Opinion Zohran Mamdani won because he recognised New York City’s despair
NYC’s annual budget currently stands at a whopping $115 billion. There is absolutely no reason why most New Yorkers should grapple with four gig economy jobs to make their ends meet
Mamdani perhaps knows he can’t fix everything, but he built a campaign to at least acknowledge the despair As Zohran Mamdani takes the reins of City Hall in New York City, the moment marks a slew of firsts. At 34, he is not just the city’s youngest mayor since the 19th century, but also its first Muslim and South Asian mayor. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and is arguably the most ideologically-committed mayor New York has ever seen.
Mamdani’s path to victory seems almost too perfectly choreographed to be true. Almost four years ago, when a friend of his suggested that he should contest the mayoral election, Mamdani responded by saying, “I’m too young, they won’t take me seriously.” Less than a year ago, his own team had put the odds of his victory at about three per cent. Back then, he was just polling at one per cent.
Yet, on the face of it, Mamdani’s victory makes perfect sense. The sitting mayor, Eric Adams, is a former cop, and has been embroiled in a bribing scandal and was eventually forced to stand down on his re-election campaign. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s chief opponent in this race, Andrew Cuomo, is the former governor of the state of New York, who was forced to resign in 2021 after being accused of sexual harassment and abuse of power.
These apparently “corrupt candidates” representing an increasingly delegitimised political establishment were not going to stand a chance against Mamdani’s uber progressive platform, which promises to tackle the city’s affordability crisis. He has promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, freeze rents, allow free public transport, provide child services for everyone above the age of six weeks, subsidised grocery stores, and a whole range of affordability initiatives.
After all, New York City is the epitome of global wealth. Its annual budget currently stands at a whopping $115 billion — comparable to Norway, Ireland and Portugal. There is absolutely no reason why most New Yorkers should grapple with four gig economy jobs to make ends meet. They deserve the same public services that citizens across the pond often enjoy. This demand for urban dignity was the crux of Mamdani’s campaign.
On the one hand, Mamdani’s victory marks the American republic turning a page. The younger generations no longer see socialism as the ideological manifestation of evil, as most Cold War era Americans did. From Occupy Wall Street in 2008 to Bernie Sanders to Mamdani, there has been a gradual acceptance in public opinion about the usage of the word “socialist”. On the other hand, Mamdani’s extreme redistributive platform with an unequivocal stance on Israel and Gaza has left many on Wall Street and the establishment Jewish business leaders quite unimpressed.
Given this backdrop, it is easy to box this election within the larger global narrative regarding the rise of the populist left and right. Going forward, discussions can now focus on whether Mamdani can successfully negotiate with the New York State’s government in Albany and deliver on some of his core promises, or whether he starts a gradual march towards pragmatism, as most of his European counterparts actually do. These are meaningful discussions, but they miss a deeper underlying phenomenon regarding the evolution of market societies.
Trying to decipher the fundamental nature of capitalism, Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the idea of creative destruction. In his reading, capitalism is inherently an evolutionary process — but this doesn’t stem from shifts in demographics or societal lifestyles. Rather, “the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organisation that capitalist enterprise creates,” writes Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Schumpeter thought that this very process of never-ending industrial mutation “incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
The United States is the most grotesque embodiment of this variant of capitalism. There is no other republic in the world that took the idea of creative destruction as seriously as the US did. Its economy is like a gravy train. As long as it stays, it provides bounty and prosperity at a scale that is, frankly speaking, incomparable to anywhere else in the world. But when that train will eventually move on, and it always will, it leaves behind an absolute wreckage of post-modernity despair.
Visit downtown San Francisco or uptown Manhattan, and you can see middle-aged jobless men and women spend their Tuesday mornings at a dimly lit dive bar. Hop on the Silver Meteor Amtrak train from New York to Miami and you will encounter one half-abandoned town after another. Large swathes of the US are stuck in time, wallowing in their post-prosperity urban decay. Trump gets it. And so does Mamdani.
In popular imagination, New York City features fast-flowing diners, well-suited men and women walking down streets having conversations about esoteric financial games, and the global elite spending hours at bespoke luxury fashion stores. The reality is slightly different.
In 2025, only 10 per cent of New York’s jobs are related to finance. Most of the storied buildings in the financial district now stay vacant, as offices have moved to midtown. JP Morgan now employs more people in Texas than in New York. Meanwhile, the bulk of New Yorkers — almost 43 percent — work in healthcare, education and social services. These aren’t the most well-paying jobs, especially for a city as expensive as New York. Housing remains unaffordable. Over a million apartments are currently under rent stabilisation, which makes further private investments in housing a less lucrative venture.
“When you have limited housing, and a growing population with a larger share of relatively low earners, affordability becomes an even bigger issue — especially when there remains a sizable population that can pay much more. The changing nature of the workforce also means there are probably more people who both provide and rely on services and benefits from the government and care industry,” remarks Allison Schrager.
New York was once a primarily industrial city. Eventually, it transformed into an industrial and financial hub. Over time, manufacturing left, while high finance could only employ so many people. Today, the city mostly has low-paying jobs without any of the panache associated with the American dream. Decades of fast-paced lifestyles have disincentivised the formation of any meaningful community ties. While most members of working-class households barely have any time left for leisure, the relatively affluent Gen-Z population working in high finance or tech, are experiencing a screen-hooked existential crisis of their own.
Step back for a moment, and the post-modern despair of New York reveals itself: Glaring, inescapable, impossible to ignore. Mamdani perhaps knows he can’t fix everything, but he built a campaign to at least acknowledge the despair.
The writer is an Associate Fellow at ORF
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