Comrade Mayor?

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Ten years ago on this site, I documented the rise of America’s most prominent socialist, Bernie Sanders, from his surprising victory in a mayoral election in Burlington, Vermont, to becoming a member of the House of Representatives, then the US Senate, and now a leading national left-wing politician. I called his version of socialism “genteel” and asked if it really had any relationship with the hard-edged revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America who wanted to confront the owners of capital, take control of industries, and fight for unions and working people.

Whether they are consciously copying Sanders’ footsteps to becoming the leading advocate for overthrowing America’s “oppressive” capitalist system or not, we now have three individuals who either call or align themselves with socialism serving as mayor or in a very strong position to become mayor of large American cities. Like Sanders, these individuals espouse some very left-wing policies. But can someone serving as a mayor, even the mayor of America’s largest city, really pursue “socialism”? Can local politics ever be socialist?

Chicago’s Brandon Johnson won the general election just two years ago, and now in New York City, Zohran Mamdani is the winner of the Democratic primary, which will likely give him the keys to Gracie Mansion. Then just last week in a very surprising outcome in Minneapolis, another socialist, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, won the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic party at a convention, rejecting the incumbent Jacob Frey because he failed to support a resolution calling for an end to the Israel-Hamas conflict last year and not supporting policies such as carbon taxes and rent control. Arguing, correctly, that they don’t work.

Socialism has been growing in popularity and favorability among the two groups that carried Mamdani to victory in New York—Democrats in general and young people in particular. The day after his stunning victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that it was an army of young volunteers who helped organize his campaign and push him over the finish line, convincingly defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo.

Socialism has steadily become more popular among young people and the left in recent years. A Pew poll from 2022 showed 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of socialism, and that a majority of Americans aged 18–29 preferred socialism to capitalism. Drilling further into the data, the poll found that young Democrats in particular were predisposed towards socialism because it would redistribute wealth and use state power to provide a plethora of various services and other “freebies.”

Mamdani’s bread and butter policies were chosen to appeal to younger left-leaning voters in New York, specifically rent control, subsidized public transportation, government grocery stores, and other superficially appealing (and ultimately disastrous) proposals. Fateh has a similar vision for Minneapolis.

Part of the problem is that for a long time, there was at least one party that staked out a fairly consistent position in favor of less government and more markets, in its rhetoric. That was the Republican Party, coming out of the roots of the Goldwater Revolution through the Reagan presidency up through the end of George W. Bush’s two terms in the White House. The party of the “right” was fairly consistent in at least talking about capitalism and limited government positively. But the GOP now supports tariffs, economic planning, and huge domestic spending programs, alongside strengthening the military. That shift allows Democrats to move further left on a wide range of issues, and the election of these two individuals offers a glimpse of one potential future of American national politics.

Leaving aside national politics, an interesting question remains: Why are we seeing socialism become popular at the local level, particularly in these three cities? First, in the case of New York and Minneapolis, these candidates were successful through unconventional electoral processes—ranked-order voting in Mamdani’s case and a nomination by a local party in Fateh’s. Second, all three of these candidates have won in very blue cities in which socialism is more favorably viewed, but none with the support of blue-collar voters. In Chicago, Johnson was the former head of the teachers’ union, which is one of the most politically powerful organizations in the state. In New York, Mamdani won with support from the “a little rich” boroughs of Brooklyn and other areas filled with highly educated elite voters who believe they are the underpaid relative to their fellow elites on Wall Street and in tech. Resentment by them fueled his victory while working-class voters in the Bronx and Staten Island rejected his calls for government grocery stores, housing the homeless in subway stations, and rent control. Fateh won the support of hard-left party delegates in a city that was the birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

There is one more key reason why socialism is becoming more popular among heavily blue cities, and Fateh mentions it prominently on his campaign page when he begins his “Vision” by noting that the White House is occupied by Donald Trump. Of course, this is in conjunction with Trump’s policies. He says he wants to create a Minneapolis that is “the last line of defense” against President Trump and what he calls his “posse of unelected billionaires” in a nod to Elon Musk. I would wager that Mamdani enjoys a similar tailwind in this election. It’s also worth noting that Sanders was elected mayor in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was to begin his first term in office. Coincidence?

