Zohran Mamdani will fail, utterly and completely, as mayor of New York City

Mamdani has many good ideas, and a few terrible ideas, but he has not put enough thought into the actual implementation of his good ideas.

This is very long and will probably not interest anyone other than myself. I hope Mamdani’s good ideas are implemented. I hope he can be convinced to improve the implementation of his mediocre ideas, and give up entirely on his worst ideas.

How did he get this far?

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state legislator, is the presumed winner of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Back in January, he was polling at around 2 percent in a race whose initial front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, had vastly more name recognition and money than any other candidate. Mamdani still trailed Cuomo by 8 points in an average of the last polls conducted before Election Day on Tuesday—but when Wednesday morning dawned, he was leading the former state governor by 7 percent and Cuomo had conceded. (The mayoral primary uses “ranked choice” ballots whose official tallies won’t be finished until next week.) How did he get this done as a self-described democratic socialist, critic of overpolicing, and supporter of Palestinian causes in a city that, reputation for leftism aside, has spent most of the last 30 years electing staunchly pro-Israel “law and order” mayors? Basically, by walking around the city for months on end talking to people (and making charming videos of himself talking to people) about the high cost of living and what he would do about it. Crazy stuff! Sometimes, hard work and common sense pay off.

I have elsewhere criticized Democratic Socialists for their lack of creativity, their nostalgia, and their historic disregard for the rights of minorities, especially women. I'm going to use this essay to criticize Mamdani and also the broader movement behind him, which includes many people who call themselves Democratic Socialists. But first, let's talk about some of his better ideas.

Read Mamdani's platform, I will be quoting from it here.

Baby Baskets

Mamdani has tried to borrow good ideas from other Social Democratic movements around the world. For instance, the baby basket that Finland introduced in 1938. Mamdani makes this case for it:

Each year, 125,000 New Yorkers are born across our city – but the cost of living crisis can make it difficult for new families to give them a healthy start. Building on the success of more than 90 similar programs around the world, the Mamdani administration will provide new parents and guardians with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books.

Each NYC Baby Basket will also include a resource guide of information on the City’s newborn home visiting program, breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more. These are critical resources for combating postpartum maternal mortality and increasing trust in government as well. At less than $20 million a year, it’s a relatively small investment with potentially huge rewards for healthy development and family stability – as demonstrated by countless programs around the globe.

You can read about Finland's baby basket on Wikipedia.

In Finland, families are offered 170 euros but they typically take the baby basket instead, as it is worth more than 170 euros. Mamdani should make the baby basket offer as generous as possible. If there is one thing in this world that a government should absolutely subsidize, it is the first few weeks of a new baby’s life.

Importing this particular program from Finland is Mamdani's best idea. I am hopeful this will work in New York City, and I hope it then becomes a model that is imitated all over the USA. You do not need to be a radical to support this idea, you only need to care about children. Since Finland introduced this idea, it has been imitated by many nations, including some conservative governments.

Raise the minimum wage to $30 by 2030

About the minimum wage, Mamdani’s platform says:

In the world’s richest city, making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty. But that’s exactly what it means for working people today, even with the hard-won increase in the state minimum wage. When incomes don’t match the true cost of living, government services have to make up the difference – effectively subsidizing low wage employers.

As Mayor, Zohran will champion a new local law bringing the NYC wage floor up to $30/hour by 2030. After that, the minimum wage will automatically increase based on the cost of living and productivity increases. When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives.

This is an excellent idea, nor is this an especially radical idea. Plenty of mainstream economists support this idea. For instance, Paul Krugman has said:

Until the Card-Krueger study, most economists, myself included, assumed that raising the minimum wage would have a clear negative effect on employment. But they found, if anything, a positive effect. Their result has since been confirmed using data from many episodes. There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.

Krugman's view on the minimum wage has been changing at least since 2015:

There isn’t a sharply defined “going wage”, either because the firm has monopsony power — it can, in effect, choose the going wage in its local labor market — or because efficiency wage considerations lead it to pay more than the minimum, so that there are normally more applicants than places... In particular, the firm shouldn’t mind very much paying a somewhat higher wage, because this will produce offsetting benefits — a larger supply of labor if it has monoposony power, lower turnover or higher productivity if efficiency wages are an issue, maybe all of the above. The point is that under these circumstances it needn’t be all that hard to push up wages: the threat of union organizing or a consumer boycott, even moral suasion from the government might be enough. So the standard view that it’s very hard to change the distribution of market income, that policy must involve after-market taxes and transfers, may be quite wrong.

