A Socialist Now Runs New York. Here’s What History Predicts.

Two months ago, New York City said fuck you and voted for socialism.

November 2025. Zohran Mamdani elected mayor. Democratic Socialists of America member. Not a progressive Democrat. Not a moderate with left-leaning policies. An actual socialist who ran on public housing, rent freezes, and wealth redistribution.

Today, January 1, 2026, he was sworn in. The city that birthed Wall Street has officially handed the keys to someone who wants to dismantle it.

This wasn’t a policy debate. It was a fuck you. A giant middle finger to establishment candidates, to broken promises, to a system that told them to play by the rules while quietly changing those rules.

Young voters especially. They were told: go to college, work hard, save money, and you’ll prosper. They did all of that. They took on enormous debt. They worked two jobs without benefits. They delayed buying homes, having kids, building lives.

And they got poorer anyway.

Their purchasing power collapsed. The dollar kept shrinking. A minor sickness could bury them in debt. Rent ate half their paycheck. Groceries cost twice as much. Savings accounts stayed empty.

They blame capitalism. And a vote for a socialist is basically a giant fuck you to capitalism and to government’s false promises.

This is not surprising. Not even a little.

This has happened many times in history. When inequality becomes unbearable, when the system stops working, when the powerful exploit the powerless too openly, people turn to socialism. They always have. They always will.

The pattern is consistent. Once you see it, you recognize it everywhere.

What happens next is what history warns us about.

Why They’re Angry: The Numbers

The anger is real. The numbers prove it.

Who Voted for Change

78% of voters under 30. 66% of voters 30-44.

84% of young women. 85% of young Latinos. 83% of young Black voters.

81% of New Yorkers who lived in the city less than 10 years.

First-time voters backed Mamdani over Cuomo 2-to-1.

Why They Voted

Exit polls asked: why Mamdani?

89% said: his plans to lower costs.

86% said: his plans to tax the wealthy and stand up to corporations.

The pattern is clear. Young. Priced out. Angry at inequality.

The Pandemic Split (2020-2022)

COVID revealed the divide. Essential workers called heroes. Applause lasted six weeks. Hazard pay lasted less.

Billionaires’ wealth rose 62% (March 2020-October 2021). Asset prices soared as the Federal Reserve flooded markets with liquidity. Those who owned stocks, real estate, and businesses saw their net worth explode. Those who owned nothing saw wages stagnate.

This wasn’t theft. It was monetary policy. The Fed printed money. Assets inflated. Wealth concentrated.

But to voters watching from the outside, the optics were devastating. Hospitals overflowed. Portfolios doubled.

The perception: the system protects wealth, not workers. That perception drove votes.

The Inflation Shock (2021-2024)

Here’s the problem:

Official inflation: 3%. Grocery bills told a different story.

• Food prices: +25% (2021-2024)
• Real wages: -3% (during peak inflation, 2022)
• NYC median rent: $2,500 → $3,400
• Gas: doubled (peaked summer 2022)
• Electricity: +15-30% (varies by region)

Government said the economy was strong. Bank accounts said that was a lie.

The Housing Trap

Mortgage rates: 3% → 7%. Home prices kept rising. The math became impossible.

NYC median home price: $763,000. At peak 2025 rates of 7%, affording that requires roughly $150,000/year income. Median NYC household income: $77,000.

The gap speaks for itself. Homeownership became a generational myth. Something your parents did. Not something you ever would.

The Student Debt Whiplash

Student loan payments paused for three years. People caught their breath. Some saved a little.

Then the Supreme Court struck down forgiveness. Payments restarted.

Education was supposed to be the ladder to success. It became a trap. $37,000 median debt. $400/month for a decade. For degrees that led to jobs that barely covered rent.

The AI Boom and Worker Bust (2023-2025)

Stock market hit record highs. S&P 500 soared. The wealthy celebrated.

Tech companies laid off 500,000 workers across three years.

AI became the story. Executives got richer. Workers got replaced by algorithms and told to learn to code.

Then the coders got replaced too.

The new economy didn’t raise people. It replaced them.

The Breaking Point

By the end of 2025: 62% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Credit card debt: over $1.2 trillion.

Work two jobs to afford rent. Skip doctor visits because you can’t afford the copay. Decide between fixing your car or buying groceries. Choose which bill to pay late this month.

These aren’t crises of ideology. They’re crises of faith.

