The Revolution’s Happening in New York

Not the One You Think

One of my favorite songs from Hamilton: An American Musical comes early in Act I, as the Schuyler sisters walk the streets of Manhattan on the eve of the Revolution. They sing, “History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world.” The song has stuck with me—not just because it’s catchy, but because it captures a deeper idea: that cities are where revolutions are made, and where America’s future is forged. When the musical debuted in 2015, it felt like its own revolution: a recasting of America’s founding story that elevated the immigrant outsider Alexander Hamilton—and celebrated cities as engines of ambition and reinvention for upstarts like him.

Last week, another upstart made history in New York: Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist and Ugandan immigrant, defeated Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary. Supporters and detractors alike treated it as something seismic—a toppling of the Democratic Party elite. But as we celebrate our 249th Fourth of July, I wonder: was it really a revolution—or just a facelift?

Mamdani is a quintessential American success story—and a very New York one at that. He’s not the first kid from Queens to make it big in the Big Apple, and his victory likewise shocked the political establishment. Commentators blamed everything from “elite overproduction” to institutional decay. Cuomo didn’t help himself with a listless campaign built around public safety.¹ Meanwhile, Jacobin triumphantly crowed that “socialism beat the status quo.”

Mamdani indeed ran against the “status Cuomo.” But many of the policies he proposes were already implemented in some form—by Cuomo himself.

As governor, Cuomo raised taxes on the wealthy—so would Mamdani; Cuomo froze the housing market through heavy-handed rent stabilization—so would Mamdani; Cuomo raided MTA funds, and slashed inpatient psychiatric bed capacity—policies that strained city services and worsened homelessness. He championed costly vanity projects like the LaGuardia AirTrain while basic transit infrastructure languished. These weren’t random misfires; they reflected a political philosophy at odds with New York City’s interests—and a governing style that bulldozed opposition, obsessed over control, and was allergic to any spotlight but Cuomo’s own. He governed like Robert Moses with Jane Jacobs permanently out of mind.

By comparison, Mamdani’s love for the city is real and his style is a breath of fresh air—but his policies seem somewhat stale.

Mamdani’s core promises—“free buses, free childcare, freeze the rent”—may sound radical, but they’re mostly retreads. New York already subsidizes transit for low-income riders and pre-K for four-year-olds in—gasp!—government-run schools. Rent freezes are a decades-old strategy within a decades-old housing policy that has fueled a decades-old housing crisis. His proposal for city-run grocery stores is symbolic, though small—not quite seizing the means of production. And his proposal to move homeless services into the subway system might not drive homelessness like Cuomo did—but it does risk driving the same disorder underground.

Whether or not these are good ideas, they are hardly new—and most New Yorkers didn’t see them that way. More than 70% of Democrats stayed home. Of those who voted, 80% chose either Cuomo or Mamdani: two sides of the same policy coin. Mamdani may have toppled Cuomo, but voters weren’t calling for a revolution—they were choosing between two flavors of the status quo. Mamdani ran on charisma and class consciousness, but beneath the radical-chic aesthetic was Cuomoism, better branded. That’s why, when Cuomo lobbed the “socialist” label, it didn’t land as a pejorative. Not because voters embraced socialism, but because Mamdani’s platform wasn’t all that socialist.

You could argue that the real danger is the slippery slope, but the mayor of New York stands on the “commanding heights” only at the Empire State Building observatory. For all the alarm over electing a self-described socialist, let’s remember: this country elected Donald Trump—a man with no understanding of the Declaration of Independence and open contempt for the Constitution—to an office with far greater power. Twice. Whatever you think of Mamdani’s politics, he isn’t an existential threat to the republic.²

Nor, I believe, to New York City. There is no such thing as socialism at the municipal level.

Nevertheless, Mamdani’s campaign grasped the core problem facing New York City. Asked by The New York Times to name his defining issue, he offered a single word:

Affordability.

Cuomo’s talk of “management capacity” and “existential threats” from Trump didn’t register with voters navigating $4,000 rents and $2,000 daycare bills. While Cuomo won support from the very rich and the very poor, Mamdani’s affordability message resonated with New York’s precarious middle class—those earning $75k to $150k who make too much to qualify for subsidies, but not enough to feel secure. These are young professionals trying to build stable lives in a city where rents climb faster than incomes, and buying a home feels like a fantasy.

If you’re still finding your footing, only thinking about marriage or kids well into your 30s, just trying to make it there—even basic stability can feel out of reach, let alone the pursuit of happiness. These people should be upwardly mobile, but New York makes many of them outwardly mobile: friends leave, families form in the suburbs, schools and neighborhoods hollow out.

It’s not a “luxury belief” thinking that a middle-class salary should afford a middle-class life in New York.

This race wasn’t about policy. It was about who understood that life in New York is becoming an unattainable luxury good for too many—and it wasn’t the guy driving one of his cars to the polls, just a few blocks away from his apartment. Mamdani saw that frustration in the electorate, and voters saw themselves reflected in his vision. Cuomo, meanwhile, could see no farther than the mayor’s desk at City Hall. The real challenge for Mamdani is whether he can now channel that energy—anger, aspiration, and all—into governance.