Also, see this Krugman essay from 2018.

Simple math confirms that the minimum wage should be higher:

You can see that the minimum wage reached it’s current inflation-adjusted value in 1968, and it has since stalled. For most of the 20th Century, labor unions were strong enough that the American worker received close to 100% of all productivity gains. Productivity gains since 1968 work out to about 290% so:

7.21 x 2.9 = $20.90

That is the national rate, and wages in New York City have always been higher than the national average, roughly 20%. So $24 an hour would be the correct minimum wage in New York City for the year 2025. Mamdani's plan is for the year 2030, by which point additional inflation and productivity would justify a minimum wage close to $30 an hour.

In short, you don't have to be a radical to support a minimum wage of $30 an hour. Moderate centrists should have an easy time supporting this in New York City.

If you don't know the history: wages in the USA grew for most of USA history, until the crisis of the 1970s. The male median wage fell from 1973 to 1996, and it did not fully recover before it began falling again, from 2008 to 2015. If the minimum wage had merely kept up with the earlier long-term trends, we would already have a minimum wage of $24 an hour.

But those are just the numbers. Senator Elizabeth Warren has told the story about her father, who had a heart attack in 1962 and was no longer able to work, and so her mom went out and got a minimum wage job, and on that minimum wage her mom was able to support her husband and all of the children. That's how strong the minimum wage used to be, and how strong it should be again:

During a CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, Warren said her father had a serious heart attack [in 1962] and was unable to get back to work, so her 50-year-old mother was forced to take on a minimum wage job to support the family.

Things were tough, and they lost the family station wagon. Warren recalled her mother saying, “We will not lose this house.”

“She was 50 years old. She had never worked outside the home. She was truly terrified,” she said.

Warren’s mother managed to save their family home with her minimum wage job, the senator said, something – Warren routinely notes – that would not be possible in most households in 2019.

“For a long time I used to think that was just a story about my mother. How when you get scared you reach down and you find what you have to find and you bring it. And then years later, I came to understand that it’s the story of millions of Americans who, it doesn’t matter if you’re scared, when you got to do something to take care of the people you love, you reach down and you find it and you pull it up,” she said.

Deregulation for small businesses

To his credit, Mamdani says that he is committed to undoing some of the regulations that stifle businesses:

New York is the greatest city in the world, but the people who make it so are being priced out. That includes small business owners, who account for over 90 percent of all firms in the city and who employ nearly half of all New Yorkers within the private sector. But too many mom-and-pops are forced to close because keeping a business open costs too much and navigating our bureaucracy is too difficult. That costs New Yorkers their jobs, small business owners their dreams, and our city the places that give it character.

Zohran will make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business in New York City, so that bodegas and corner stores stay open and dollar slices come back. He will cut small business fines in half, speed up permitting and make online applications easier, and increase funding for 1:1 small business support by 500 percent. And he’ll appoint a Mom-and-Pop Czar to make sure it happens.

This might be his least radical idea. Democrats have been pushing deregulation since President Carter started the modern trend in the 1970s. It’s a great idea, though it is only a small step in the right direction.

Skyrocketing commercial rents is what shuts down most restaurants. Efforts to limit real estate speculation are necessary to lower costs for small businesses. I am surprised that Mamdani doesn't talk about this more. Something like an increase in real estate tax would help limit speculation, and would also bring in revenue. But even that does not go far enough.

As Donald Trump's various crimes have made clear, we need to be strict about insisting that a business only use one valuation for a given piece of real estate. We now know that Donald Trump would aggressively inflate the value of his properties when he applied for a bank loan, but he would aggressively undercut the value when he had to pay taxes on that property. It should be automatic that the government requires any documentation that a person or corporation gives to banks when applying for loans, where the loans are backed by taxable property.

Why will Mamdani fail? We need to set up an independent, autonomous agency, as politically neutral as possible, to engage in a process of continuous mark-to-market for assessed values on real estate. The most invisible form of speculation is when an investor merely holds a property, and does nothing with it, allowing its assessed value to grow increasingly out of date. But here Mamdani is likely to sabotage himself with his own populism, as his populism will make it impossible “to set up an independent, autonomous agency, as politically neutral as possible.” One problem afflicts all leaders who use populism to gain power: they attract a coalition that believes in populism, and who therefore oppose all agencies that are independent and autonomous.

