Zohran Mamdani's Victory Reveals the 50 Year Corruption of the Crony Corporatist “Center”
The Democratic Socialist's Win is a Sign of “New Democrats’” Failures
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
The June victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic mayoral primary is being treated by many conservatives as a threat to populist constitutionalism and its policies of free exchange of goods, traditional social values, and decentralized government. But this isn't the most accurate or the most helpful way to frame Mamdani's victory, the bigger meaning of which is not about his policies but about his politics: Who he won against and how.
Mamdani's victory was not at the expense of conservatives and his rhetoric seems to have little to do with them. Instead, it came at the expense of a different force Restoration News has reported on in the past, one that sees both populist conservatism and democratic socialism as threats that have to be defeated or co-opted. This force is the crony corporatist state and its centrist, "uniparty" servants: The Democrats and Republicans who, year in and year out, push political and economic power in America away from states and localities, small businesses and communities, into the hands of a narrow few.
Understanding how Mamdani's victory flowed from the specific policies of corporatists in New York over six decades, and how those policies helped lead to the same ones inflicted on America at large, shows conservatives a way to pivot off of Mamdani's win. Namely, by appreciating the forces Mamdani was elected to crusade against, conservatives can adapt a more effective set of policies to form a popular movement against the same enemy.
The Appeal of Socialism…
Despite what establishment media would have the public believe, socialism in the United States has a long history, and has always flowed from a very specific set of facts. From 1900 to 1930, more than 130 small and medium-sized towns and cities had socialist mayors, including Minneapolis and Milwaukee multiple times; dozens of socialists were elected to state assemblies; and two served in the U.S. congress. The reason for this was simple: People were sick of watching government money going to large industrial corporations tied to Washington, D.C.—in effect, corporate socialism—and wanted the money to go directly to the people instead.
This skewed situation was the culmination of a process that began directly before and after the Civil War, when America's government began seriously investing in industrial growth. The investment empowered players Restoration News has recently investigated: Among them the Lowells, the Forbeses, the Rockefellers. These wealthy financial and industrial families, mostly from Boston and New York, gained respectability using philanthropy even as they used their business influence to corner their respective markets via government contracts. Special arrangements with Washington over railroads and manufacturers, in turn, gave them political power. This helped them push back unionization drives by their workers, often with violence, and avoid spending money on wages or basic protections. By the 1900s, workers were responding, and Midwestern and western towns and cities were the site of successful socialist candidates.
The Democratic Party of the early 1930s saw in socialism a way to get votes. It promoted labor unions and encouraged antitrust policies as well as limited welfare, while encouraging businesses and unions to resolve their differences to avoid strikes and boost the economy—much like Donald Trump began to do in his 2024 presidential campaign. By the mid-1930s, these adjustments had brought socialists into a Democratic Party which favored market regulation and corporate subsidies but not the socialist solution of outright nationalizing industries. But, by the early 1960s, government-tied financiers were remaking politics, particularly city politics, in ways that would create the conditions for socialism, a half-century later, to return.
…and the Roots of its Rebirth
Specifically, Mamdani's victory in New York has its roots with the Rockefeller Family, whose "charitable work" there beginning in the 1960s involved clearing working class neighborhoods in Midtown Manhattan to make room for cultural centers while running New York City's finances into the ground. The main Rockefeller mover was Nelson Rockefeller, the "moderate" Republican governor of New York from 1959 to 1973, who turned the city's budgetary needs into a boondoggle for his family. He did this by approving new bonds to cover the city's bills that were held by a consortium of financiers led by Chase Bank, run by his brother David Rockefeller. These bonds were not backed by actual assets of the city's but by anticipated returns: E.g. "tax anticipation bonds," "bond anticipation notes," and "moral obligation bonds." In this scheme, the city borrowed from the bankers, paid a portion of the interest, and borrowed again, while having no long-term way to pay back the full amount of ever-increasing debt.
The people formally running the city—labor leaders and leaders of the city's working- and middle-class Irish, Italian, and Jewish communities— were not financiers, and trusted Rockefeller. But eventually, in 1975, when an audit was called, the cost of Rockefeller's moves came home: $6 billion dollars in debt and no way to repay. The response of America's government, one led by Rockefeller, now the Vice President, was to bring in the Financial Community Liaison Group (FCLG): "A formal mechanism through which the financial community and the city could cooperatively work to reopen the municipal credit markets to the city" which actually "establish[ed] the power of finance capital over the city's fiscal affairs." According to one report,
The [new financial leadership] shifted funding…towards business-friendly ventures in the areas of real estate, producer services, banking, and insurance. Elements of previous urban policy that came under attack included City University of New York's (CUNY) policy of tuition-free education, the city's subsidized housing, rent control, transportation subsidies, and health facilities, especially with respect to welfare. Other targeted areas included the unionized municipal workforce. The [financiers] articulated the causes of the city's "fiscal ill health," as primarily attributed to unionized labor, the poor, and immigrants.
