This past January, in his inaugural address, Zohran Mamdani memorably promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” In the parlance of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, collectivism is a good thing. It is not meant to recall Stalin’s seizure of farms, which resulted in mass famine, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which also resulted in mass famine. American socialism today is different. The DSA still formally aspires to “popular control of resources and production,” otherwise known as seizing the means of production. Yet the New York City mayor’s attention-grabbing policy proposals—to freeze rents, establish city-run grocery stores, and pay for universal child care—are aimed at a more modest goal: socializing the cost of consumption.
“Consumer socialism” does not liberate workers from the exploitation of owners; it liberates consumers from the burden of prices. Although its advocates may claim inspiration from both the Great Society tradition of the Democratic Party and Nordic-style democratic socialism, consumer socialism is really a muddle of the two. The Great Society emphasized poverty reduction through means-tested programs such as Medicaid and Head Start; consumer socialism is meant for all. And unlike the Nordic welfare states, which are supported by high levels of taxation for all workers, Mamdani’s approach aims to raise sufficient revenue from corporations and the rich. Consumer socialism tries to have it all: universal social provisions without universally steep taxes. It retains, like other forms of socialism, a supreme optimism in the ability of state planners to shape markets. Where the old central planners failed, the new ones think they will succeed.
Mamdani is only one of consumer socialism’s proponents. The newly elected mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, is a former transit organizer who campaigned on both universal child care and spending $1 billion to pay for union-built public housing. The leading candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., is DSA-backed Janeese Lewis George, who also calls for universal child care and massive production of below-market-rate housing. (She is open to the idea of government-run grocery stores as well.) Mamdani, Wilson, and Lewis George have claimed the mantle not of Stalinists or Maoists, but of a different subspecies of socialist—the “sewer socialists” who ran Milwaukee for decades starting in 1910. They made peace with the capitalist superstructure and devoted themselves to good, incorruptible governance and reliable public infrastructure—sewage systems, yes, but also parks, libraries, and fire departments. In their time, they were skewered for practicing “slowcialism.” In a speech he gave to mark his 100th day in office, Mamdani labeled “our 2026 answer to sewer socialism” as “pothole politics”—doing mundane jobs, such as filling more than 100,000 potholes, because “government is not too busy, not too self-important, not too mired in paperwork to fix the problems of this city.”
Sewer socialism is attracting renewed interest in America because it is too boring to threaten capitalism. Lenin despised its predecessor, municipal socialism, for much the same reason. In the late 19th century in English and German cities, socialist administrators operated public utilities such as gasworks, electric trams, and even city-owned slaughterhouses. This variation of socialism aimed to blunt the rapacity of capitalism rather than sharpen its contradictions and hasten the coming revolution. Under municipal socialism, Lenin wrote in 1907, “attention is diverted to the sphere of minor local questions, being directed not to the question of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, nor to the question of the chief instruments of that rule, but to the question of distributing the crumbs thrown by the rich bourgeoisie for the ‘needs of the population.’ ”
Lenin’s ghost would be similarly unimpressed with contemporary American socialism—too much democracy, too little murder. Still, there’s nothing small-bore about consumer socialists’ desire to overhaul the economy. In their view, high prices are not market failures but moral ones, the result of greed and corruption, which can be vanquished with the right intention. The ideal state is a kind of Lake Wobegon, where every price is below average.
[Michael Powell: What Mamdani doesn’t know about tenants]
One irony of consumer socialism is that it is better tailored to the laptop classes—which now form the backbone of the Democratic Party—than to the American left’s traditional working-class base. The upper classes disproportionately use child-care centers, while lower-income households rely more on stay-at-home parents and relatives. This is partly because wealthier people can more easily afford formal care services. But not every community may even want to send their kids to a child-care center. Some evidence suggests that Latina mothers prefer to have a relative look after their children, even when cost is no issue. Rent stabilization and controls apply to units, not occupants—which in New York has sometimes meant showering benefits on celebrities and on politicians, such as former Governor David Paterson and the late Representative Charles Rangel. Upper-middle-class meritocrats are generally not exhausted by capitalism. They are exhausted by the costs of rent and child care in desirable neighborhoods—bills that the preexisting means-tested welfare state would never have covered.
