The Participation Trophy Mayor

Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax victory is typical of his politics and his movement.

Courtesy Angelina Katsanis - Pool/Getty Images

For months, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been in a hostile stand-off over taxes. Mamdani ran on further taxing Gotham’s already well-soaked rich, but he’s struggled to deliver. His efforts to hike taxes on high earners and corporations fell flat, and his fallback—a proposed property-tax increase across the five boroughs—was unlikely to pass either the state legislature or the city council. When the council floated its own budget proposal, Mamdani fulminated against speaker Julie Menin—an out-of-character assault for the usually happy-go-lucky mayor.

Last week, though, Gov. Kathy Hochul stepped in to provide Mamdani some respite. She revived a long-standing proposal to tax New York City homes worth more than $5 million if their owners do not list them as their primary residence. Hochul projected the “pied-à-terre” tax would bring in $500 million, about 10 percent of the city’s budget hole. Despite the modest sum, Mamdani declared victory in a gloating video filmed in front of investor Ken Griffin’s apartment.

That declaration was par for the course for the mayor who routinely casts small changes as big victories. This style of politics has come to characterize not only Mamdani but his voters as well: the downwardly mobile elites clamoring to be told that they don’t have to try in order to succeed. It’s not quite the extremism on which Mamdani ran, but it’s a perverse politics all its own, one worth naming explicitly.

Of course, maybe Mamdani never really expected to be able to tax the rich. Certainly he ran on the idea; pushed for it repeatedly in budget negotiations; and even appeared at a tax day summit with pro-wealth-tax economist Gabriel Zucman beneath a “tax the rich” banner. But perhaps securing the pied-à-terre tax—which has been under discussion for over a decade—was his goal all along.

Still, it’s not hard to see the proposal as a kind of consolation prize. He wanted a wealth tax, and he’s going to get something that sort of looks like one if you squint at it the right way.

That dynamic is not unfamiliar. As my colleague John Ketcham recently observed in his review of the mayor’s first 100 days, Mamdani’s style has become characterized by “small, performative gestures accompanied by big announcements” designed to make it look like the mayor has done far more than he actually has.

Mamdani has bragged about improving crime statistics, neglecting to mention that he’s mostly reaped the rewards of keeping Jessica Tisch on as police commissioner at One Police Plaza. He reversed himself almost immediately on homeless sweeps. Even Mamdani’s excitement about filling 100,000 potholes is, on closer inspection, small beans: as Ketcham observes, Mayor Michael Bloomberg did as much or more with fewer workers and less funding.

Which has not stopped the adulation for Mamdani among his hyper-online base. To many on X or Bluesky, the mayor is proving that everything skeptical Gen X and Boomer voters told them is wrong; democratic socialism really is the way of the future.

I make these generational identifications for a reason. As Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam argued shortly after Mamdani’s unexpected primary victory, the mayor was propelled to Gracie Mansion by a wave of highly educated, downwardly mobile urban millennials. These (decreasingly) young people look at the rising cost of living in the city compared to their declining earning potential and conclude that they’ve been denied something they’re owed. When Mamdani tells them that, indeed, the system is rigged against them, and that the top 1 percent is hoarding wealth that is rightfully theirs, these scions of the top 10 percent are eager to agree.

Which is why it doesn’t matter that the pied-à-terre tax is not going to do much actual taxation of the rich. What matters to these constituents is the sense of a win, however insubstantial that win may actually be.

It’s hard not to think of the proverbial participation trophy to which every millennial child was allegedly entitled as a youth. Yes, sure, Mamdani can’t really get anything done in Albany. Yes, sure, he has filled a routine number of potholes. Yes, sure, the real adults are running the show at NYPD. But the important thing, for Mamdani but especially for his base, is to feel like you’re winning—to be told that actually, public policy can put you at the front of the line, where you always thought you were supposed to be.

Perhaps that’s better than Mamdani actually succeeding at his most radical designs. Before he was elected, I was personally very concerned that Mamdani would try to close the jail complex on Rikers Island without a replacement in place. The participation-prize Mamdani will probably find a way to make extending the closure deadline next year look like a personal victory. But Rikers will, more likely than not, remain open.

At the same time, Mamdani’s approach absolutely perpetuates the theory of political economy that underlies his movement. In this view, wealth is something that is hoarded, and which needs to be reapportioned to promote fairness. It’s unfair that some people have more than others. Indeed, those people deserve to be mocked and vilified—as Mamdani did by putting Griffin front and center in his celebratory tax day video.

That kind of politics has already gutted New York State. As Salam argued after Mamdani’s general election victory, the mayor’s brand of socialism had infected Albany and the city for years prior to his election. The increasing political dominance of the Democratic Socialists of America and their political allies helps ensure that participation-trophy politics continues to be the order of the day.

So perhaps Mamdani did lose his big legislative fight, receiving a consolation prize from the more experienced Hochul. But the idea that Mamdani, and his voters, need such prizes is itself a pernicious sign of the problems in New York State politics. He may not be winning, but Mamdani has turned losing into a political project all its own.