People stopped believing that capitalism, as practiced, would ever reward their effort again.

In that vacuum, socialism doesn’t feel radical. It feels like relief.

Megan Marks, 52, freelancer from Brooklyn: “I feel like we have nothing to lose. He’s idealistic and a little young. We might as well balance what is happening in the country by having someone from a very different perspective.”

The status quo felt permanent. Mamdani showed it wasn’t. Now he has the power to prove it.

The Pattern: Why Societies Turn to Socialism

This has happened before. Many times. Across centuries. Across continents.

When inequality becomes unbearable, societies turn to socialism. The pattern repeats because the frustration is real.

But so is the failure that follows.

The Five-Stage Cycle

1. Disillusionment. The system stops working for most people. Wealth concentrates. Opportunity narrows. Frustration builds.

2. Moral awakening. A movement emerges that frames the problem as injustice, not bad luck. Leaders articulate the grievance. Followers organize around fairness.

3. Centralization. The movement gains power. The state expands to enforce equality. Regulations multiply. Wealth is redistributed.

4. Stagnation. Bureaucracy becomes unwieldy. Incentives misalign. Productivity slows. The costs of enforcement mount. The system strains.

5. Correction. Society reopens space for markets, for individual initiative, for reward based on effort. A mixed system emerges.

This cycle has played out across history.

Different methods. Different continents. Different centuries. But the same sequence.

The Historical Examples

Sparta: Enforced Equality

Perhaps history’s first state socialism. Wealth and private luxury banned. All citizens lived under strict equality. Land divided into equal plots. Meals eaten communally. Currency deliberately made impractical to discourage trade.

It worked for centuries. But only by suppressing individuality and relying on massive slavery. The Helots, a class of serfs, outnumbered Spartan citizens seven to one. Between 65% and 85% of people in Sparta were enslaved. The system required constant oppression to function.

The numbers tell the story of decline. 8,000 Spartan citizens in 480 BC. 3,500 by 418 BC. 2,500 by 394 BC. Just 1,500 by 371 BC. Wealth consolidated despite the ideology. Citizenship requirements excluded more families each generation. The army that enforced equality couldn’t maintain its own ranks.

Rigidity led to stagnation. Stagnation led to collapse.

Early Christian Communities

Practiced communal living and resource sharing. “All things in common.”

The first socialist impulse in Western civilization. Noble. But short-lived.

Hierarchy and private ownership reemerged. Human nature reasserted itself.

Soviet Russia

The largest socialist experiment in history. Complete state control of production. Central planning of the entire economy. The promise: equality and prosperity for all workers.

The reality: equality in destitution.

Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture killed millions. The Holodomor alone, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, killed an estimated 3.9 million people. At its peak, 28,000 people died every day. The Gulag system imprisoned 18 million between 1930 and 1953. Between 1.5 and 1.7 million died in the camps.

The economy stagnated. Soviet growth from 1960-1989 was the worst in the world after controlling for investment and capital. Performance worsened each decade. By the 1980s, the black market equaled more than 10% of official GDP. People couldn’t get basic goods through official channels.

GDP per capita fell 40% between 1989 and 1992. The system collapsed under its own weight.

Maoist China

The Great Leap Forward pursued perfect equality through forced collectivization. Private farming abolished. Backyard steel furnaces mandated. Production quotas enforced at gunpoint.

Result: the deadliest famine in human history.

Between 30 and 45 million people starved to death from 1959 to 1961. The most common scholarly estimate: 36 million dead. Some provinces lost nearly 20% of their population. Anhui province: 18% dead. Chongqing: 15%. About 7% of victims were tortured to death or summarily executed.

The government maintained grain export quotas while people starved. Ideology overruled reality.

Even Chinese officials admitted the failure. Liu Shaoqi called it “30% natural disasters and 70% human error.” Later analysis showed the famine was almost entirely man-made. Utopian socialism collided with human nature. Human nature lost.

Israeli Kibbutzim

A different model. Voluntary socialism. Small communities with shared values. Collective ownership, communal meals, no private property, equal allocation regardless of work performed.

For decades, kibbutzim thrived. They accounted for 9% of Israel’s industrial output and 40% of agricultural output. The experiment seemed to work.

Then came reality.

The 1980s brought crisis. Israel’s inflation hit 445% in 1984. Kibbutzim became insolvent. The model couldn’t compete in a modern economy.

The privatization was swift. Members opened personal bank accounts for the first time in their lives. Differential wages replaced equal allocation. Private property returned.

