My neighbor, three blocks directly east, is now one of the most famous socialists in history. It’s tempting to hope New York City’s Mayor Mamdani will only be remembered for small or ridiculous things such as the car-sized plastic garbage dumpsters he’s inflicting on the curbs of his fellow Upper East Side residents. More likely though, he and his fellow Democratic Socialists will keep making smart and cynical strategic gains while calcified members of the two-party establishment make ineffectual counter-moves.
That is, when establishment politicians aren’t seizing the opportunity, like potential Trump successor JD Vance, to make matters even worse by echoing Mamdani’s anti-capitalist, economically-ignorant bluster—in the vain hope that a right-leaning anti-capitalism will be an easier sell than the traditional left-wing kind.
The Vance strategy will probably work out about as well in the long run as did Republicans in the 20th century routinely assuring voters, “Don’t worry, we too like the welfare state, we just want it to grow a bit more slowly than the Democrats running against us do.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican activist who even cares that the real measure of success in these clashes is how socialist (that is, bureaucratic, coercive, and centrally-controlled) or free-market (individualist and endlessly choice-based, thus far more wealth-producing) the country ends up being, not how many Republicans are elected. If, as the DSA constantly reminds us, corporations are thinking only of the bottom line, almost all politicians and political activists are thinking only of election victories, not the ensuing damage to the economy and civilization more broadly.
In the 20th century, the anti-capitalists of both parties could be partially forgiven due to their apparent ignorance of free-market arguments. They seemed, so to speak, innocent, endlessly distracted from the economy by other matters such as the Cold War or gay marriage. Until they found time in their busy schedules to learn economics, it appeared polite and morally necessary to be patient with them—and I was, contrary to what some of my acquaintances might claim.
No such patient indulgence should be extended to the current crop of anti-capitalists, who delight in saying that they’re aware of the libertarian alternative and want it extinguished. They see the threat libertarianism poses, not to the public but to the anti-capitalists’ unearned and brutal power.
Mamdani is not so preoccupied with petty strategic moves (such as having the City government buy up housing stock or nixing open primaries in New York, the better to shore up radical partisan gains within the major parties, particularly the DSA’s takeover of the Democrats) that he can’t find time in speeches to condemn libertarian economists by name, such as Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek and the so-called Austrian School.
Mamdani’s right-wing analogue, capitalism-bashing Vice President Vance, rather than trying to educate the Mamdanis of the world about why markets work and property violations bring misery, now whines that his fellow Republicans’ main mistake has been deploying slogans from Milton Friedman (another justifiably Nobel-winning libertarian economist) instead of using the government to help people, as if that’s a thing government knows how to do. Vance will not turn government into a thing that helps, but he can certainly turn it into a thing that ignores Friedman’s teachings.
As long as more of the ignorant, anti-capitalist masses vote for Vance’s party than for Mamdani’s party, Vance doesn’t give a damn how poor everyone ends up being. Impoverished hillbillies may be a rich source of future votes for him, after all, just as frustrated white recent college grads in New York City are a great source of votes for Mamdani, or perhaps in a couple of years President Ocasio-Cortez (her dismissive recent references to the “peak Woke” and “Woke 1” extremist political slogans of a decade ago are obviously not evidence she’s learning econ or any other aspect of reality aside from the need to sound more moderate to get votes in places like the Midwest once you go national).
There’s no significant incentive in government and thus none in politics generally to match campaign rhetoric to economic reality. The more delusional the offer made to voters, the more enthusiastic they tend to become, at least the attentive, “educated,” ideological ones.
If the Republicans can’t fend off Vance in the 2028 primaries and there’s no long-overdue surge in support for libertarian Rand Paul as an alternative, the best (feeble) hope for somewhat-market-oriented conservatives in that election season might be Marco Rubio, even with the added militarist baggage he brings. Neocons are bad, but that doesn’t mean market-bashing hillbilly clods are good by default.
In the meantime, several major NYC employers plan their exit strategies, and though Mamdani has enough moderate political instincts to sound regretful about such defections, I’d bet that half the Gen X intellectuals I grew up around will simply assert that the law should forbid the capitalists to relocate. Those intellectuals, particularly the New Yorkers, will still imagine they’re better, kinder, more tolerant people than the capitalists because they enjoy, say, lesbian-made puppet shows more than the bourgeoisie do. If only that were all that mattered.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.