Good ideas with no real implementation plan

Baby Baskets, raise the minimum wage, deregulation for small business — all excellent ideas. Sadly, Mamdani only has a few ideas that are both good and where his plan for implementation is crystal clear. On other issues, his plan to implement changes amounts to "I will wave a magic wand, and something good will happen." Take, for instance, what he says about libraries:

Libraries are critical to our city’s success—they enable access to the internet, provide cool from summer heat, serve as vital community hubs, and help New Yorkers seek career advancement and education. Yet, Eric Adams’ library closures have been devastating. As a state legislator, I supported neighborhood organizing to restore funding to Astoria’s Broadway Library and have used Assembly discretionary money to fund programming at the Queens Public Library. As Mayor, I will end the practice of using library funding as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations and commit 0.5% of NYC’s budget to libraries, ensuring we have enough revenue for robust services and well-staffed facilities.

The phrase "as a bargaining chip in budget negotiations" suggests that he is willing to trade away something else in exchange for better funding for libraries. But what is that other thing that he is willing to trade away? What is he planning to sacrifice so that we can get the library service that New York City needs?

Ambiguous, difficult-to-interpret ideas:

This is how Mamdani’s platform describes the Department of Community Safety:

All New Yorkers deserve to be safe. But the Adams administration has failed to deliver the sense of safety and security that everyone should feel walking down our streets, riding our subways, or taking our buses. Zohran will create the Department of Community Safety to prevent violence before it happens by prioritizing solutions which have been consistently shown to improve safety. Police have a critical role to play. But right now, we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net—which prevents them from doing their actual jobs. Through this new city agency and whole-of-government approach, community safety will be prioritized like never before in NYC. The Department will invest in citywide mental health programs and crisis response—including deploying dedicated outreach workers in 100 subway stations, providing medical services in vacant commercial units, and increasing Transit Ambassadors to assist New Yorkers on their journeys—expand evidence-based gun violence prevention programs, and increase funding to hate violence prevention programs by 800%. Read more in the NYT, and the full proposal here.

The most charitable interpretation that I can come up with goes like this: throughout history, sometimes a leader loses control of part of the government, and the leader lacks the political capital to bring that department back under control. The leader lacks the allies necessary to confront and discipline the wayward department. In such circumstances, what sometimes works is to set up a new government department that competes directly with the old government department. If all goes well, the old government department can be starved of funds, while the new government department is responsive to the will of the leadership. Being able to starve a legion of funds is how the Roman Emperor Diocletian re-imposed discipline on far-flung armies and thus ended what had been a century of almost constant rebellion and civil war. It’s an old idea.

It is known that some local police departments demonstrate too much autonomy relative to the elected civilian leadership. And while state police are often better, local police are known for poor pay, poor training, poor discipline, poor morale, poor education, and poor behavior.

Setting up a new, competing organization, and transferring resources from the police to this new organization, is one way to discipline the police. It has worked in many different nations, in different centuries. As a method of discipline, it may be a path to real reform.

Also, as I have written many times before, we live in an advanced civilization that has a constantly advancing system of labor specialization. Some of the complaints that people now have with the police arise from insufficient specialization. Put differently, we are asking the police to do too many things. The police should not be overseeing outreach to those who are suffering severe mental illness — that is a different skill, and should be handled by a different specialist. To the extent that Mamdani is aiming to increase the level of specialization engaged in community safety, this is a positive step.

That is the most charitable interpretation of his proposal.

On this issue, more than most, the devil is in details.

I have two concerns:

1. That the new organization will lack a punitive element, and so the people in the organization will have to rely on the police for every enforcement action. This would be a paradox as it would strengthen the position of the police. (On Tumblr, there is a woman named Natalie, who is 34 years old and who works with Child Protective Services in Alabama. Although she mostly writes about lesbians in popular TV shows, she does occasionally tell stories about her work, in which she makes clear how much the CPS in Alabama is forced to depend on the police, and how uncaring and incompetent those police are. Real reform would mean finding a solution to some of the paradoxes which she has described.)