To that end, while Mamdani has correctly diagnosed the affordability crisis, his prescriptions are deeply flawed. If his goal is to improve the lives of New Yorkers, repackaged leftism won’t cut it—and neither will a socialist counter-revolution. What the city needs is a real political revolution: a radical commitment to building more housing, expanding opportunity, and cutting the constraints that strangle progress.

If elected, how might Mamdani become a true revolutionary? Perhaps by looking to that other immigrant upstart: Alexander Hamilton.

Of all the Founders, Hamilton was the most urban and the most future-oriented. He didn’t seek revolution for its own sake. He sought to build a republic that secured America’s hard-won liberties and that endured: national institutions, public credit, infrastructure, a government capable of unlocking individual enterprise and creating conditions for widespread prosperity. That vision took shape not just in policy papers but in real places. Hamilton imagined a nation whose vitality flowed through its cities—none more so than New York. It was the living embodiment of his ideals: a city where the freedoms secured by the Constitution could flourish, allowing upstarts like him to rise above their station.

For two centuries, New York was the crown jewel of Hamilton’s America: a magnet for strivers, a springboard to the middle class. Then, in the span of a few decades, it became a city where the streets weren’t paved in gold—but barely paved at all. The decline was self-inflicted. Leaders strangled housing growth, underfunded transit, and entombed progress beneath landmark plaques and proceduralist red tape. When the city finally rebounded, those same policies sparked a housing crisis—and for fifty years, leaders have tried to douse the fire by pouring on more of the same fuel.

Mamdani’s rhetoric speaks to the proletariat, but it’s the city’s downwardly mobile middle class that actually turned out for him—and who most need a lifeline. If he truly wants to help them, he’ll need more than redistributive slogans and a rebranded rehash of past policy failures.

A Hamiltonian revolution in New York wouldn’t mean seizing the means of production—it would mean unblocking the means of mobility. It would tear down the structural barriers that keep middle-class and working families from affording housing, companies from creating well-paying jobs, entrepreneurs from starting small businesses—and city government from fulfilling its own promises and purpose. He’ll need to lead a revolution of construction, not confiscation—of permission, not prohibition—of inclusive abundance, not exclusive access—of future-proofing, not managing decline. Perhaps, most of all, of execution over ideology.

What’s holding New York back isn’t capitalist ideology—it’s sclerosis. A city where a bank gets a bailout faster than a restaurateur gets a sidewalk permit isn’t suffering from market failure, but government failure. As Mike Bloomberg’s $8.3 million bet on Cuomo has once again shown, billionaires don’t control the city: when things go south, they go south—to their mansions in Miami and West Palm Beach. If New York is beholden to power brokers, they’re the ones Mamdani just toppled within his own party.

Mamdani has tapped into a real crisis. But if he wants to do more than preside over New York’s managed decline, he’ll need to move beyond aesthetic radicalism and embrace the harder, slower work of Hamiltonian statecraft. To echo another line from the musical: winning is easy, governing’s harder.³

New York needs a vision for its future as bold as Hamilton’s was for America. The question for New Yorkers is whether it will have a revolution—or just another four years around the sun. Whether Zohran Mamdani meets this revolutionary moment—or just repackages the past—remains to be seen. I hope he’s up for the challenge.

After all, doesn’t the greatest city in the world deserve, well… something greater?

🇺🇸 To my New York friends: Excelsior.🗽 To everyone else: Happy Independence Day! 🇺🇸

1. Public safety barely registered in this race—and that’s telling. Crime in New York has declined meaningfully since the pandemic-era spike, and while challenges remain, the city is still among the safest large cities in the U.S. Cuomo’s vague warnings about safety didn’t resonate, and Mamdani’s past flirtation with “defund” rhetoric didn’t cost him. He has since walked back those views, but his instincts on policing still raise questions. Voters didn’t seem to reward or punish either candidate on the issue—but if Mamdani wins, he’ll need a credible plan to keep New Yorkers safe.

2. Speaking of things outside the mayor’s purview, this essay hasn’t dwelled on Mamdani’s position on Israel and Palestine. That’s deliberate: foreign policy isn’t a mayor’s job, and this is an essay about city governance. Still, Mamdani’s refusal to condemn phrases like “globalize the intifada” has caused legitimate discomfort, especially among Jewish New Yorkers. The community is far from monolithic, but the concern is real—and it will not simply fade. While the issue didn’t define the primary, it may shadow the general. If Mamdani hopes to lead a city as pluralistic as New York, he’ll need to demonstrate—not just assert—that he can be a mayor for all of it.

3. What should Mamdani actually do? On housing, he should adopt Zellnor Myrie’s plan to build or preserve 1 million homes, the only serious proposal offered by any candidate that matches the scale of the city’s crisis. Short of that, he can follow Sam Deutsch’s advice on housing and transit. He needs to get the basics right and govern as a “sewer socialist,” as Matthew Yglesias puts it. He can pursue affordability while maintaining fiscal discipline, but he needs to get the right people on the bus—whether they’re free or not.