The issue here wasn't that spending was being cut on public services, which is a policy choice about what kind of government, large or small, best serves the people. The issue was that government wasn't being significantly shrunk. Instead, resources were being shifted by a narrow group of corporate-government players to empower people like them at the expense of (d)emocratic government of organized labor and neighborhood-based ethnic politics. This is what began the famous "rebirth" of New York: In real estate in the 1970s; in financial markets in the 1980s; in tourism in the 1990s; and in all of them together in the 2000s and 2010s.
The New York Doubledown on Corporatism…
The process was straightforward. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, manufacturing lofts were converted into apartments using city dollars which were also funding the "revitalization" of commercial areas like Times Square and Battery Park and South Street Seaport. Some of the investors in these plays took their earnings to Wall Street, helping drive a boom which brought new money to the city via business graduates who flocked to finance and populate the lofts-turned-apartments. This in turn drove up prices and displaced working and middle class Jews, Irish, blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Italians. The rise of "Yuppies" (Young Urban Professionals of Affluence)—socially liberal players who believed in government subsidies for corporate expansion—dates from this place and period. Indeed, this was the start of both Yuppies' appearance in the "culture" and their use as a political force harvested by "New Democrats" whom Restoration News has reported on in the past.
Relatedly, the "rebirth" of New York along corporate-government lines helped drive the same reorientation of American politics at the hands of these "New Democrats" and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) of the 1980s and 1990s. It was Michael Steinhardt, the most prolific donor to the DLC, who was integral in driving New York's financial sector into clover in the 1970s and 1980s off of his de facto reinvention of the hedge fund. It was Michael Bloomberg, Michael Steinhardt's confidante and ally, who, months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, decided to restore business confidence by rezoning 40 percent of the city in the name of tech and tourism. These were the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century equivalents of the Rockefellers, and, like their predecessors, their New York ran on debt and finance to benefit a narrow few.
As outcry grew in the 1980s—and as displacements led to homelessness, unemployment, and crime—these operators found another way to use government subsidies: On militarized police forces, which in turn enriched private weapons and surveillance contractors whose clients were the NYPD. This, too, was managed with the (now posthumous) help of Nelson Rockefeller, who in 1973, his last year as New York governor, had signed extremely severe legislation to tackle drug dealing which was only "enforce[d] at the street level" by the NYPD in the 1980s. This new enforcement, at the hands of New York's new financial steering committee, was seen as a crucial part of urban redevelopment: "Aid[ing] the city's effort to reclaim urban spaces for 'legitimate' uses" was "an important component, city policy makers believed, of a broader project to encourage capital investment." The result was to take a disproportionate number of men of color off the streets, depleting their communities and putting these communities into a forty-year conflict with the NYPD, while driving up expenditures on prisons.
…and the Players Who Drove It
Every New York mayor, politics aside, was in on all of these policies. Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the city with $3 billion federal funding for police, often at the expense of small businesses. Bill De Blasio, elected on an "anti-corporate" line, allowed Amazon to relocate its headquarters in the middle class neighborhood of Long Island City, until outcry from New Yorkers (some democratic socialists but other neighborhood residents concerned with rising costs and displacement) ended the project. Eric Adams has given his third police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, the granddaughter of the founder of one of the financial families which rose in New York in the 1980s with holdings ranging from hotel chains to the New York Giants, carte blanche to expand the police's surveillance capacities over citizens. De Blasio and Andrew Cuomo, New York's governor from 2010 to 2021 and a bitter political enemy of De Blasio, were nonetheless both involved in allowing CCP-backed conglomerates to take up residence as suppliers to the Empire State Building. Most of these operators, like the "New Democrats," operated off of focus groups and media blitzes, not organized politics—in part because financiers had helped destroy those organized politics (of unions and middle and working class city neighborhoods) after 1975.
Instead, the corporate backers remaking the city were also backing its politicians. Rudy Giuliani won the mayoralty only after Rupert Murdoch was persuaded to endorse him in The New York Post; after the election, Giuliani moved to cut Murdoch's TV channels into the New York market. Before his mayoralty, Michael Bloomberg moved as a financier in the business and philanthropic worlds with the very players, many of them who made or multiplied their fortunes in the 1970s and 1980s—Stephen M. Ross and Barry Diller and Dianne von Furstenberg and Goldman Sachs and Leonard Lauder—who helped him as mayor rebuild the city and displace its citizens. Bill De Blasio was the former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's 2000 Senate run, helping into office one of the pioneers, as Restoration News has revealed in the past, of the new military corporate Democratic Party. Eric Adams made his career in the NYPD at just the point when federal funding was militarizing the force.
