Opinion: Zohran Mamdani, socialist menace?

The lords of real estate and finance in New York are frantic, as if the election of an espoused socialist to City Hall would bring American capitalism to its knees. Zohran Mamdani gets more space on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal these days than Vladimir Putin. Is he that dangerous? 

Well, a bit of history might help. Mamdani would not be the first individual to hold the office who identified as a socialist. There was once a fellow named La Guardia. Yes, that one. When the then-representative from East Harlem was unable to secure the Republican Party’s nomination to run for a second congressional term in 1924, he ran and was elected on the Socialist Party line. Fiorello La Guardia had offended Republican leaders when he refused to support their party’s nominee for president and instead backed Wisconsin Sen. Robert La Follette, who appeared on the Progressive party ticket. The irascible La Guardia was highly critical of his fellow Republicans, whom he accused of being class-based and anti-immigrant.

Later, in 1932, when President Herbert Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make loans to ailing banks and industries during the Great Depression, La Guardia derided it as the “millionaires dole.” He thought the government had an obligation to deal with the misery caused by the fallen economy, but not by rewarding the brokers whose irresponsible behavior had caused the crisis to begin with. When Hoover proposed a regressive sales tax to raise federal revenues, La Guardia came up with his own “soak the rich” scheme to impose a luxury tax and eliminate loopholes in the tax code. It failed to pass.

Despite his regular outbursts, the “Little Flower” was elected mayor as the Republican and Fusion party candidate in 1933, the year after he lost his seat in Congress. Most historians, and just about every mayor who succeeded him, thought he did a pretty good job. He is rightfully recognized as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s partner in the New Deal. Yet, even during his tenure at City Hall, La Guardia could be relied on to do the unexpected. During his first year as mayor, he implemented payless furloughs for city workers to deal with a budget deficit and supported a regressive sales tax like the one he had opposed in Congress. And the same man who had gained a reputation as a friend of organized labor by sponsoring the Norris–LaGuardia Act, which removed legal barriers restricting union organizing and strike activity in the private sector, did not believe that public employees should have the right to organize or participate in collective bargaining.

Now, I don’t claim to know what Mamdani would do if he were elected mayor in November. I am fairly confident, though, that J.P. Morgan Chase will not be converted into The People’s Co-op and Jeff Bezos will continue to reap the profits from your local Whole Foods. The mayor doesn’t really have the power to do the kinds of things needed that make capitalist empires fall. He can’t even raise taxes on millionaires by 2%, as he has proposed, without approval from an apparently reluctant governor and state legislature. And if Mamdani does manage to persuade his fellow Democrats to resist the pleas of those who fill their campaign coffers and go along with his tax hike, the breaks that President Donald Trump included in his “Big Beautiful Bill” will more than cover the cost.