Today, 70% of kibbutzim run on a privatized model. Only 60 of Israel’s 273 original collective farms maintain the socialist structure. The rest chose markets.

Even voluntary socialism, built on shared ideology in tight-knit communities, couldn’t sustain itself.

The Pattern

Absolute equality is unnatural and unsustainable. Differences in ability, energy, and desire always reassert themselves.

Socialism succeeds temporarily when scarcity is high and moral zeal is strong.

Capitalism reemerges once prosperity returns, because people want autonomy, property, and reward for effort.

The pattern holds. Socialism begins with idealism and moral clarity. It centralizes power to enforce fairness. Bureaucracy grows. Efficiency declines. Incentives break. Productivity stalls.

Societies correct by restoring markets.

Why Socialism Always Fails

Two reasons. Both rooted in human nature.

The Bureaucracy Problem

Here’s the problem:

To enforce equality, you need rules. Rules need enforcement. Enforcement needs bureaucracy. Bureaucracy needs administrators.

Administrators become a class with their own interests.

Over time, the machinery meant to serve people starts serving itself. Rules multiply faster than goods are produced. The gap between intention and outcome widens.

Corruption reappears under new moral banners.

Socialism begins in idealism. It ends in bureaucracy.

The Incentive Problem

When reward is divorced from effort, productivity declines.

Why work harder if compensation is the same?

Why innovate if gains are confiscated?

Why take risks if failure and success are treated equally?

People differ in ability, energy, and ambition. These differences are real. Enforcing strict equality requires suppressing those differences.

That suppression requires ever-increasing state power.

That power breeds inefficiency and resentment.

Eventually, people tire of being controlled. They demand freedom to excel again.

Markets return. The pendulum swings back.

The Cycle

History moves like a pendulum. When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty. When equality destroys efficiency, the hunger for efficiency will destroy equality.

Societies that push too far toward inequality eventually revolt toward equality.

Societies that push too far toward equality eventually revolt toward freedom.

The healthiest societies don’t try to stop the pendulum. They try to find the center. A fair inequality. A system where people can rise by merit, where skill and effort are rewarded, but where the gap between rich and poor doesn’t become a chasm that threatens stability.

That balance is fragile. It requires constant adjustment. It’s never permanent.

What This Means for New York

New York has moved through stage one and two: disillusionment and moral awakening. Today, with Mamdani sworn in, it enters stage three.

Millions felt betrayed. Housing was unaffordable. Wages stagnated. Costs soared. The sense that capitalism works for everyone collapsed.

Socialist organizers built power. NYC-DSA, the largest chapter in the country with over 9,000 members, mobilized in low-turnout primaries. They knocked on doors. They built infrastructure. They won.

Their platform: 4-year rent freeze for 2 million rent-stabilized apartments. Build 200,000 affordable units. Free buses. City-owned grocery stores. Universal childcare.

83% of Democrats supported the rent freeze before the election. Mamdani was the only major candidate to promise it.

These aren’t abstractions. They’re responses to felt needs. People struggling with rent want rent control. People priced out want public housing. People crushed by costs want redistribution.

One voter: “I picked Mamdani because he’s new and he’s fresh. Maybe he can make a change and fix what’s messed up now.”

The specifics mattered. The promises were concrete. The anger found a target.

Now the test begins.

With his inauguration today, we officially enter stage three: bureaucratic implementation.

Here’s what happens now:

Can the state actually build? Can NYC construct enough housing to meet demand? Can public agencies operate efficiently? Can rent controls increase supply or do they reduce it by discouraging construction?

The test is delivery. Can socialist policies actually improve lives? Or will they create new problems: shortages, inefficiencies, unintended consequences?

History warns that expanding state capacity comes with costs. Bureaucracy multiplies. Rules proliferate. The administrative class grows. The gap between intention and outcome widens.

If delivery fails, if housing shortages persist, if costs keep rising despite controls, if bureaucracy becomes a new obstacle, the coalition will fracture.

The middle class will push back. Businesses will flee. The pendulum will swing.

History predicts: short-term gains, long-term correction. Some social protections will remain. Some market mechanisms will return.

The cycle will complete.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s pattern recognition.

The Real Problem: They’re Blaming the Wrong Thing

They’re right to be angry. The system failed them.

Here’s the problem: they’re misdiagnosing the cause.