2. At some point, a direct confrontation is needed, to discipline the police and get them back in line. The military offers a fine example of how civilians can maintain control over armed representatives of the state. We need to use those same techniques with the police, in particular, the officer corps needs to have their career advancement tied to approval from a committee that is under civilian control, but autonomous and independent from any immediate political pressure, and the committee needs to have a process that is rigorous, but which emphasizes loyalty to the constitution. It's also best that appointments to the committee are chronologically staggered, so that the composition of the committee does not instantly change when a new mayor or governor is elected. De-coupling the composition of the committee from the election of the mayor or the governor is one way to assure the police that the committee has independence and autonomy from immediate political pressures. On this issue, I believe Mamdani will sabotage himself with his own populism, as his populism will cause him to distrust any committee that is "autonomous and independent from any immediate political pressure." And Mamdani seems to be one of the more reasonable people in his coalition, he is the smiling face of a dangerously populist movement. Many people in his coalition have been clear about their hatred of any committee that is independent, for instance, on Twitter you can see their occasional criticism of the independence of the Fed central bank.

Terrible ideas

This is what Mamdani’s platform says about city-owned grocery stores:

Food prices are out of control. Nearly 9 in 10 New Yorkers say the cost of groceries is rising faster than their income. Only the very wealthiest aren’t feeling squeezed at the register. As Mayor, Zohran will create a network of city-owned grocery stores focused on keeping prices low, not making a profit. Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers. They will buy and sell at wholesale prices, centralize warehousing and distribution, and partner with local neighborhoods on products and sourcing. With New York City already spending millions of dollars to subsidize private grocery store operators (which are not even required to take SNAP/WIC!), we should redirect public money to a real “public option.”

Obviously, I am a huge fan of city owned grocery stores, as I have written about this topic at great length. But the point I made there was that the government should own businesses that can maximize profits to provide revenue to complement the revenue that is raised from taxes. As the great libertarian Milton Friedman once said, "The best argument for Socialism, though no one makes this argument, is that it can lower taxes." Some states impose a monopoly on alcohol sales and they make big profits via their ABC stores (either running the stores directly or licensing them). This should be the ideal we follow.

There is absolutely no reason for the city to run grocery stores if the city is not planning to make a profit off of the stores. If the real goal is to help poor people afford food, then we can establish a targeted program to get more money to poor people.

Raising taxes

This is what Mamdani’s platform says about taxes:

Zohran has a plan to bring down the cost-of-living through city-owned grocery stores, universal childcare, and other bold proposals, and he knows exactly how to pay for it, too. Zohran’s revenue plan will raise the corporate tax rate to match New Jersey’s 11.5%, bringing in $5 billion. And he will tax the wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers—those earning above $1 million annually—a flat 2% tax (right now city income tax rates are essentially the same whether you make $50,000 or $50 million). Zohran will also implement common-sense procurement reform, end senseless no-bid contracts, hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional $1 billion.

This part is a good idea:

Hire more tax auditors, and crack down on fine collection from corrupt landlords to raise an additional $1 billion.

The rest is, at best, unproven. Some wealthy people will change their primary residence to avoid these taxes. I have wealthy friends who are careful to only visit New York 179 days a year, so they can never be accused of making New York state their primary residence.

But more so, this tax plan is not sufficient to raise the money to pay for New York's needs. New York City would benefit from an extra $20 billion, and we should be thinking about how to get that. Owning profitable businesses is one way to get extra revenue. But again, the CEOs of the businesses would have to have total independence from current politics, and Mamdani’s populism will likely make that independence impossible.

The failure to think creatively about new sources of funding suggests that Mamdani will fail at everything he attempts, because all of his ideas need to be paid for. Without new sources of funding, all of his ideas amount to idle fantasies, disconnected from reality.

Freeze the rent

Mamdani’s platform says:

A majority of New Yorkers are tenants, and more than two million of them live in rent stabilized apartments. These homes should be the bedrock of economic security for the city’s working class. Instead, Eric Adams has taken every opportunity to squeeze tenants, with his hand-picked appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board jacking up rents on stabilized apartments by 9% (and counting)–the most since a Republican ran City Hall.

As Mayor, Zohran will immediately freeze the rent for all stabilized tenants, and use every available resource to build the housing New Yorkers need and bring down the rent. The number one reason working families are leaving our city is the housing crisis. The Mayor has the power to change that.

