Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in livability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.     

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will  abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation.”

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.  

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favorable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23 percent, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.”     

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

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By Joel Kotkin

Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified  sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be  high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalizing the hipsters. They face a job market that is  getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.   

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.  

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favored destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good.”  Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive  disorder during the “summer of love.” There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. The city’s economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.  

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Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.  

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to   give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing  a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device. 

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalization of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

Welcome to what might as well be called Trump’s “Deep Blue City Revenge Tour,” which has seen him using the power of the presidency — and then some — to confront liberal urban strongholds. In recent months, he’s dispatched the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and this week also authorized roughly 500 troops to Chicago, despite objections from state and local leaders. In a recent speech, he said he told Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He acknowledged critics who say he’s gone too far in using federal troops domestically, but brushed them off: “America is under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult because they don’t wear uniforms.”

This language — war metaphors, occupation logic — signals something larger than bog-standard conservative law-and-order politics. Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump has sharpened a moral vocabulary that fuses the populist Right’s fear of urban chaos with the militarism of a besieged empire, and declared a war against the “radical Left” in cities that once humiliated or opposed him. 

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Saving a city from invasion by invading it with out-of-state troops is a hell of a contradiction, but Trump’s game might be intentional bear-baiting. Indeed, as the National Guard enters Chicago this week, the city is caught in a perverse optics game. If it fights back too hard against the occupying troops, it becomes the poster child for instability. If it bows or accedes quietly, it concedes the logic of militarized control. Either path validates Trump’s claim that blue cities must suppress themselves or be suppressed.

Ironically, Chicago isn’t actually seething with unrest at the moment. Like much of urban America, it is quieter now than it was a few years ago — no George Floyd-era protests in the streets, no sky-high homicide spikes like those of 2022 or 2023. There are small pockets of resistance against ICE deportations and scattered Boomer-heavy “No Kings” protests, but the agitation remains marginal. The supposed “war zones” are mostly calm, or at least for now. 

But in Chicago, the instinct toward confrontation — for both better or worse — runs deep. Consider that for nearly its entire two-century existence, the city has been a stage for resistance and repression, from the 1886 bombing at a labor rally in Haymarket Square during a protest for the 8-hour workday, to the Pullman Strike, the largest-ever organized work stoppage in 1894. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the “whole world was watching” as thousands of Yippies and other anti-war protestors clashed with police; and more recently, Chicago roiled with widespread demonstrations, riots, and arson during the summer of 2020. Chicago may ultimately serve as Trump’s perfect trap because the city can’t not resist. But in doing so, it risks giving Trump exactly what he wants: the imagery of chaos, the spectacle of unrest, the “war from within” that justifies extraordinary measures. 

One undersung event that offers haunting parallel to the present is the fierce labor battle of 1877. That summer, railway workers went on strike in dramatic fashion, and President Rutherford B. Hayes invoked the Insurrection Act that Trump is reportedly also considering utilizing. Hayes sent federal troops to crush the uprising and reopen the rail lines, mobilizing some 45,000 militiamen from 15 states. As historian Eleanor Hannah noted, the presence of the National Guard may have exacerbated the situation in Chicago. “…They turned previously nonviolent crowds into frightening mobs. Urban crowds could outnumber the Guard companies by the hundreds and even the thousands. These crowds presented special challenges because the only real training guardsmen had for dealing with large, hostile forces was military — despite the name riot duty.”

The escalation ended in tragedy with the “Battle of the Viaduct,” fought two blocks from my old South Side apartment on Halsted Street. Guardsmen and federal troops who’d been fighting the Sioux turned their muskets and artillery guns on thousands of striking workers and sympathizers, mostly Irish and Czech immigrants, many of them under the age of 18, who wielded stones and clubs. The Chicago Police and troops suffered no fatalities and 18 injuries during the three-day uprising, while the protesters suffered roughly 20 dead and 200 injured. The city’s elite and industrialists responded by formalizing the Illinois National Guard and financing Fort Sheridan, an army base built specifically to deploy troops against labor. They even donated cannons and a Gatling gun to the city for the cause. 

That bloody history has never entirely faded. When Trump deploys troops today, under the same Illinois National Guard banner established in 1877, he is echoing ancient Chicago lore but with profound irony. The 19th-century industrialists wanted to suppress a genuine uprising. Trump, in contrast, appears to want to manufacture one using the same Illinois National Guard that once killed immigrant strikers.

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To be fair, this week’s deployment is a modest force compared to the 19th century or, for instance, the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, it’s large enough to stage a show sufficient to create the kind of street-level confrontations that can metastasize into national spectacles and justify a further crackdown. The rise of recent lone-wolf violence — shootings, stabbings, random attacks — also gives Trump the rhetorical pretext he needs. He can frame each new violent act as a thread in a tapestry of urban collapse, to be contained only via the military, even in domestic neighborhoods.  

There are signs of resistance already. On Oct. 4, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, Border Patrol agents shot a 30-year-old woman, Marimar Martinez, amid protests targeting increased ICE activity after she was involved in an alleged vehicle chase that ended in her ramming a CBP vehicle. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has sued to block the deployment, calling it part of an “authoritarian march.” Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order barring ICE from operating on city-owned property and has publicly denounced Trump’s threats. When Trump posted that Pritzker and Johnson “should be in jail,” accusing them of failing to protect federal agents, both responded defiantly. Pritzker on X: “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” Johnson replied, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Or is he? If the city meets force with force, Trump likely wins. If it retreats into anxious silence, he also wins. The challenge for Chicago, and for America’s liberal cities more broadly, is to find a language of defiance that denies him the spectacle he craves. The lesson of the city’s storied history isn’t that resistance is futile — it’s that resistance, without a strategy and strong allies, becomes fuel for repression. Trump is counting on that.