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Don’t believe the rumors that the mayor has softened his socialism.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani came into office promising to give the city a sweeping socialist makeover. It didn’t take long for his revolutionary fantasies to collide with fiscal and political reality. Facing a budget shortfall, the new mayor promptly backtracked on several key campaign promises. His vow to make city buses free got pushed into the misty future, for example, while his billion-dollar plan to replace some police officers with social workers was reduced to a token effort.
Friendly media outlets portray Mr. Mamdani’s climb-downs as signs that the boyish activist is growing in the job. The new mayor, Politico writes, “is already a more complex city executive” than the one who promised not to “abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical” in his inaugural address. The New York Times praises Mr. Mamdani’s unexpected “commitment to the brass tacks of municipal government,” and cites a poll showing that a majority of residents believe the city is “moving in the right direction.”
The mayor came into office with the energy of “a theater kid crossed with a let’s-change-the-world college activist,” as Free Expression’s Kyle Smith put it recently. Has the youthful radical really matured into a sober realist in just a few months? Don’t fall for it. While the media gives Mr. Mamdani credit for decisions that were forced upon him, his underlying worldview remains untouched by recent encounters with reality. It is a worldview shaped both by his upbringing (his father is an anti-American, terrorist-defending academic) and by his education in trendy radicalism.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.