Short answer: who knows?
Longer answer: probably not as bad as you think in the short run, and quite awful in the medium to long term, although perhaps not much worse than Bill de Blasio, who was plenty awful.
First things first: Mamdani is almost certainly as bad or worse than you believe, so I am not making the argument that he is a socialist with a pragmatic streak who will try to turn New York City into Stockholm in the 1970s, before the Swedes wised up a bit and abandoned hard socialism for a capitalist economy with a strong social insurance system. Of course, Swedes then went all in on mass migration, which has turned it into one of the rape capitals of the world and Western Europe’s bombing capital, but that is a different story.
No, Mamdani really is a communist with a pretty smile. If you doubt how awful Mamdani and his circle are, read John’s piece from earlier today. If he were the leader of a revolutionary movement who captured the city by force, he would try to turn it into Cuba or Venezuela and blame all the trouble on Trump.
Here’s one of his transition advisors:
🚨 Mamdani Transition Pick: “Police Are a Direct Interference” With “Radical Socialist Oriented Politics”… and “They Will Be Used to Stop Us”
Professor Alex Vitale, now on Mamdani’s transition team, says the quiet part out loud, admitting that abolishing the police “creates… pic.twitter.com/3wFicpmxIU
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) November 25, 2025
His policy advisors range from some bureaucrats who are willing to work with whoever is their boss to Marxists who would put you up against a wall if they could. He has a radical agenda and will, to the extent possible, try to implement it. And even if he can’t check off his wish list through diktats, he can rearrange regulations to implement his policies in the longer term.
Zorhan Mamdani says the quiet part out loud,
Under Mamdani, if there is a ‘bad landlord’ the city is going to take over and seize the propertypic.twitter.com/je3V5OTfbV
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 8, 2025
Guess who gets to decide what defines a bad landlord? City bureaucrats, that’s who. Over the longer term, one can use rules and regulations to seize property and take it over.
What happens to landlords after Zohran Mamdani freezes rent across NYC? Well of course, they get to apply for government help too (as long as they can prove they aren’t making a profit).
What could go wrong? 😜 pic.twitter.com/eUj7khFr7T
— MAZE (@mazemoore) October 27, 2025
But many of the policies Mamdani wants to implement will actually be quite difficult to push through, not necessarily because he or other city leaders won’t have the will, but out of the sheer inertia of a city filled with millions of people, seriously smart lawyers, and other politicians who won’t be inclined to cooperate.
🚨 “Kill the Cop in Our Head”: Mamdani Transition Pick Rejects Reform, Calls Policing “Violence Work,” and Advocates for “Pod Mapping”
Zohran Mamdani just appointed Professor Alex Vitale to his community safety transition team.
Vitale says it plainly, “Policing is about… pic.twitter.com/jvwgh3CUt6
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) November 25, 2025
Vitale says it plainly, “Policing is about violence work, and I want to get the violence out of it, whatever we call it.”
“It also doesn’t mean everything has to be under the control of the state… we can do co-counseling and we can do pod mapping. We can do that person-to-person organizing of our daily lives and our living spaces and our working spaces.”
Pod mapping is the idea that small circles of friends or neighbors should take over crisis response themselves — a DIY mutual-aid system where ordinary people handle emergencies instead of trained professionals, police, or even social workers.
“If we’re going to get police out of our lives… it’s also about doing that hard interpersonal work in our everyday lives.”
Already, Kathy Hochul is signaling she won’t sign off on tax increases or free buses, and Mamdani will face constraints that he brushed over in a campaign filled with grand promises and no plan to fulfill them. He is a salesman and doesn’t understand how the government or the legal system works.
And, amusingly enough, Mamdani has already had to kiss Trump’s ring. That must have been fun for him.
There are areas where he can do great damage—for instance, the mayor has a great deal of power over the education system in New York, and obviously, the police force. I suspect he will do great damage quickly in the former, even if the consequences take a while to manifest themselves in a system that already works rather poorly.
In the latter? Mamdani will do real damage to public safety, but with 34,000 police and a lot of momentum in the system, the damage will take longer than you expect and last longer than anybody who tries to clean up his mess will want to deal with.
Adam Smith famously said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” by which he meant that the bad consequences that are foreseeable will take longer to destroy a polity than you would expect. We see that often enough. How many of us have expected the US monetary system to collapse due to mounting debt? No doubt, at some point, it will, unless we straighten up and fly right.
But who knows when? The US is still a great place to invest, has a skilled workforce, an unmatched military, and everywhere else is worse. So it continues.
I suspect that New York City is much the same. Mamdani’s policies will harm the city grievously, but I suspect it is so vital that it will plod along doing pretty well, with Mamdani throwing a lot of sand in the gears without creating either a communist utopia as he promises, or a communist hell we all fear.
I’m not shrugging. It’s horrible that he won, and he will make things worse. But I have this sense that New York City is too big and strong to kill, at least not in the short term. I get the sense that he is like a lone lion attacking an elephant. Not good. The elephant may get some damage, but unless a substantial pride attacks, the elephant is likely to survive the experience with only some scars.
I hope that New York City is more a herd of elephants than one roaming alone, and that Mamdani’s pride of lions is not as great as they believe. I suspect, and believe, that New York City will outlast even a communist mayor. Scarred, maybe badly, but it’s hard to kill.
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