Mamdani will probably fall short of implementing his vision: Budget constraints mean that buses are unlikely to be free, as he promised; his child-care proposal received funds to last for just two years so far; and New York, a city of more than 8 million people, will have, at most, five city-run grocery stores by the end of his first term. Despite his pledges to tax the rich, he is limited in his ability to do so, and although his recently passed pied-à-terre tax might raise $500 million a year, universal child care would, according to his own campaign, cost $6 billion a year.
The natural habitat of consumer socialism—solidly left-wing American cities—imposes serious limits on its ambitions. Unlike the federal government, cities typically cannot run huge deficits year after year, and must quickly reckon with promises that cannot be paid for. In 2018, New York City officials rolled out a voucher program with an unwieldy name, CityFHEPS, and the laudable goal of decreasing homelessness by subsidizing housing. In 2019, the annual cost of the program was budgeted at $25 million; its projected cost last fiscal year reached $1.7 billion, as the number of recipients and the cost per voucher increased simultaneously. Faced with the city’s daunting budget deficit, Mamdani reversed his campaign pledge to expand CityFHEPS and has instead scrambled for ways to hold costs down.
Many risks lurk in consumer socialism’s promises of cheap goods and services. If New York City or Washington, D.C., rapidly increases subsidies for child care, for instance, without expanding the number of approved providers, the existing ones will charge more to meet excessive demand. Another complication is that the more generous any city benefits are, the more people will move across municipal limits to use them—creating a cost spiral.
The sewer socialists chose their targets carefully. Milwaukee’s mayors had a strong economic rationale for pursuing public ownership of utilities: avoiding the massive, duplicative costs of rival water networks without letting a private monopoly gouge consumers. In contrast, publicly run grocery stores are interventions in a low-margin, highly competitive industry. In his 100-days speech, Mamdani pledged, “At our stores, eggs will be cheaper. Bread will be cheaper. Grocery shopping will no longer be an unsolvable equation.” But the mathematics of running retail outlets might prove more flummoxing than he realizes. Many aspects of life in the Soviet Union have come to be retroactively romanticized; its grocery stores are not among them.
Optimists think—or hope—that Mamdani-style socialists have a greater awareness of economic constraints than they let on. My colleague Derek Thompson recently said that Mamdani may be sporting “the abundance mullet, which is to say, economic populism in the front and abundance in the back.” Abundance is a term that Thompson coined in this magazine to describe policies that expand supply through public and private investment and deregulation—essentially supply-side economics for liberals. The idea is that Mamdani would win popular support by freezing rents—an idea almost unanimously derided by economists—while simultaneously boosting home-building. But the second half of this bargain may never materialize. Although New York’s Rent Guidelines Board has approved a promised freeze for nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, Mamdani’s efforts to permit more home-building have been plodding by comparison. Absent new supply, restrictions on rent increases will limit mobility for those who receive the benefit, and increase costs for those who do not.
[Derek Thompson: A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems]
Plans are already afoot to scale consumer socialism across America. National Democrats have realized that the high cost of living makes for a powerful midterm-election theme, and some in the party prefer to address it with subsidies and price controls rather than measures that increase personal incomes and economic growth. The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its “New Affordability Agenda,” which includes plans to make child care a nationwide entitlement—staffed by day-care workers paid as much as teachers—and to create a new set of housing subsidies for rent and down payments. Progressives also argue that this can be financed without tax hikes on ordinary people, but through targeted taxes on plutocrats and corporations. Enacting any such changes nationwide would require many more votes than the caucus currently has. And the problem with implementing such plans at the local level is that the rich can always decamp to Austin or Miami, as some of California’s billionaires are threatening to do over a ballot measure that would take 5 percent of their wealth.
Perhaps cities like New York will refine a functional version of consumer socialism, in which subsidies are balanced with enormous supply-side expansions in the number of homes and child-care centers, leaving everyone better off. Perhaps capitalism can be appropriately fettered within the confines of a select few cities, inspiring a nonviolent, nationwide socialist revolution. That would be a remarkable triumph for Mamdani’s consumerist ideology, which wears the transgressive label of socialism but is born primarily out of anger over prices (and an innate American antipathy toward taxes). American collectivism may be, as Mamdani promised, warmer than rugged individualism. It will certainly be warmer than Soviet or Maoist collectivism. It could also be just as unworkable. And it will certainly be extraordinarily expensive.
This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The ‘Consumer Socialism’ Trap.”
The post The “Consumer Socialism” Trap appeared first on The Atlantic.
