Opinion | Why New York City Needs Someone Like Mamdani

As Zohran Mamdani takes office, there is rightly a great emphasis on the many ways in which his mayoralty is a first for New York City. He is the first Muslim mayor of the city, the first born in Africa, the first of South Asian descent, the first to make being a democratic socialist central to his politics.

On the campaign trail, his opponents repeatedly depicted him as a radical, a foreigner, an outsider to the city and its politics.

But they are all wrong. Mr. Mamdani is an entirely familiar type of New York politician. The central issues of his campaign — holding down the costs of housing and transit so that all New Yorkers can enjoy the city’s glories — are the same ones that have animated working-class politics in the city going back to the 1886 mayoral campaign of Henry George, the 1917 campaign of the Socialist Morris Hillquit and the 1933 campaign of Fiorello La Guardia (who won, unlike the other two).

Mr. Mamdani is part of a long tradition in New York City that has framed itself as seeking to reclaim the democratic community of the city from wealth, power and greed.

In the early years of the 20th century, reform politics was most often associated with the crusade against Tammany Hall — shorthand for the faction that controlled Manhattan’s Democratic Party for decades. It brought leftist organizers, often associated with the Socialist Party and the insurgent labor movement, together with good-government professionals, even businessmen, who disliked the corruption and waste of the machine.

La Guardia’s triumph showed the power of this alliance. La Guardia, an Italian Jewish American (and practicing Episcopalian), was the first mayor to hail from the ranks of the immigrants who transformed the city in the early 20th century, just as Mr. Mamdani represents new immigrants from South Asia, East Asia, Africa and Latin America who have reshaped New York over the past 50 years.

More deeply, La Guardia’s ascendance to City Hall was a referendum on Tammany Hall and a city government that was sycophantic toward great wealth. The stock market crash, after years of Wall Street speculation, and the ensuing Great Depression had left New York a bitterly divided city on the edge of financial ruin, with tent-and-hut cities of homeless people sprawling through Central Park. His victory reflected the widespread perception that the mayoralty of the nightlife lover Jimmy J. Walker (who resigned from office after an extensive investigation for corruption) favored a narrow elite interested in its self-enrichment rather than the common good.

As a close La Guardia adviser said shortly before his inauguration, “As I see the hundreds of thousands of hungry people in this city, I wonder why the people of New York, especially those of affluence, do not realize this condition cannot go on forever.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, La Guardia took steps to knit together a divided New York by building housing, regulating rents, keeping the subway fare low, supporting unions and investing in the arts and public infrastructure. New Yorkers still live with some of the results, from City Center to the East River Drive and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the Midwood campus of Brooklyn College. Not everything he did was laudable: Black New Yorkers remained trapped in segregated neighborhoods, and his police tactics offered a precedent for law-and-order policing. But his mayoralty marked a turning point in the city.

Our day is profoundly different from the 1930s, not least in that La Guardia enjoyed the support and friendship of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal funds uncorked in the New Deal. But there are important parallels. Just as La Guardia’s triumph marked the end of an era in New York politics defined by greed, graft and the passivity of the city government in the face of shocking inequality and economic need, Mr. Mamdani’s rise points to the deep ambivalence in New York toward the role of Wall Street in the contemporary city.

Although finance has been important to New York since the late 18th century, it is only over the past 50 years that Wall Street has become its economic motor. As New York cast about for ways to recover from the white flight, disinvestment, recession and fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the city’s political elite turned to the finance industry. In 1980 there were still more manufacturing jobs in the city than in the finance, insurance and real estate industries combined. Today the city’s industrial base is virtually gone, and the financial sector and attendant business services (like corporate law firms) have ballooned.

The extraordinary wealth generated by Wall Street has transformed the city. From the perspective of the city government, the personal income tax has emerged as an important revenue source. Many city policies in recent years have revolved around making New York City an appealing place for affluent people to live, work and invest, so that the city can then encourage them to turn some of their private wealth to public purposes.

The obvious weight that the wealthy carry in the city’s political and fiscal life has also led to the perception that they are able to demand favors from city government and to receive special treatment. Meanwhile, the vast wealth of the financial industry has created intense incentives for landlords to raise rents and evict tenants in favor of more affluent ones. The tools that have helped capture wealth for public purposes have meant that it is distributed in ways that are far from egalitarian; parks and schools in wealthy neighborhoods may be able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars through park conservancies and parent-teacher associations, but how does this help people in other parts of New York?

Mr. Mamdani came to power by criticizing the ways this extreme economic division has changed New York as a place to live and work, building a coalition of tenants, immigrants, union members and downwardly mobile college-educated young people who are eager to make their lives in the city. He also won the support of a broad swath of the city’s professional middle class (doctors, lawyers, professors, teachers, social workers), which is similarly excluded from the provinces of extreme wealth.

For these New Yorkers, Andrew Cuomo’s warnings that electing Mr. Mamdani might bring back the high crime and fiscal crisis of the 1970s seemed implausible. Today people leave New York not because they are afraid of being mugged but because they fear their landlords are about to raise their rents. The desperation of the ’70s, when the city government handed out tax breaks to developers (including Donald Trump) out of sheer panic, is hard to summon when Wall Street profits are on track to top $60 billion for 2025.

As La Guardia took office in 1934, people around the country were watching. His election seemed to augur a new era not only for New York but for the whole country. In an article published before his inauguration, a writer for The Nation suggested that while the powers of the mayor’s office were somewhat limited, La Guardia might yet govern New York as a “gigantic laboratory for civic reconstruction.” His first address to New Yorkers as mayor, on Jan. 1, 1934, echoed these themes. “Our city, any city in the country, does not belong to any individual or set of individuals. It belongs to all of the people,” he said.

Mr. Mamdani’s capacity to deliver on his pledges to the city — rent freezes and affordable housing, universal child care and buses that are free and fast, as well as better, cheaper mass transit overall — has been much debated. These promises respond to the material needs of those who rely on the collective resources of the city rather than solely on personal wealth. If realized, they would be transformative. But even more important than these commitments and the specifics of how they might be achieved is the spirit behind them: as in the 1930s, experimentation and seeing the city as a “gigantic laboratory” for exploring what it means to live together.

Mr. Mamdani’s election is also a testament to the vision of democracy that is inherent in city life: the insight that our society — like our city, our New York — is something we must all create, enjoy and govern together.

Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of “Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics” and “Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal.

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