This is a terrible idea. We have an abundance of evidence that tells us this is a terrible idea. Assuming the population grows, the only way to bring rents down is to build more apartments, and to do so we will need either private sector capital or public sector capital. A rent freeze will scare away the private sector capital. Mamdani's tax increases will not raise enough money to provide the public sector money needed to build the new residential housing that we need.

Rather than freezing rents, Mamdani should focus on finding revenue sources that would allow the city to build more housing, and it should look to build highly profitable apartments which will then provide the revenue which will then allow more housing to be built — after an initial outlay, this program could be self-sustaining, and could bring rents down, so long as Mamdani is focused on maximizing the profits from such a program. But his focus seems to be in the opposite direction.

On a different topic, Ned Resnikoff has written about the “free buses” idea that Mamdani has argued for, I’ve nothing to add, so if the topic interests you, go read Resnikoff:

This proposal has stirred up a lot of intra-left rancor and backbiting, so let me make something clear: I’m not opposed to free transit on principle. To me, it’s a question of math: how much does fare collection cost, and how much does it take in? Is making transit free for everyone more or less effective than subsidizing fares for lower-income riders? (In other words, how much would it cost to do some basic eligibility screening, and would we be able to do it in a way that minimizes administrative burdens for the riders whose fares we want to subsidize?) And lastly, how should we weigh the cost of fare elimination against other potential spending priorities, such as increasing bus frequency and reliability?

It is entirely possible for fare elimination advocates to provide good answers to all of these questions. But I suspect that the cases where the benefits of total fare elimination outweigh the costs will mostly be found in small or mid-sized cities — places where demand for transit is both manageable and predictable, where a transit network doesn’t need to cover too much territory to be comprehensive, where fare recovery doesn’t bring in a whole lot of revenue anyway, and where the administrative costs associated with setting up a more targeted fare subsidy program would eat up a pretty significant share of the city’s overall transportation budget. Free buses might make sense in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example.

Zohran Mamdani will fail, utterly and completely, as mayor of New York City

As I said at the beginning of this essay, I have elsewhere criticized Democratic Socialists for their lack of creativity, their nostalgia, and their historic disregard for the rights of minorities, especially women. Mamdani’s success encourages me to express my disappointment, yet again. Some of the people in this movement engage in a style of reasoning that amounts to “Sweden did this in 1950, therefore we can do it now.” In their nostalgia and their ahistorical revisionism, they amount to a traditionalist RETVRN movement which just happens to have Left aesthetics. Especially since many of these people are young, I am curious why they want to revive a dead movement from a century ago, rather than creatively invent a completely new politics that is adapted to the realities of the early 21st Century?

I will briefly address some political practicalities. To push through major reform requires a large political coalition, and Mamdani has already sabotaged himself in multiple ways. During the 2024 Presidential election, Mamdani was a leader in the Uncommitted movement against Kamala Harris. He has therefore alienated many African-Americans, who mostly voted for Cuomo and Adams in this most recent election.

New York City is a multiracial democracy. Most whites support the Republicans. A leader of the Democratic Party needs the support of African-Americans and Jews, and Mamdani lacks support from either group. He has not yet gained office, but he has already wasted much of his political capital. While I appreciate that Mamdani is unusually charismatic, he faces a daunting struggle to regain the trust of those he would need to pass any major reforms.

I am not aware of Mamdani saying anything anti-semitic, but people in his coalition have done so. Right after Mamdani’s victory, Mohammed El-Kurd, a prominent Palestinian activist, tweeted, “Consider the intifada globalized.” Mamdani then explained what he felt the words “globalize the intifada” actually meant, without fully denouncing the words. Many Jews are extremely wary of Mamdani, and it will be difficult to be a Democratic leader of New York City without the support of a majority of Jews. Regarding his more extreme followers, Mamdani will have to break them with them as forcefully as Henry V broke with Falstaff.

Can Social Democracy be reconciled to our current implementation of substantive due process?

Historically, Social Democrats represented a majoritarian movement, and they were slow to reconcile themselves to a liberal system with extensive checks and balances to protect the rights of unpopular minorities. It was not until the Godesberg Program of 1959 that the German SPD fully committed itself to working within the constraints of a liberal system. As I’ve written about elsewhere, Willy Brandt first got into national government in 1966 and then became Chancellor in 1969 and then he enjoyed 4 years when he was at the zenith of his power and his political capital appeared to be infinite — very few leaders in a democracy ever have the kind of total freedom of operation that Brandt enjoyed for those years. He pushed through several hundred much-needed reforms. But because his power was unlimited, what he did not do is surprising. Above all, he did not legalize abortion. And so it came to pass that the CDU, an organization founded and controlled by pro-life Catholics, took the lead in legalizing abortion in Germany. I’ve elsewhere quoted Sarah Wiliarty’s book at great length, so I won’t repeat all of that here.

