James Meigs is one of my favorite writers. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of MI’s City Journal. I met Mr. Meigs at a Manhattan Institute dinner in 2024. He is a learned and delightful gentleman. As the editor of Popular Mechanics in years gone by, he made the magazine a major voice on technological issues of the day.
Most recently, he has become a Wall Street Journal Free Expression columnist. I get Free Experssion’s daily newsletter and have drawn on it for this occasional series. Now I discover that it is also available here on Substack. Edited by Matthew Hennessey, Free Expression is always worth reading. You may want to check it out and subscribe (free).
Earlier this week Meigs took up the case of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He quotes from Zineb Riboua’s Substack post “Third-Worldism, Islamism, and the Return of Global Struggle” in the column. Ms. Riboua’s Substack site is Beyond the Ideological. I follow her on X here.
Referring to Mamdani, Meigs writes in his current Free Expression column:
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The mayor came into office with the energy of “a theater kid crossed with a let’s-change-the-world college activist,” as Free Expression’s Kyle Smith put it recently. Has the youthful radical really matured into a sober realist in just a few months? Don’t fall for it. While the media gives Mr. Mamdani credit for decisions that were forced upon him, his underlying worldview remains untouched by recent encounters with reality. It is a worldview shaped both by his upbringing (his father is an anti-American, terrorist-defending academic) and by his education in trendy radicalism.
Take the mayor’s promise to create a chain of government-run grocery stores. In a press conference announcing plans to build the first $30 million outlet in Harlem, Mr. Mamdani said, “When corporations control every part of the food supply chain, prices go up, basic necessities become luxuries and workers and customers both lose.” That kind of logic might be persuasive in a senior seminar. But every single word in that statement is false. Producing abundant and affordable food is one of capitalism’s most famous success stories. Meanwhile, socialist regimes from the USSR to Venezuela have famously failed to feed their populations adequately. Unlearning these historic truths requires a very high-priced education. The Babylon Bee summed up this absurdity with the parodic headline, “Mamdani Says City-Run Supermarket Will Be Ready in 3 Years But Recommends Getting in Line for Bread Now.”
A kind of real-world refutation of the mayor’s claims exists just a few blocks from his proposed store: The Aldi supermarket in East Harlem is currently selling apples and oranges for under $1 a pound and pork chops for $2.99 a pound. Some “food desert.”
But Mr. Mamdani’s policies aren’t based on the realities of life in New York. They reflect his fantasy vision of how the entire world operates. The Moroccan-born writer Zineb Riboua explains how New York’s mayor embodies the ideology known as Third-Worldism. Birthed in the anticolonial revolutions of the 20th century, the doctrine gradually flowered into an all-encompassing creed. It describes the world in stark Manichean terms: as an ongoing battle between the oppressed and their oppressors. “Mamdani repurposes the lexicon of Third-World liberation for American soil,” Ms. Riboua writes. “The landlord morphs into the colonizer, the tenant into the colonized. The NYPD becomes the occupier. New York’s boroughs serve as metaphorical battlegrounds in the decolonization process.”
Beneath his cheerful exterior and elegant political patter, Mr. Mamdani stays true to this Third-Worldism ethos. Each of his trademark policies targets some group of villainous oppressors who must be punished for the good of downtrodden New Yorkers. His proposed rent freeze and tax increases would make it harder for landlords to maintain their buildings. Meanwhile, his “rental rip-off” hearings served to castigate all landlords based on the negligence of a few.
As a candidate, Mr. Mamdani promised to raise taxes on “whiter neighborhoods.” Once in office, he issued a sweeping Racial Equity Plan that makes “dismantling systemic racial inequality” a key task of every city agency. “It is a framework that presumes its conclusions and then operationalizes them,” writes Manhattan Institute scholar Wai Wah Chin. Such plans “don’t heal historical wounds,” she continues, “they reopen them for political profit.”
And boy does he want to stick it to the rich. The mayor has asked the state to raise taxes on the wealthy, is threatening to boost property taxes by 9.5%, and recently proposed a big tax on part-time residents who own expensive apartments. “Happy Tax Day!” he grinned into the camera in one of his trademark short videos. The mayor seems unconcerned that higher taxes make the city’s dysfunctional tax code worse and could drive away vital businesses. Punishing fat cats is an end in itself.
In his inaugural address, the incoming mayor insisted that the “city belongs to the people.” Perhaps, in time, Mr. Mamdani will rise above his polarizing, us-versus-them ideology and make good on that promise. But I wouldn’t count on it.
Read the whole thing here.
