A New Era in New York City Political History?

During his culminating campaign rally at Forest Hills Stadium on October 26, now-mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani laid out his broad objectives as mayor. New Yorkers, he claimed, had been “encouraged…to imagine less.” He promised a city of expanded imagination and expanded possibilities: “We deserve a city government as ambitious as the working New Yorkers who make it the greatest city in the world,” he declared.  

Intentionally or not, Mamdani’s evocation of social imagination and ambition echoed a mission statement once delivered by his favorite New York City mayor, the progressive Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who served three terms between 1934 and 1945. Three weeks into his first administration, La Guardia wrote in the pages of the weekly magazine Liberty:

This was as good an expression as any of the social vision that underpinned La Guardia’s mayoralty. That vision shaped the city in the era of the New Deal and World War II and guided its politics in the postwar decades. It strained to encompass the broader claims to justice raised by the Black and Brown freedom movements in the 1960s and then collapsed entirely amid the economic turmoil of the 1970s, to be replaced by something very different in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Mamdani is now seeking to channel the spirit of La Guardia’s New York in order to reinvigorate Gotham in the 21st century. Where exactly does he stand in the city’s political history, and what does that history tell us about the obstacles he might encounter as he attempts to reshape New York politics?

Fiorello La Guardia was a complex political figure, and there were aspects of his mayoralty that Mamdani’s core supporters would not find cause to celebrate. He was a good-government reformer aligned with some of the city’s leading financial interests, a moral traditionalist who sometimes impinged on civil liberties, a supporter of aggressive policing, a constructor of massive public works, many overseen by Robert Moses, and, during the Second World War, a rabid anti-Japanese racist. He, like practically all liberals of his era, had little grasp of the structural underpinnings of racial inequality and little appreciation for the hardships Black New Yorkers faced in the Jim Crow North.

But what made La Guardia so appealing to the working-class New Yorkers who resoundingly reelected him was his vision for how the government could be deployed where private markets had failed to make city life more tolerable and even more enjoyable — for what the city government, the agency of New Yorkers’ collective aspirations, could do to make life in the city more than a squalid succession of days. With the help of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, La Guardia and his appointees put into practice a playbook drawn up by urban progressives and socialists over the previous few decades. New parks and playgrounds; theater and opera accessible to all; decent, affordable housing; monumental new swimming pools — these were not only goods and services, but gestures to working-class New Yorkers that the city cared about the quality of urban life in the broadest sense.

In the 1960s and 1970s, this political vision ran aground on the twin shoals of inequality and insolvency. Public institutions could not work well in a city so deeply divided by race and class. And the coming of the fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s made it clear that the city could not count on the local growth that had sustained New Deal-era ambitions through the postwar era. What arose from the fiscal crisis was a sense among the city’s political class that the municipal aspirations of the mid-20th century — augmented by the movements for freedom, equality and empowerment of the 1960s — had led to a political culture in which no one was willing to say no. 

Out of this passage came a new approach to city politics. The city thereafter “returned” to a focus on fundamentals — on responsible budgeting and core services, policing above all. Broadly, it turned away from the egalitarian visions of the mid-century — profoundly compromised though they were by inequalities of race, class and gender — and toward an emphasis on “making things work,” which in practice meant attracting and retaining businesses and a middle-class/affluent tax-paying “public.” This entailed, all sides agreed, a narrowing of horizons, evident in the shifting meaning of what became perhaps the most resonant phrase of the new era. 

“Quality of life,” a term that might otherwise have expressed something of the “great, living, thrilling adventure” of which La Guardia wrote, came to mean something quite different: not the presence of things that made urban life thrilling, but the absence of things that made it grinding and perhaps dangerous.

This approach did not go unchallenged, and it is worth examining the successes and failures of those challenges, for they suggest some possibilities and dangers for the incoming Mamdani administration. In 1989, an appealing, nattily-suited man from an underrepresented background rose up to challenge a universally-known establishment pol in the Democratic primary, confronting accusations of antisemitism while promising to give voice to forgotten New Yorkers: This was David Dinkins, who became the city’s first Black mayor after beating Ed Koch in the 1989 Democratic primary and Rudy Giuliani in the general election amid voter turnout not seen in decades. Almost a quarter-century later, a former Dinkins staffer, Bill de Blasio, emerged from a crowded Democratic field pledging to address inequality head-on — promising to end New York’s “tale of two cities,” a phrase he had gotten from Dinkins, who had gotten it from Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Dinkins and de Blasio served at very different times, and their mayoralties defy tidy summary. Still, they illuminate some dilemmas the incoming administration will face. Both Dinkins and de Blasio faced challenges from independent power centers in the city: Both, for instance, had famously difficult relationships with the NYPD and the city press. But their insurgent candidacies also left lingering fissures within their parties. Dinkins’ campaign, in particular, represented a challenge by the city’s rising Black and Latino communities to the white-ethnic communities that had long been the Democratic party’s center of gravity — and therefore to established leaders like Koch, Gov. Mario Cuomo and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Dinkins never managed to repair those ruptures, nor to build a coalition powerful enough to surmount them. When he ran for reelection in 1993, Cuomo and Moynihan offered tepid support, Koch actively opposed him and a key slice of white-ethnic voters went over to Giuliani. De Blasio, of course, faced similar obstacles in winning Democratic support for his agenda, particularly in the form of opposition from Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Both Dinkins and de Blasio also struggled to make permanent changes in how the city government worked. For changes in governance, if they are to be durable, require not just enacting and implementing policies, but remaking entire administrative systems. Dinkins’ “community policing” plan — an approach that envisioned police officers as neighborhood problem-solvers and ombudsmen — is an illustrative case in point as Mamdani considers a different reform, creating a Department of Community Safety to help address mental health problems without the presence of police. Dinkins and his police commissioners developed sophisticated policing strategy, but they never succeeded at changing the NYPD’s organizational structure and culture. Dinkins’ successor, Giuliani, and his Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, were much more successful at reorganizing the NYPD and shifting its culture, and their broken windows approach took hold.

Dinkins and de Blasio ultimately stand as cautionary examples to Mamdani and his supporters, not because they did not succeed as mayors — indeed, both performed better than is often remembered — but because they did not succeed on their own terms: neither managed to turn the popular surges that had elevated them to office into durable, powerful movements. And that is what it ultimately takes to produce the kind of transformation to which Mamdani aspires. 

Much will be out of Mamdani’s control. La Guardia succeeded in large measure because the New Deal enabled his vision for an ambitious, imaginative government, and because the ascendant labor movement provided the organizational heft to power a new kind of politics. Mamdani’s mayoralty, at least in its early days, will be defined largely by the federal government’s hostility toward the city.

But much is within his control, too. Mamdani’s ebullience, boundless energy and seeming ability to embody the city recall La Guardia and Koch, the men who set the template for what New Yorkers expect of their mayor. His election night remarks about governing in “prose that rhymes” suggest an appreciation of the workaday tasks in front of him, even if he has no firsthand administrative experience. He has created a genuinely new political force in the city, and while mayors always have their work cut out for them in Albany, the situation seems more favorable for Mamdani than it was for de Blasio in 2014.

Even if he plays his cards well, Mamdani will not be La Guardia; the times are not so conducive. But unlike Dinkins and de Blasio, who were essentially reactive figures, responding to the developments of the Koch and Bloomberg years, Mamdani has a chance to point a way forward. That would be an achievement in its own right.