Gavin Newsom focuses on Trump as a threat to the Constitution while Zohran Mandami presents naive ideas about housing and education.
The two victory speeches on election day, 2025 that were offered by Democratic leaders on opposite coasts were very different. Gavin Newsom had run Proposition 50 as the Anti-Trump. The Democrats do not need a positive agenda because the only issue is that Trump is destroying democratic and constitutional processes by arresting or harassing people who are engaged in law abiding activities, deporting people with no due process of law, closing agencies where money was allocated by Congress to spend on these programs, demonizing all his opponents, sending militarized “poll watchers” to election sites so as to intimidate voters and discourage turnout, claim the just past election, like that in 2020, was”rigged”. It all made me wonder whether the electoral process would last beyond 2026, the last chance to avert authoritarian rule. Newsom was dealing with the organizational aspects of the Constitution, and they were in danger.
Zohran Mandami, in his victory speech on winning the New York City mayoralty, took some potshots at Trump but his main point was the onward march of democratic socialism, invoking the name of Eugene V. Debs, a figure from a hundred years ago, so as to emphasize his lineage and consistent principles, which is that the war in the United States is the rich versus the poor, the rich bleeding the poor in a zero sum game. But the economy has changed. To my mind, it doesn’t matter how wealthy and tacky the rich may be, so long as they pay enough taxes so as to support the collective purchases the government has to make to support the poor so that they live decent lives and provide opportunities for their children.
Some people suggest that Mandami will be a “sewer Socialist”, which means someone who will run government efficiently and effectively, a clean government type, and therefore a way to succeed as Mayor. But I looked into his brief statement of prospective programs and the major ones do not seem to have been thought through, not scrutinized from a policy viewpoint, and probably to cause destruction because a program analyst has to think about how to avoid the anticipated untoward consequences of a program before passing it into law and implementing it. Some people say Mandami is aspirational and so will find something good to do because he has good intentions, but his nostrums are irrelevant or antiquated. Eugene V, Debs will not do.
One of his most touted programs is to freeze rent stabilized apartments so that will ease the rents of many. But that covers only a million people but more importantly their rent hikes by the Rent Stabilization Board have been one to three percent a year which doesn’t even beat inflation and so landlords have to pay for greater yearly rise in costs of fuel and repairs. Landlords make money when tenants vacate their rent stabilized apartments which allow landlords to rent new tenants at market rates, which are extraordinary increases on what was paid to them before. Will Mamdani apply the freeze to vacated apartments? His policy statement doesn’t say. That would be radical indeed and landlords might warehouse vacated apartments hoping the political climate will change. Real estate people think about the long run.
An even more major proposal by Mandami is to invest many billions of dollars into public housing. The city will invest in spaces that are already part of the areas owned by public housing. The parts devoted to parking lots wio;ll be filled with apartment buildings even though the empty spaces between buildings are one of the few attractive features of public housing. A drawback of this proposal is that public housing puts buildings off the tax rolls and so gives the city less income, most taxes in the city raised by property taxes. But there is a much more serious drawback. The experience of urban public housing since the fifties through the nineties is that putting low income families together into a kind of poverty ghetto has bad consequences. It breeds crime and disrepair. It makes more sense to spread the poor by requiring builders to assign a certain number of low income residents to be assigned to their units, poverty people sheltered by the better off and so able to flourish. Maybe Mandami thinks that the poor are always the good people who would rise to the residences now available but history suggests otherwise, which it is not just housing that cures the poor any more than housing solves the previously homeless who also need social services to help them pull themselves together or just sustain themselves. Mondami’s idea is of a social program, the building of congregate buildings designed for the poor, that is outdated.
A more successful way of providing housing is for the city to provide the amenities which will make the private sector develop housing. That happened when apartment buildings for the working class sprung up along the routes of the elevated trains when they were extended into the Bronx in the early twentieth century. The same thing is happening today. The state and city provide the amenities on the east shore of Staten Island so that developers will build there. The Interboro Express bus from Brooklyn to Queens will attract developers. A mixed government-private solution is a proven idea while Namdani’s socialism is just government driven.
Another outdated idea is the idea of spending billion to provide early preschool to all students. That would seem laudatory because it gives children a chance as early as possible to get schooling and away from the clutches of their families. Ed Koch wanted to establish residential academies to educate poor children but that was just aspirational in that it was so expensive and parents would have resisted having their children sent to Exeter and Eton. But the experience of trying from the 1950’s to the end of the twentieth century to close the gap in achievement between the children of those financially comfortable and those financially poor has not been successful. The differences persisted despite programs like Head Start or Follow Thru and have gotten worse as a result of Covid, poorer children having poorer attendance as a result of missing school for a while during the pandemic. The reasons are many and probably multidetermined: a lack of parental education so that children just hear far fewer words by the time they are three than do tier better off counterparts, unstable family life which leads to anxiety rather than confidence, the infliction of more bullying by peers about an interest in education, ad even lowweight births and poor prenatal care for expectant mothers. My guess might be a program which culled a new talented tenth to put the most successful students at the end of, let us say, the seventh grade, into merit based schools that would allow children interested in education to get quality education. I am not so sure because education is the avenue to social mobility for few when the main way to move people into remunerative jobs is to provide them with stable families by giving them guaranteed work. Work leads to education rather than the other way round.
Another Mondami proposal that seems appealing is to provide free bus transportation. Using mass transit might well be considered a utility and so shouldn’t be charged but just a necessary service. But there are obvious drawbacks with shiftless youth and the homeless traveling endlessly on buses and so notable to be expelled from the buses. Instead, just expand lower costing or free bus passes such that students get to cover more and more people and so avoid what at one time were the token suckers who got subway tokens out of the token machines.
I am not leery of the poor just noting that the poor are not the salt of the earth but people getting by on their available circumstances and prospects rather than an idealized poor who have none of the scars of poverty, thatseeming to be Mandami’s vision.His naive socialism is to be contrasted to the English Fabians, like George Bernard Shaw, recognized that the poor used a different language.
The criticisms I have made of Mandami’s policy proposals are hardly original. They are the consensus of policy experts. Mondami can consult policy experts from left or right wing think tanks who will say the same thing. Or Monami might have absorbed that from hanging around Albany as a tree term assemblyman were he not envisioning the poor as just victims rather than having agency. Now the transition cabinet or outside expertise may modify or sophisticate Mandami’s initial proposals, or else the state government which has to allow for New York City to impose new taxes to pay for the Mandami adventures may help modify them. But Mandami is at the moment on the wrong rack and that has to be corrected after he enters office. That is why I would have preferred an experienced political leader who is into the ins and outs of policy to guide the city. It is going to be a bumpy ride for a while even if he does adjust to reality. Good intentions are not enough.