The concept of judicial supremacy was invented in the USA in 1803 in the case of Marbury v. Madison.The concept was very slow to catch on in (continental) Europe, and even today is not as universal in (continental) Europe as it is in the USA. In my essay Neo-Majoritarianism I suggested there were ways to guarantee a liberal system of checks and balances without relying on judicial supremacy, so I am open-minded about other systems, but the American Social Democrats who I personally know cannot be described as open-minded, nor can they be described as closed-minded, they are instead no-minded about this issue, they just don’t think about it. For Americans, this is very much of case of “fish don’t realize they are in water.” They live in a liberal system with the most dominant judiciary in the history of the world yet they do not think much about how this changes the context of Social Democracy.

In particular, they do not think about lawsuits. And they do not think about the difficulty of reconciling Social Democracy to lawsuits. They do not recognize the need for creativity in finding some new synthesis of our current implementation of substantive due process and Social Democracy.

Here I am taking seriously the claim that some of these so-called Social Democrats are in fact serious about Social Democracy. I am aware that this is too rigorous for most of this crowd. For many of them, it is merely a matter of branding. For many of them, it is simply a way to say, “I wish the Democrats were further to the left.” For many of them, they don’t actually care about Social Democracy as a historical movement or a conceptual program. And that’s fine. But it is possible that Mamdani does, in fact, seriously think of himself as a Social Democrat, and it is likely that at least a few of his most important supporters are also serious about the label, and so it is worth taking the whole project seriously, at least for a moment.

It is difficult to reconcile Social Democracy to lawsuits.

Under our current understanding of substantive due process, when a person working for the government makes a serious mistake, citizens can sue the government, and if they win their case, then all tax payers are punished, forced to pay an extra amount in taxes so that award money can be given to the person who won the lawsuit (or tax payers pay for the insurance that then pays the lawsuit). This system, in which most people are punished so that an award can be given to a particular person, undercuts the majoritarian sensibilities of Social Democracy.

Take, for instance, what happened in Uvalde, Texas.

From the Texas Tribune:

Details of how a gunman was able to enter Robb Elementary School in Uvalde and kill 19 students and two teachers over the course of an hour have come out in parcels since the shooting.

Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Department of Public Safety officials have walked back some of their initial statements about the shooting and the authorities’ response after contradictory information came to light.

Details of how long it took for officers to confront the shooter — about 1 hour and 15 minutes — have also sparked widespread outage and criticism. In July, an investigation into the shooting by a Texas House committee determined the law enforcement response was plagued by "systemic failures and egregious poor decision making."

This long delay, during which the police stood around and did nothing, resulted in a lawsuit from the families of those who died, which was settled 2 years later:

Nineteen families of the students and teachers killed or injured at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, announced Wednesday they have settled a lawsuit with the city for $2 million, and announced they are suing 92 officers with Texas Department of Public Safety, the school district and individual employees.

“It has been an unbearable two years,” Javier Cazares, the father of 9-year-old victim Jacklyn Cazares, said at a news conference. “We all know who took our children’s lives, but there was an obvious systemic failure out there on May 24. The whole world saw that.

“No amount of money is worth the lives of our children. Justice and accountability has always been my main concern. We’ve been let down so many times, that time has come to do the right thing,” he said.

Minus the fees for the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs, each family got around $60,000 to pay them for their dead children. Do these families deserve more than $60,000 for their dead children? Maybe, but how much of a penalty can the people of Uvalde afford to pay? All of the tax payers of Uvalde help pay for the insurance which paid the settlement. There is a risk that the price of the insurance will go up in the future, because of this large settlement, in which case every family in Uvalde will have to pay more, because of the money that was given to these 19 families.

Children died, and then their families received money as compensation for the loss: it is important to note how much this resembles ordinary social insurance, or perhaps a kind of life insurance. A European Social Democrat would certainly have an easy time making the case for a kind of life insurance, overseen by the Executive branch, that paid out money in such cases of major life tragedies.

