Zohran Mamdani’s takeover of New York city isn’t just a problem for the Big Apple. His takeover of the city’s governing apparatus will provide an ample training ground for his socialist comrades to gain experience wielding power.
As I wrote previously, the far-Left has a playbook for how they are going to take over cities across the nation. New York is just the biggest prize they’ve captured so far. But make no mistake, they have larger ambitions.
Mamdani is fully integrating activists on the furthest leftwing fringe of Democrat politics into city governance. “The Left, through groups like the [Democratic Socialists of America] and [Working Families Party], staged an insurgency and won,” wrote the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman. Lehman noted that this faction represents a minority of voters in the city, but don’t underestimate their ability to transform politics in the city through their newfound, dominant position.
“Mamdani’s victory is the culmination of years of progressive insurgency largely unchallenged,” Lehman wrote. They are in the driver’s seat now and they know it. The executive experience they gain in the next four years will give them the ability to effectively spread the socialist virus elsewhere, including at the federal level.
New York’s political transformation will start at the top, from DSA member Mamdani himself, but it reaches all levels of his senior staff, transition team, and lower-level employees who will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the city government.
“Our movement is at the heart of Zohran’s campaign,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of DSA’s New York City chapter, said on election night according to the New York Post. That army is taking over the maybe soon-to-be-former financial capital of the world and will receive some very serious on the job training.
Mamdani’s chief of staff will reportedly be Elle Bisgaard-Church. According to CBS News, she was the chief architect of the plan to replace police officers with social workers. Much like socialism, this sort of policy has already been tried very recently in New York City under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. It didn’t work and quickly became a scam. They will give it another go anyway.
Mamdani’s choice for first deputy mayor is Dean Fuleihan, a former de Blasio staffer who worked as the former mayor’s budget director among other positions. De Blasio presided over one of the worst budget crises in city history. Again, policy failure didn’t matter. What matters is they have power.
It’s not just the senior staff that matters in this case. Politico reported on Mamdani’s plan to fully take over New York government, including integrating the Left’s activist class into the city bureaucracy.
“In the wake of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s win, the city’s Democratic Socialists of America and other factions of the institutional left are helping staff up City Hall with the aim of creating a new generation of civil servants who can run a sprawling bureaucracy with a leftist mindset,” Politico reported.
Ana María Archila, co-director of far-left Working Family Party’s New York chapter was quoted as saying in that piece that Mamdani’s administration “is going to accelerate a lot of the learning and capacity of our side to not just be able to legislate, but to also administer and execute a governing agenda.”
There is no doubt that’s true. It’s one of many reasons why I don’t agree with some conservatives who say that what happens in big, blue cities like New York doesn’t matter and that we should be happy the voters will get the just desserts of bad policy.
This problem will spread elsewhere. Not only will state and federal governments be pressured into essentially bailing out the New York’s reckless spending, but Mamdani’s time in power will give operating experience to a wide swath of fanatical leftist activists turned bureaucrats. They are certainly hoping that they can step into the vacuum left by the Democratic Party establishment’s exhaustion and disintegration.
These people aren’t content to rule Manhattan. They have national aspirations. And don’t think that policy failures will deter them. Mamdani appears to be a true believer as are his committed followers. Any failure they encounter running the city will be blamed on their enemies, real and imagined.
They will now have a base of experience to seize power elsewhere. All it will take is one messy election, one serious downturn, and they can find themselves in charge of more big cities, a state, or even the White House. For them, chaos really is a ladder. The threat they pose to the country is very real, and they will have a ready-made army of dedicated political operatives ready to seize their moment if it arrives.
