanks for joining. See you next time.
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