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TO WIN RADICAL SUCCESS, MAMDANI UNDERSTANDS, IS TO KNOW WHEN AND
WHERE TO COMPROMISE  
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Harold Meyerson
November 25, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Pragmatism is required to build a social democratic New York. The
key to radical reform, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani
clearly understands, is to be pragmatic as all hell. _

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and New York City Police
Commissioner Jessica Tisch shake hands after their visit to the New
York City Police Memorial, November 19, 2025., Credit: Richard Drew/AP
Photo // The American Prospect

 

Mamdani’s ultra-disciplined campaign focused on a handful of
policies that New Yorkers both needed and wanted: affordable housing
and universal child care above all, along with free buses and a
handful of city-owned grocery stores. Like Bernie Sanders and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani is a democratic socialist, but also
like them, his agenda is garden-variety social democratic. To win its
enactment—in a word, to deliver—requires a host of accommodations
with a political establishment that is not all that social democratic
itself. The price for delivering on his core issues is compromise on
other issues. And like all successful principled political leaders,
Mamdani gets that in his bones.

Part of getting that means he must avoid making political enemies when
doing so would imperil his agenda. Back in July, when I wrote
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that Democratic primary victor Mamdani would likely start picking up
endorsements from establishment Democrats, I noted that he needed a
progressive challenge to House Democratic leader and Brooklyn Rep.
Hakeem Jeffries like the proverbial hole in the head. In time,
Jeffries did endorse Mamdani, and today, Mamdani has made clear that
he does not back progressive Democrat Chi Ossé’s challenge to
Jeffries in next year’s congressional primary and has even persuaded
the New York chapter of DSA not to endorse him. Opposing Jeffries
after Jeffries had endorsed him (however half-heartedly) would upset
Jeffries ally Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose support Mamdani needs to fund
and create universal child care.

Nor does Mamdani need to further estrange New York’s police, even
though his previous critiques of the force are no less true than when
he levied them. A disconsolate or even rebellious force can undo a
mayoralty or even a city, and New York’s patrol-officer union made
clear during Bill de Blasio’s term in office that it was more than
willing to lie down on the job at the slightest sign of what it
interpreted as disrespect. Mamdani’s reappointment of Police
Commissioner Jessica Tisch was a sign that he’d try to avoid
inflaming the easily flammable police. Creating an uncomfortable civic
peace on that one front gives him the space to focus on child care and
housing.

So far, New York DSA appears to understand that such compromises are
the price of social democratic power. Their refusal to endorse Ossé
indicates that they know the stakes for municipal socialism depend on
Mamdani’s success in delivering on his agenda, and _not _on his
adhering to any form of doctrinal socialist purity (never mind that
DSA has never fully agreed on what socialist purity constitutes). This
realpolitik in the ranks is increasingly characteristic of DSA locals
in most large cities, where DSA candidates have won electoral office
only with broad liberal support and govern in informal coalition with
non-DSA progressives. In many smaller locals, where DSA candidates
remain on the electoral outs and have failed to form alliances with
the broader left (often, where the broad left itself is too weak to
win elections), a more sectarian outlook often prevails, and is
overrepresented on what passes for the organization’s national
political committee.

Since Mamdani’s election, New York DSA has continued to grow and may
soon reach a new high of 15,000 members. That said, Mamdani’s
campaign mobilized roughly 100,000 volunteers, an astonishing
achievement that means his base overwhelmingly does not consist of DSA
members, and that he’s answerable, even in the most narrow
definition of “answerability,” to a much broader group than DSA.
Just as Mamdani must govern within a broad left coalition, so New York
DSA must—or at least, should—understand that its fortunes and
capacities are maximized only when it acts within a broad left
coalition, too. So far, that appears to be the case.

Maintaining the unity and clout of that coalition will be required if
the Mamdani agenda is to be realized. The city lost its fiscal
independence—the ability, say, to levy its own taxes—during the
near-bankruptcy of the 1970s, when it ceded that power to the state.
If Mamdani’s legions stay mobilized in support of the higher taxes
on Gotham’s gazillionaires that are required to fund universal child
care, they can certainly compel the state legislature to enact them.
And if they can stay mobilized to swell Hochul’s vote in her
upcoming re-election contest, they can likely persuade her to sign
that bill. It’s not as if a 2 percent tax hike on New York’s
richest is unpopular with anyone other than New York’s richest.

Even without New York’s one-off dependence on Albany, a progressive
city can’t be an island, entire of itself, if it’s to be
successful. Mamdani rightly judges Fiorello La Guardia to have been
the city’s greatest mayor, but La Guardia’s success in building a
social democratic New York was in no small part due to his
relationship with Franklin Roosevelt, who made sure that abundant
federal aid flowed to the city. (On federal employment programs like
the WPA, the feds established a direct liaison office with each of the
48 states—and with one city, New York, which it treated like a state
of its own.) The best Mamdani can hope for from our current,
sub-ideological president is that he doesn’t clog the city with his
deportation goons, but that’s a relationship Mamdani needs to
continue working on as well. Radical reform can sometimes require
radical pragmatism.

We’ve seen such concessions before. In 1589, Henry of Navarre
inherited the French throne, but he was a Protestant in a
majority-Catholic country, and parts of that country—most
particularly, its capital and largest city—refused to recognize his
rule so long as he was a Protestant. Henry had an ambitious agenda of
domestic development and (largely anti-Hapsburg) foreign alliances,
but his religious affiliation stood in the way of his rallying the
nation to the causes (none of them religious) that he deeply believed
in.

So he converted to Catholicism, with the famous, if likely apocryphal,
words: “Paris is worth a mass.”

New York, Mamdani most surely understands, is worth a Tisch.

_[__HAROLD MEYERSON__ is editor at large of The American Prospect. His
email is [email protected]. Follow __@HaroldMeyerson_
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__MORE BY HAROLD MEYERSON_
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_Used with the permission. © __The American Prospect_
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* New York City
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* radical politics
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* democratic socialist
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* DSA
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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* New York
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* Kathy Hochul
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* Democrats
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* Democratic Party
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* Congress
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* Hakeem Jeffries
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* Child Care
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* policing
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* AOC
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