Crony Corporatism's Impacts…
This new New York introduced a host of new players linked to crony corporatist government: Businessmen-philanthropists who dominated its politics at the expense of representative government. They included developers like Stephen M. Ross and Tony Malkin; land-hungry university presidents like NYU's John Sexton and Columbia's Lee Bollinger; and philanthropists like Oscar Tang and his wife Agnes Hsu-Tang whom Restoration News has reported on extensively in the past. The Tangs profited from their ties to finance in New York and their connections to China just as Bill Clinton opened American markets to the CCP—a priority of Steinhardt's DLC and Michael Bloomberg as well. NYU's John Sexton benefited from Steinhardt's largesse, Bloomberg's rezoning, and the Pentagon security blanket in the Persian Gulf which allows for the existence of NYU Abu Dhabi, a degree-granting campus in the United Arab Emirates. Stephen M. Ross and Tony Malkin are heavily invested in by the Saudi and Qatari public wealth funds.
These players helped turn New York into a city of haves and have nots, where rent ate up a third of a middle class income because housing was being driven by major real estate developers and powerful landlords with ties to government. Homelessness more than doubled in the city during Bloomberg's tenure alone, crime began slowly increasing, intrusive and militarized policing functioned as the government response to the fallout of displacement and rising prices, and protests occurred in response. Neighborhoods lost their middle and working classes; small businesses shuttered; churches closed their doors. And socialism resurfaced: With the Occupy Wall Street protests and with organizations like the People's Forum, which gave a sense of belonging to young people in a city that government-backed corporations had stripped of community.
…and the Mamdani Response
Enter Zohran Mamdani in 2025, on an explicit platform of rescuing New York from billionaires and returning it to New Yorkers. 15 of the 20 policy points in his platform have to do with affordability. Two of his most prominent backers, Zephyr Teachout and Lina Khan, are two of the three leading lights of antitrust in the Democratic Party. (Among Lina Khan's avowed admirers is Vice President Vance.) His primary campaign involved, revolutionarily, organizing and talking to people, mostly about quality of life issues and a corrupt establishment. This is much more similar to MAGA than anything establishment Republicans or Democrats have done for many years.
Not coincidentally, just as with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a number of Mamdani voters also identify themselves as having voted for Trump. Their backgrounds are diverse: From a Bangladeshi home healthcare worker to a Latino air traffic controller to a Yemini Verizon executive. Their reasons were definite and seemingly representative of their communities: Trump and Mamdani would push for peace abroad and affordability at home; Trump and Mamdani weren't "complacent" and promised a change. In some cases, Mamdani seemed to these voters an improvement on what Trump promised but, in their view, had not delivered. According to a Washington Post interview with one Mamdani canvasser for an "organization focused on Asian American voters, which…contacted an estimated 40,000 in their effort to get out the vote for Mamdani":
Every day that we were on the phones and doors, we would meet people who had voted for Trump. Some of them, of their own admission, named regret and disappointment with what they're seeing now."
The Mamdani Opportunity for Conservatives…
The opportunity for conservatives comes with Mamdani's limits. As mayor, he has no power over who the state of New York can prosecute for anti-trust violations; and he has shown little interest in basic reforms like rezoning to make land grabs by crony capitalists harder. Nor is he demonstrating real interest in reforming surveillance or policing practices: a major concern of his voters. Indeed, there are already signs—for example Mamdani's bringing onto his campaign strategists tied to the Center for American Progress as well as his likely alliance with Police Commissioner Tisch—that he is willing to cooperate with the city's power brokers in exchange for progress on his major priorities (rent freezes, free buses). This creates the prospect of a mayoralty that will be a repeat of Bill De Blasio's: It will add expensive social services to the city's bill, while not tackling the fact that the city is hostage to a narrow clique of government-backed financiers tied to the crony corporatist state.
Republicans, by contrast, have spent the years since the 2008 financial crash protesting the ties between corporations and government. In the process, they have become increasingly supportive of certain welfare programs and antitrust. Pro-welfare and anti-corporate is not the kind of government that is good everywhere, but it is highly fitted to a city—and more to the point a state—like New York, and to other urban states besides. It is also fully consistent with the underlying approach of constitutional populism: For decentralized government, which means policy adjustments in different places depending on context.
…and the Warning
There's also a warning for conservatives in what's happened to New York. Affordability and peace are at the top of voters' minds, and some of the working- and middle-class minorities Trump has brought into the Republican coalition seem, on evidence of Mamdani's campaign and polling in general, to be edging away. A ground zero for this warning has to do with the city Republicans are starting to call their version of New York, Miami: Majority Latino, which turned out for Trump in November and which many Republicans see as the antidote to New York's failures. Making a constitutional populist alternative urban model to corporatism is a noble and necessary goal. But a lot is in the execution—and, so far, as Restoration News will cover in a follow-up report, Miami's growth is at the hands of a uniparty whose undemocratic methods, and current results, look a lot like New York's.