The Lesson of a Possible Mamdani Victory

As we approach the November election, the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Mayoral race seems likely.  Many, “conservative” pundits have responded to this by heaping insults on the people of New York and making comments on social media that New Yorkers deserve their fate under Mamdani.  Such thinking and such comments are not only reprehensible, they represent a deadly flaw within certain Republican Party circles, including among some who identify as “MAGA.”

President Trump and his closest allies have been very clear that their intention is to create a new Republican Party, and that this party will be a working-class—not a country-club or Wall Street—party.  Promethean Action enthusiastically supports that perspective.  But words and intention alone require concrete action, and many are not prepared for what must be done. Writing off New York, or Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and other major cities as “woke” or “communist” or some other epithet is suicide for the Republican Party, and if this outlook is tolerated it will ensure that the current Republican majority will not long outlive Donald Trump.

New York is not a “woke city.”  It is not San Francisco, Hollywood or Portland, Oregon.  Consider the population of New York City:

Outside of some pockets of “hipster wokeness” in Brooklyn, and certain enclaves of wealth and affluence here and there, the population of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island—6.78 million people— is overwhelmingly working class (the same could be said for much of northern Manhattan).  Working people with families.  Some middle class, some poor and many in between.  It is characterized by still large pockets of Italians, Irish, Jews, Russians and the like, along with large immigrant neighborhoods:   Hispanic, Asian, Arab and other nationalities.   Of course, blacks still make up 23 percent of the city’s population.  Overwhelmingly, these are all families.  Working-class families.

I know New York City.  I was born in Manhattan, went to school in the Bronx, worked in Manhattan and Queens.  In recent years—although I now live in California—I have spent a good deal of time in that City.  I have spent days in the West Bronx, the North Bronx and the South Bronx.  I have been in almost every section of Brooklyn, from Sheepshead Bay to Red Hook to Flatbush, and I have visited every neighborhood on Staten Island.  These areas are populated, overwhelmingly, with working people and their families.   They don’t want crime and drugs;  they don’t want transgenderism;  they are not “woke”; they are not communists.  They just want a decent life and a future for their children.

So, you might ask, why would such people vote for a radical Marxist like Zohran Mamdami?  The answer is actually easy to comprehend.

The Day to Day Struggle in New York

Two thirds of all New York City residents are “renters,” i.e., they do not own their own home.  As of 2025, the average monthly rent for the 4 outer boroughs—(not including Manhattan)—is $3,285 per month/$40,000 per year.  At the same time, the Average Per Capita income for the 4 boroughs is about $25,000 per year.

Thus, for a couple, two full-time incomes is mandatory if one wants to avoid homelessness.  This makes the time and expense of family formation very, very difficult.  Yes, many earn much higher income, but the median household incomes are:  Bronx - $34,264, Brooklyn - $43,567, Queens - $55,291, which means that 50 percent of the population live on incomes lower than those figures.  It is a day-to-day struggle to survive.  Add to this that everything in the City is expensive, including health care, transportation, education, insurance, etc .  A single daily round trip on the subway is $6.00, or $2,190 per year. 

It is an economic nightmare for working families.  Many are desperate.  The lives, opportunities and futures of New Yorkers have increasingly been destroyed—taken away from them.  Of course the urban one-party Democratic Party dictatorship is largely to blame for this disaster, but—and it a very important BUT—have the Republicans offered anything better?  They talk-the-talk, but do they walk-the-walk?  Are they fighting to change this situation.  The answer is a resounding NO.  Yes, Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime and drugs in a number of large cities has been greeted enthusiastically by many within those cities, but taking on the crime problem is not enough.  Can the people who live in these cities prosper, pay their bills and provide for their families?

Do not blame the entirety of the likely Mamdani election simply on the George Soros-linked “progressive” non-profits.  Look to the flesh-and-blood crisis confronting every-day New Yorkers.

The National Crisis Facing Working People

Although the specifics are quite different, the challenge facing MAGA and the Republican Party in New York City is a microcosm of the economic revolution that is required nation-wide.  In 1947, more than a million New York City residents worked in factories, more than any other American city, including Detroit and Pittsburgh.  This mirrored the national picture, where in 1953 32 percent of all non-farm employment in the United States was in manufacturing.  Following the disastrous decision to end the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971 and the ushering in of a paradigm of financial speculation and a “post-industrial society,” manufacturing began to disappear.  Today manufacturing employment represents only 8 percent of the U.S. workforce.  In New York City, from its peak in the late 1940s, manufacturing jobs dropped to just 172,000 in 2000, and then plummeted to an abysmal 57,000 in 2022.

