The mad world vision inside Zohran Mamdanis head

The mayor of New York City is a figure of national importance, even though no one in the past century has risen from City Hall to play a meaningful role in American politics.Why? Because New York City is the canary in the coal mine for ideas about how to govern.When bad ideas are enacted here, they spread like the Spanish flu and sicken the rest of America.And when good ones come along, like the policies that ended the crime wave in the 1990s, they spread like sunshine on a cloudless morning and brighten the daily lives of the entire country.So it’s not just because New York is the center of the universe (which it is) that its mayors matter.

It’s that what happens here reverberates.And right now, what seems to be reverberating as New York’s Democrats prepare for their June mayor primary is Zohran Mamdani.Mamdani has risen from complete obscurity to second in the polls (albeit 20 points behind leader Andrew Cuomo) and has raised an astounding $9 million-plus.That makes Mamdani the breakthrough star of the Democratic Party so far this year.And that’s pretty amazing, because this 33 year-old nobody state representative is an out-and-out utopian lunatic.He wants to freeze all rents, have the government run grocery stores, and make both childcare and bus transit free for all.How would this work in practice? Oh, don’t be a stickler! Get on board the free bus!Indeed, Mamdami is so pure in his ideological vision that he evokes one of socialism’s crackpot founders, Charles Fourier (1782-1837).Fourier had a plan to reorganize the earth into a series of exactly equal-in-size-and-money communal farms called “phalansteries” in which happy children would do the work of contented adults and the resulting social harmony would literally transform the oceans into lemonade we could all drink.How would this all work? Never mind how! Just drink the Kool-Aid — I mean, the lemonade!The glory was in the doing — the process of creating the new order Fourier called Harm...