The NYC Mayor Is Explicitly Describing His Administration as a Template That Can Spread Beyond the City
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
The NYC Mayor Is Explicitly Describing His Administration as a Template That Can Spread Beyond the City
The Statement
NEW YORK — Mayor Mamdani, in a media appearance, described democratic socialism as ‘a politics that can flourish anywhere,’ saying ‘there is only one majority in this country, that’s the working class’ and suggesting his approach is focused on putting them ‘at the heart of what it is that we’re pursuing,’ while indicating the approach’s potential to extend from New York City to ‘the state’ and eventually ‘the country.’ This is an ambitious statement about the scalability of a political approach that is currently managing a $12 billion budget gap and a postponed executive budget deadline.
The National Attention
New York City’s socialist mayor is being watched by the national political press as a test case for whether democratic socialist politics can produce governing results that sustain the electoral coalition that produced it. The specific results being tracked: whether the universal child care program gets funded, whether the PTET reduction gets through Albany, whether the budget is balanced without service cuts, and whether the pied–terre tax generates the revenue that Mamdani estimates. These are the test variables of the national experiment.
The Sceptical View
The sceptical view — represented by Eric Adams’s ‘Free is a lie’ formulation and by various conservative media covering the budget crisis — is that Mamdani’s democratic socialism in practice produces the specific condition of ambitious social program commitments that require revenue mechanisms that centrist state governments block, producing the budget gap that requires either service cuts or the public subsidy the centrist governments have declined to provide. The test of whether this critique is correct or whether Mamdani’s negotiating strategy eventually produces the revenue is the test of the national experiment.
The Timeline
A democratic socialist politics that ‘can flourish anywhere’ is currently flourishing in the specific context of New York City, with a May 12 budget deadline, a Governor saying ‘that’s not happening’ to the primary revenue mechanism, and a former mayor saying ‘Free is a lie.’ The flourishing, in its current form, has a specific look. The next iteration of the experiment will follow from how this one resolves.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.
The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.