Zohran Mamdani's Luxury Beliefs

A socialist has been nominated for NYC mayor

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

Take, for example, Mamdani’s plan to freeze rents. Without raising rents, many landlords cannot afford to maintain their buildings, which leads to apartments becoming rundown or empty. This is one reason why, ironically, cities with rent control policies have the lowest levels of affordable housing — a policy that hurts working-class families most.

Then there’s Mamdani’s push for free public buses, a plan that would cost $630 million a year. An analysis by the Transportation Research Board found that “some public transit systems that have experimented with or implemented a fare-free policy have been overwhelmed … by the presence of disruptive passengers, including loud teenagers and vagrants.” This, too, would make life harder for low-income New Yorkers who depend on public transit every day.

Mamdani has also been a supporter of the “defund the police” movement. But a recent poll from the Manhattan Institute found that a majority (54 per cent) of New York City voters say they want to see more police officers across New York. Only 17 per cent say they want to see fewer, while 21 per cent say they want to keep the existing number as it is. Consider that compared with Americans who earn more than $50,000 a year, the poorest Americans are three times more likely to be victims of robbery, aggravated assault and sexual assault, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.

It’s not like Mamdani — who grew up amid privilege — would understand any of this. Raised by a Columbia professor father and acclaimed filmmaker mother in a comfortable faculty apartment on Riverside Drive, Mamdani attended the private Bank Street School for Children, which costs up to $66,147 a year. His alma mater is Bowdoin College in Maine, where there are more students from families in the top 1 per cent of the income scale than there are from the entire bottom 60 per cent. And though he boasts he is a product of the New York City public high school system, he in fact attended the Bronx High School of Science — one of the most selective academies in the city, where many come from the elite.

Before being elected to the New York state assembly in 2020, Mamdani only managed to string together three years of employment. This includes a short-lived rap career and a spell on a film project for his mother, Mira Nair, the director of Monsoon Wedding. He has even joked: “You know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way.”

Hollywood actress Emily Ratajkowski endorsed him. One person who pretends to be someone else for a living endorses another person who pretends to be someone else for a living.

If you asked, who should lead this Fortune 500 company, or who should run this school, or who should manage this McDonald’s, the last person on earth you’d ask is a rich Hollywood celebrity. But somehow when it comes to politics, there really are people dumb enough to seek the support of an entertainer with no experience in governance, economics, or reality.

To appear humble and relatable, he wears hoodies and stages photo ops of himself eating fast-casual meals on the subway.

In reality, these are the self-fellating theatrics of the kind I witnessed as a first-generation student at Yale, which helped inform my theory about luxury beliefs.

But while Mamdani pretends to be an ordinary person for political advantage, working-class New Yorkers see right through him. A recent Emerson poll projects him winning 57 per cent of white voters, but only 26 per cent of Black voters and 35 per cent of Hispanic voters. While 57 per cent of college-educated voters support Mamdani, only 23 per cent of those without a college degree do.

The latest results show Mamdani failing to win the support of the very people he claims to champion.

Working class voters know that, with his unrealistic promises, Mamdani sounds like a kid running for student council who promises longer recess and endless free pizza. It sounds great until someone asks who’s paying for the pizza, or discovers that “longer recess” means there’s no time to teach the 3Rs.

Economist Larry Summers recently warned that “New York City is closely watched. If it adopts irresponsible budget policies or the Democratic primary chooses a candidate advocating irresponsible, semi-socialist, government bankrupting policies, the consequences will be grave for New York and progressivism more broadly.”

Mamdani is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

If he wins the upcoming mayoral election, New Yorkers can expect to be governed by luxury beliefs. The elites will feel absolved, having elected a socialist who makes them feel less guilty about their wealth, while never having to suffer the consequences. And the working class will have to keep on struggling.

Here’s a video I did for The Times, on the luxury beliefs of Mamdani:

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A version of this article was originally published by The Times under the title “Zohran Mamdani is poster child for ‘luxury beliefs’”