What Actually Happened

The dollar lost purchasing power. Who controlled the printing press? Government printed trillions.

Wall Street got bailouts in 2008. Main Street got foreclosures. Who chose? Government decided winners and losers.

Small businesses locked down during COVID. Big corporations stayed open. Who set the rules? Government created the exemptions.

Credit expanded. Assets inflated. Wealth concentrated at the top while wages stagnated. Who borrowed against the future? Government debt ballooned.

Student loans became non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. An entire generation trapped in debt. Who changed the law? Government removed the escape route.

What Capitalism Actually Is

Capitalism is an economic system where prices are set by supply and demand. Where people can trade freely. Where effort can be rewarded.

That’s not what we have.

We have crony capitalism. Government-connected corporations getting bailouts, subsidies, and favorable regulations while small businesses drown in red tape.

The inflation that raised grocery prices 25%? That’s not capitalism. That’s the Federal Reserve printing money to fund government spending. When you print trillions of dollars, prices rise. Basic economics.

The housing crisis? That’s not capitalism. That’s zoning laws restricting supply. Building codes adding costs. Environmental regulations delaying projects. Government policy restricted supply while subsidizing demand through low interest rates and government-backed mortgages.

The student debt crisis? That’s not capitalism. That’s government-guaranteed loans that let universities raise prices infinitely because students could borrow infinitely. Remove the risk from lending and prices explode.

The Tragic Irony

Young voters look at this broken system and call it capitalism.

Here’s what it actually is:

Corporatism. Regulatory capture. Government intervention creating the problems they’re angry about.

The sequence is clear:

Dollar lost value. Government printed money.

Housing became unaffordable. Government restricted supply.

Student debt became unpayable. Government guaranteed the loans.

Billionaires got bailouts. Government chose winners and losers.

And now they want more government intervention to fix problems caused by government intervention.

That’s the tragic irony. Socialism doubles down on the thing that broke the system in the first place: centralized control.

They’re handing more power to the institution that wielded power badly. They’re asking for more of what failed them.

The Real Solution: Sound Money and Financial Sovereignty

The anger is justified. The system is broken. Young people worked hard, followed the rules, and got poorer. They have every right to demand change.

But the diagnosis is wrong. And the socialist cure will make it worse.

What’s Actually Needed

Sound money that government can’t print away.

Free markets that government can’t manipulate.

Property rights that government can’t violate.

Financial sovereignty that government can’t revoke.

The tools exist.

The Alternative Architecture

Bitcoin proved that money can exist without central control. A fixed supply that no government can inflate. A network that no institution can shut down.

21 million coins. Ever. Rules set in mathematics, not policy.

Zcash proved that transactions can be private without trusted parties. Zero-knowledge proofs that allow verification without visibility. Privacy as a default, not a privilege.

Same fixed supply. Same divisibility. Adds optional privacy through cryptography.

These aren’t ideologies. They’re technologies. Mathematics that protects what laws won’t.

What Becomes Possible

Path One: Give more power to the institution that broke money. Expand centralized control. More bureaucracy enforcing fairness. More rules. More administrators. More of what failed.

What becomes possible: bureaucracy multiplies, incentives break, productivity stalls, the pattern repeats.

Path Two: Remove government’s power to manipulate money. Fixed supply rules. Mathematical guarantees. Individual sovereignty.

What becomes possible: money no authority can inflate, purchasing power that can’t be stolen, transactions government can’t monitor, wealth individuals control.

When money can’t be printed, purchasing power can’t be stolen.

When transactions are private, surveillance can’t control behavior.

When individuals control their wealth, governments can’t confiscate it.

The Choice Young Voters Haven’t Considered

Socialism promises to fix government failure with more government power.

Sound money removes government’s power to fail in the first place.

That’s the lesson young voters haven’t learned yet. That’s the alternative they haven’t considered.

Not through politics. Through technology.

Not through centralization. Through individual sovereignty.

Not through systems that require trust. Through systems that require only math.

Conclusion

The pendulum swings.

From inequality to equality. From liberty to order. From markets to planning.

And then back again.

Today, New York joins the swing. History tells us what comes next.

The fuck you vote made sense. The system broke its promise. But they’re blaming capitalism for problems government created. They’re choosing socialism to fix failures caused by centralized control.

They’re handing more power to the institution that failed them.

The rebellion itself will need correcting.

The cycle continues.

The question: will we learn this time?

Or just repeat it once more?