New York City’s socialist mayor built his entire political program on fighting for the “working class.” Asked point-blank to say who that actually is, Zohran Mamdani couldn’t do it.
In a lengthy interview with the New York Times published over the weekend, journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro put the question directly to the mayor: “How do you define the working class?” His answer, as The New York Post reported, was a word salad.
“I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class,” Mamdani vaguely responded.
Pushed on whether someone earning $250,000 a year counts, the mayor admitted, “I haven’t asked myself where it starts and stops.”
“What I would say is those who are working to try and afford the basic dignities of life and aren’t able to do so, I think that that is also working class,” he rambled on. “I think there’s only one majority in this country — it’s the working class.”
Even the Times interviewer wasn’t buying it. Garcia-Navarro admitted the mayor’s description didn’t “ring true” to her. “It just seems a very easy answer to what is a complicated question,” she fought back. “Because politically, if you’re saying everyone is the working class, or anyone that gets a salary is the working class, yes, that opens up your tent. But practically speaking, we are divided by income — and especially if you want to tax people, where you draw those lines matter.”
That last point is the one that matters. Mamdani’s agenda — city-run groceries, rent freezes, massive new social spending — rests on soaking a “rich” he apparently cannot locate. Pressed, he finally said he would draw the line at around $1 million a year, a definition that lumps a janitor into the same “working class” as a successful lawyer pulling down high six figures. “That feels like a distinction that might matter,” Garcia-Navarro told him.
The mayor’s escape hatch? Change the subject. “When I was running, a question I would face was: What does it mean to be a democratic socialist? And I only bring that up because I think sometimes there’s a fixation on a definition of something,” Mamdani attempted to explain, before pivoting to what New Yorkers ask him at their doors.
Garcia-Navarro then accused him of deflecting by talking about New Yorkers’ wants in “broad strokes.”
“Look, I think I’ve defined it to you as someone who works to afford their life,” he shot back, insisting that those “struggling to afford the rent, struggling to afford their groceries, struggling to afford child care” should be “at the heart of our vision for what comes next.”
So there it is: the man redistributing billions of dollars in the nation’s largest city cannot say who is supposed to pay and who is supposed to receive. The people, the program, the whole moral framework of his socialism — undefined. Let that sink in.
Source: nypost.com