In recent years, there have been a few growth spots in New York manufacturing, but they have been almost exclusively in low-wage sectors.  For example, the fastest growing manufacturing sector, food manufacturing, is also the one that pays the lowest wages, with an average annual wage of only $32,882.  This low-wage manufacturing model is now a nation-wide phenomenon.  For example, consider the current national wage rates in 2025:

The companies listed above are not even the worst.  Among certain industries and businesses, the wage situation is truly horrific.   None of these wages are sufficient to support a “one-income” household or family formation.  Meanwhile, the speculative financial boom has created an über-wealthy class that goes far beyond the fabled “robber barons” of the late 19^th century in its corrupt wealth.  From 1865 to 1965 (100 years), the average ratio of CEO-to-employee income was 20 to 1.  That rate fluctuated, but was fairly stable, and it included the decades of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D.  Rockefeller and John Jacob Astor.  By 1990 the ratio was 70:1.  Today it stands at 300:1.  From 1978 to 2024, average worker pay grew 24 percent (below the inflation rate), while CEO compensation increase 1,094 percent.

The situation is even worse among what are euphemistically called “low-wage employers.”  Among the 100 largest of such companies the CEO-to-worker wage differential is more than 600:1.  The worst offender is Brian Niccol, CEO of Starbucks, who earned  $95.8 million in 2024, compared to his average employee’s salary of $14,674—a ratio of 6,666:1.  But there are many others in this boat, including WalMart, Home Depot, Coca Cola, Tyson’s Foods and the like.

Does anyone really not grasp the attraction of Zohran Mamdani for struggling blue-collar families?

Much of this transformation of U.S. businesses into wealth-generators for the elite class has its origins in the “financial deregulation” of the period from 1992 to 2008, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the horrific Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and a multitude of other measures.  The crimes of the Federal Reserve, both during those years and continuing to the present day, have greatly contributed to this disaster.

For example, beginning with federal legislation passed in the 1980s, corporations initiated a policy of “Equity-Linked Incentives.”  This involved massive stock “buy-backs,” maximizing what Lyndon LaRouche called “shareholder values,” and other measures which tied CEO wealth to equity performance.  Almost all of the “low wage employers” now spend far more on stock buy-backs than on capital investment and employee wages combined.  All of this—including the off-shoring of U.S. manufacturing to low-wage nations—is subsumed within the larger initiative of transforming U.S. corporations from producers to financial wealth-generators.

Evil in the Name of Christianity

Today, Hillsdale College, an establishment which self-identifies as a patriotic and “Christian” institution, is a bastion for the anti-American British economics that has destroyed the productive economy of the United States during the past half-century.  Who does Hillsdale champion?  The dregs of the British-created Mont Pelerin Society, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  What does Hayek say in his works The Road to Serfdom and the The Constitution of Liberty?   He proclaims that the greatest era of economic freedom were the decades of “liberal” economic rule by the British Empire in the late 19^th century.  He praises to the skies the British rulers and “economists” of that era.  But what were the moral and philosophical roots of that British economic/financial system?

It all goes back to individuals such as William Petty, John Locke, Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith.  What they all proclaim is that “wealth” is located in the possession of money or objects that could be monetized.  Worse, they insist that human nature is driven by the desire to possess such wealth.  In other words, the motivating force for human activity is greed.  In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith pronounced that ALL human activity is governed by the “Pursuit of Pleasure and the Avoidance of Pain.”   In his Fable of the Bees, Mandeville insists that a society based on bestial appetites—greed, lust, gluttony and the like—will somehow produce a cumulative “greater good.”  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the repetition of Sin will produce the Good.

It is the amoral tenets of Smith, Mandeville, et. al, which produced the “free-market” policies of the British Empire in the 19^th century, policies rejected by Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley.  Today, Hillsdale champions such oligarchical economics, as do the hard-core “free-market” libertarians.  Unfortunately, this outlook is still influential among neo-cons and others (many anti-Trump) within the Republican Party, such as former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.  Hey, if a CEO can make $20 million while paying his employees $17 an hour, that’s capitalism at work!

Up until 1933, the majority of industrial workers in America voted Republican.  FDR changed this.  He captured the blue-collar vote because of initiatives like Social Security, rural electrification and collective bargaining rights.  Like him or hate him, he stood for the Forgotten Men and Women of America.  Today, that is precisely the perspective of President Donald Trump.  Regrettably, many Republican leaders and most of the corporate elite do not agree with him.  Trump’s current attack on the Federal Reserve and his efforts to rebuild U.S. manufacturing is the domestic battle we must win.  

In his campus organizing Charlie Kirk forcefully demonstrated the link between his devout Christianity and economics.  His unshakable commitment to family formation, decent wages, productive jobs and economic opportunity for young people defines an outlook wherein ALL of America’s citizens are sacred.  All are God’s children.  America was and is intended as a government for all the people, not a financial oligarchy where millions—whether in New York City or elsewhere—are expendable.