For months, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been stuck in a hostile stand-off over taxes.
Mamdani ran on further taxing Gotham’s already well-soaked rich, but he’s struggled to deliver.
His efforts to hike taxes on high earners and corporations fell flat, and his fallback — a proposed property-tax increase across the five boroughs — found few backers in the Legislature and City Council.
Last month, though, Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped in to provide some respite, reviving a long-standing “pied-à-terre tax” proposal on New York City second homes worth more than $5 million.
Mamdani declared victory in a gloating video filmed in front of investor Ken Griffin’s apartment.
It was par for the course for a mayor who routinely casts small changes as big victories — a habit that characterizes both Mamdani and his voters, the downwardly mobile elites clamoring to be told they don’t have to try in order to succeed.
It’s a perverse politics all its own.
Of course, maybe Mamdani never really expected to be able to “tax the rich” outright, even though he ran on the idea and pushed for it repeatedly in budget negotiations.
Still, it’s not hard to see the pied-à-terre tax proposal as a kind of consolation prize.
He wanted a wealth tax, and he’s going to get something that sort of looks like one if you squint at it the right way.
That dynamic is not unfamiliar.
Mamdani’s style has become characterized by performative gestures designed to make it look like he’s done far more than he actually has.
He has bragged about improving crime statistics, without admitting that he’s mostly reaped the rewards of keeping Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner.
He reversed himself almost immediately on homeless sweeps.
Even Mamdani’s excitement about filling 100,000 potholes is, on closer inspection, small beans: Mayor Michael Bloomberg did as much or more with fewer workers and less funding.
Which has not stopped the adulation for Mamdani among his hyper-online base.
To many on X or Bluesky, the mayor is proving that everything skeptical older voters told them is wrong: Democratic socialism really is the way of the future.
The mayor was propelled to Gracie Mansion by a wave of highly educated, downwardly mobile urban millennials.
These (decreasingly) young people look at the rising cost of living in the city compared to their declining earning potential and conclude that they’ve been denied something they’re owed.
When Mamdani tells them that, indeed, the system is rigged against them, and that the top 1% is hoarding wealth that is rightfully theirs, these scions of the top 10% are eager to agree.
Which is why it doesn’t matter that the pied-à-terre tax isn’t going to do much actual taxation of the rich.
What matters to these constituents is the sense of a win, however insubstantial that win may actually be.
It’s hard not to think of the proverbial participation trophy to which every millennial child was allegedly entitled as a youth.
Yes, sure, Mamdani can’t really get anything done in Albany.
Yes, sure, he has filled a routine number of potholes.
Yes, sure, the real adults are running the show at NYPD.
But the important thing, for Mamdani but especially for his base, is to feel like you’re winning — to be told that public policy really can put you at the front of the line, where you always thought you were supposed to be.
Perhaps that’s better than if Mamdani were actually to succeed at his most radical designs.
For example, closing the jail complex on Rikers Island without a replacement in place would be disastrous for public safety.
The participation-trophy mayor will probably find a way to make extending the closure deadline next year look like a personal victory — but Rikers will, more likely than not, remain open.
At the same time, Mamdani’s approach perpetuates the theory of political economy that underlies his movement.
In this view, wealth is something that is hoarded, and it’s unfair that some people have more than others.
Indeed, those people deserve to be mocked and vilified — as Mamdani did by putting Griffin front and center in his celebratory tax-day video.
That kind of politics has already gutted New York state.
And the increasing political dominance of the Democratic Socialists of America and their political allies helps ensure that participation-trophy politics continues to be the order of the day.
So perhaps Mamdani did lose his big legislative fight, receiving a consolation prize from the more experienced Hochul.
But the idea that Mamdani, and his voters, need such prizes is itself a pernicious sign of the problems in our politics.
He may not be winning, but Mamdani has turned losing into a political project all its own.
Charles Fain Lehman is a Manhattan Institute fellow and senior editor of City Journal. Adapted from the City Journal Substack.