But keep in mind how much this is not insurance: the judicial branch was involved, and a huge percentage of the money went to lawyers, something that would not have been necessary had this been a kind of life insurance overseen by the Executive branch. Also, the process took two years, when it should have taken two weeks, or maybe just two days.

To the extent that these lawsuits are supposed to function as a kind of life insurance, they are slow, wasteful, and insanely expensive. It would be better if they were a specific program handled by the Executive branch.

But some people also feel that the lawsuits should function as revenge: that the police should have to pay for being incompetent. In that regard, these lawsuits do not function at all. It is never the police who pay these lawsuits.

Still others believe that the goal of the lawsuits should be to change the behavior of government officials. On that score, evidence is extremely mixed. There are police departments, throughout America, who pay out settlements every single year yet never change any of their practices. In fact, the only time police departments seem to change their behavior is when the courts empower the Justice Department to oversee a police department, which is to say, when the Judicial branch retreats from the situation, and the Executive branch takes over and directly manages the situation.

In other words, judicial supremacy does not guarantee justice. Some times, real justice can only come from the involvement of the Executive branch. This reality is more widely accepted in (continental) Europe than in America. Or at least, it was in the past. It’s also true that Europe has moved towards the American model.

I hope you’ll forgive this long tangent on a theoretical issue, but I believe it is important to discuss if something like Social Democracy is to ever make progress in the USA. On Twitter, I’ve been in many conversations where I’ve been surprised by the extent that people assume that lawsuits are the only way to manage people. It’s especially surprising, since I assume many of these people have had jobs, so they know what it means to have a manager, and they know what it means to have a manager who gives you explicit directions. And most of these people have never had anyone try to modify their behavior via a lawsuit. So most of these people should know, intuitively, how direct executive leadership is, whereas how distant judicial direction would be. But somehow their own lived experience means nothing to these people, when they think about interacting with large institutions, they can only imagine having power via lawsuits. Nothing else occurs to them. The normal democratic process does not seem meaningful to them. Executive power does not seem meaningful to them.

The Protestant tradition and Social Democracy

The nations of Northern Europe were fanatically Protestant for several centuries, and this inculcated a culture with a strong sense of community obligation. And even though most of the early Socialists/Social Democrats were formally atheists and anti-religion, their success was built on that foundation of strong community obligation. The first Social Democrat government in history was elected in Denmark in 1920. The traditions of the labor unions were, at that time, informed by Christian notions of “right livelihood” and this was true even when the labor unions were led by atheists. Even in 1949, when the CDU formed in Germany, it had a large and powerful internal committee for “Catholic labor unions” because it made sense to the Catholics that a conservative movement should honor the contribution of the workers. The CDU was “conservative” in the religious sense, but not in the American sense of “pro-business.” The CDU in 1949 was strongly committed to avoiding the class-conflict that was thought to have contributed to the extremes of Fascism and Communism during the early 1930s. It was not until the 1990s that the CDU began to adopt American-style pro-business rhetoric.

(I don’t have the time or space to list every cultural difference, but also consider that all the nations that gave birth to Social Democracy were monarchies, and most are still monarchies now, and polling shows the public tends to trust the institutions of government more under monarchy than under a pure republic.)

I raise this issue only because I think it will take a great deal of creativity to build anything like Social Democracy in the USA. At a minimum, Social Democratic activists need to think about how radically changed the context is. America in 2025 favors individualism and self-expression and personal satisfaction, in ways that are utterly different than the cultures that first gave birth to Social Democracy. The USA in the early 21st Century is not a Protestant nation, nor does it have strong labor unions, nor does it have strong feelings of community obligation, nor is their a culture of self-sacrifice for the greater good, nor is their the same trust of the Executive Branch. Rather, we live during the era of judicial supremacy, a supremacy grown so great that even American Social Democrats no longer think about it much. They accept it the way they accept that the sky is blue. They do not think much about the possible contradictions.

This is one of the many reasons that I think Zohran Mamdani will fail. He is leading a movement rife with internal contradictions, and so far there has been no discussion of what a new path forward would look like. To the extent that he is successful, he will be successful at small, incremental reforms, such as giving baby baskets to parents with new children. Which is to say, to the extent that he is successful, he will be successful as an ordinary Democratic leader. But to the extent that he tries to be an actual Social Democrat, he will fail, utterly and completely.