Expecting the mayors of their cities to lead the resistance, though, is naive. It’s like signing a punter to solve a football team’s passing game. Mayors have limited powers to take on the national government and a responsibility to handle local policy challenges, not to issue proclamations in support of Middle Eastern policies.

Will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.”

Any thoughtful citizen needs to see what this posse of soon-to-be-elected, self-proclaimed socialists is selling. They have little managerial experience; they are rehashing failed policies that will simply lead to a larger public sector that none of these cities can afford. What’s more, increasing public sector spending in many of the areas they are suggesting has never been effective at addressing the problems these individuals are claiming to solve. That is why blue cities have been losing population and Democrats are bleeding blue-collar support in metropolitan areas.

So, will placing socialists in charge of large American cities help drum up support for the ideas and principles of socialism? That’s going to depend to a large degree on what people think of as “socialism.” Historically, socialists have advocated for the abolition of privately held property that would be replaced by collective ownership and central control of the distribution of goods through central planning rather than markets. This has led to decreases in inequality, basically by making everyone tremendously poorer, for example, in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and elsewhere.

Modern advocates for socialism promote it as a much milder version of the Soviet communist model, but the principles share a lot of similarities. Consider Mamdani’s calls for the abolition of privately owned housing and government provision of retail food. Those are steps towards intervention in two critical areas of daily life. Of course, he lacks the power to confiscate people’s homes and build large public housing projects on 5th Avenue. So can a mayor really be a socialist?

The founders of the Bloomington School of political economy, Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent, were always reluctant to describe local politics using sharp divisions between “markets” and “government.” They correctly recognized that the market is an institution that needs some third party to maintain property rights and enforce contracts. Governments need some form of wealth creation to pay for services. They argued that neither can exist in a vacuum without the other.

Rather, cities and localities offer different bundles of services, with individuals exercising choice to decide how those services are provided. Take something simple like trash collection. A city can hire a bunch of full-time employees and equipment, then build its own landfills to handle trash removal and waste disposal fully publicly. Or they could work with private sector providers to pick up trash, contract out with private landfills, and deposit the garbage with them. Most city services can now be provided by private companies, and most cities use some mix of public and private. Here in Indianapolis, the parking meters are run by a private company. Education is moving towards a mix of public and private.

And as the Ostroms correctly noted, it is mayors and city councils who decide how those services are provided. All three of the socialist-ish mayoral candidates seem to be in agreement with the broad principle that more public provision of things is good. For example, Johnson in Chicago is fighting to curtail school choice and protect public teachers’ pensions and salaries, which may be a principled belief, but it also satisfies his strongest group of supporters. Mamdani’s goals of rent control and “free” public transit, along with curtailing police power, might also be principled but satisfy his core supporters. But none of those are necessarily “socialist”. In fact, it looks quite a bit more like a lot of urban governance during the 1960s and ’70s—a period of notoriously poor performance by most major American cities.

That period of failed governance included what became known as “white flight,” when large numbers of city dwellers fled to the suburbs when faced with unsatisfactory governance. Exit is always an option for citizens when it comes to localities. To pay for these “socialist” policies, taxes will increase on “the rich,” who will undoubtedly flee the city to avoid those higher tax rates. At this moment, both Chicago and New York are in tenuous fiscal positions because of unfunded pension funds for government employees. While Minneapolis is in a somewhat better position, it also has approximately $100 million in debt from such pension commitments to government workers.

While the music of the 1960s and 70s is something to enjoy, its urban governance, bankrupt cities, crime-ridden streets, and poor public services are not. And no matter what label you put on them, they will not bring the workers’ paradise socialism promises.