It’s been a long time since New York has been this invested in a mayoral race. And it’s been even longer since the rest of America has taken an interest in the city’s politics. But ever since Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in June, all eyes have been on New York. Even a certain New York expat with a country to run is mulling whether to insert himself into the race.
Americans are right to pay attention, and more is at stake than they may realize. What’s happening in New York today is not just the political triumph of youth and charisma over age and cynicism. And it’s not just the prospect of a dynamic progressive leader rising up from the smoldering remains of an unpopular Democratic Party. Whatever transpires with Mr. Mamdani’s political career, his emergence signals the end of a momentous chapter in American history.
It’s a chapter that began 40 years ago, and New York was at the center of the story then too. In the 1970s, deindustrialization and an overgrown public sector had brought the city to the brink of financial and social disaster. The 1980s fix, which helped saved the city, was a sudden embrace of unfettered capitalism. New York’s leaders drastically reduced the size of its government while doing everything possible to encourage businesses to reinvest in the city.
But that success came at a cost. New York’s new postindustrial economy, which was driven by finance and real estate, generated enormous wealth. In the process, though, the city became a place that fewer and fewer could afford — morphing into what Mayor Michael Bloomberg celebrated in 2003 as a “luxury product.” The divide between New York’s elite and pretty much everyone else has grown only wider since then.
Though it happened in New York first, and perhaps no place experienced such an extreme version of it, the same pattern played out across America in the 1990s and early 2000s, as deregulation, free trade, open markets and open borders all became bipartisan causes, embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike.
It was, of course, the backlash against all of this that fueled the political rise of Donald Trump: The personification of 1980s greed, wealth and excess paradoxically became the grievance-fueled voice of America’s disaffected.
Now that same backlash has produced Mr. Mamdani, with his bold proposals to turn back the historical tide with an old but familiar playbook: big government and high taxes. It’s a radical plan for a city that has been, for four decades, the beating heart of global capitalism. And there are practical realities and powerful forces arrayed against him. But if history is any guide, what’s happening in New York right now may be a bellwether for the rest of the country.
To more fully understand how New York arrived at this moment — and where it might be headed next — you need to return to the 1970s, when New York’s rich weren’t buying and renovating multimillion-dollar apartments and sending their children to $70,000-a-year private schools. They were fleeing the city in droves.
And with good reason. New York was going broke and in a death spiral. The blue-collar jobs that had provided a foothold for generations of European immigrants had vanished. The swaggering labor bosses who had long ensured that working people had what they needed had lost their muscle. Garbage went uncollected; fires raged unattended, forcing hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers out of their homes.
Once a magnet for the aspiring upwardly mobile — the place where you went to “make it” — New York had become a place that you got the hell out of if you could. Its population declined by more than one million people in the 1970s, while another million went on welfare. More than 60 Fortune 500 companies — Pepsi-Cola, Nabisco and General Electric among them — pulled up stakes, leaving behind some 28 million square feet of vacant office space in Manhattan.
Even if you didn’t experience the city during the 1970s, you’ve probably seen pictures: the subways covered end to end in graffiti, the burned-out streets of the South Bronx.
Then a new decade dawned, literally and figuratively. Desperate to revive its economy, New York transferred power in the 1980s from the public sector to the private sector. Factories that manufactured goods were replaced by investment firms that manufactured debt, including the so-called junk bonds that were fueling America’s corporate takeover craze. Rising salaries, bonuses and paper profits generated disposable income that fertilized the formerly barren city.
A new, guilt-free consumerism bloomed. Run-down apartment buildings with low rents were demolished and replaced by shimmering co-ops and condos. Apartments became assets and the demand for office space surged. The modern knowledge worker — and, in short order, a whole new professional management class — sprang to life and flourished in a city awash with capital.
New York was reborn. Only not exactly. Large portions of the city were left out of the transformation. People without college degrees struggled to find their place in the postindustrial economy. Even as the rich were getting richer, others became more deeply entrenched in poverty.
New York’s promise is possibility, and for a lot of New Yorkers today, it is failing to deliver. In the ’70s, possibility was snuffed out by deindustrialization, a bloated public sector and capital flight. Now it’s being snuffed out by the cost of living.
The numbers speak for themselves. The vacancy rate for rental housing is 1.4 percent — as low as it has been since 1968 — and the median asking rent of $3,491 has gone up more than 18 percent in the past five years. While wages are rising, costs are rising faster, and the gap between rich and poor is only growing. Between 2019 and 2024, the top 3 percent of New York City earners saw their wages increase more than 34 percent; for every other income bracket, the increase was less than 10 percent. The city’s poverty rate recently hit 25 percent, nearly double the national average.
Mr. Mamdani has given these problems a name — unfairness — and identified a culprit: the rich. His platform promises relief with more than a hint of revenge: a rent freeze, free child care and buses, a doubling of the minimum wage, 200,000 new units of affordable housing for the poorest New Yorkers and expanded public services, paid for in large part by higher taxes on the wealthy. It is not so much a platform designed to realign New York’s priorities or shift its resources as it is a rebuke of the city’s identity for the past 40 years.
His system-is-rigged narrative is aimed at the poor, and they are the ones who would benefit most from his policies. But what may be most telling about the Mamdani phenomenon — in terms of both New York’s and America’s political future — is that his core supporters are college-educated New Yorkers who earn roughly $70,000 to $140,000 a year. As with Mr. Trump’s political rise, Mr. Mamdani’s has signaled the arrival of a new and powerful constituency of the disaffected.
New York’s shift toward private industry in the 1980s is what once enabled young professionals in fields like the news media, public relations, marketing and advertising to flourish. But the next wave of technological change has arrived and the disruption to this class of workers has only just begun.
Just as industrial automation brought the city to its knees in the ’70s, forcing it to abandon one social order and embrace another, new technology is at the root of today’s convulsions. The outcry of college-educated professionals is being expressed as “the rent is too damn high,” but their fears and underlying anxieties are about something more existential: the dawning realization that huge numbers of jobs are no longer secure and that more and more of us can be replaced by machines.
It’s too early to say exactly what New York’s next political cycle will bring. But the city is clearly hurtling toward a new social and economic order, much as it was 40 years ago. If Mr. Mamdani intends to lead New York — and maybe America — into this uncertain future, he’s going to need much more than rent freezes and free buses.
Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book “The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990,” from which this essay is adapted.
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Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001. @jonathanmahler
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