Bonus Segment: 100 Days of Mamdani, Live in NYC | Ones and Tooze

Hi, my name is Claudia Taty. I'm the producer of Ones and Twos. I'm really excited to be here tonight introducing Adam and Cam. This is our third show at Caveat. We actually did our first ever live taping here back in 2022. And we love it so much we keep coming back. So, thank you Caveat for having us. A lot has changed since that first show. We are coming up on our five-year anniversary of Ones and Twos. Yes, we've done over 200 episodes. We're posting full episodes on YouTube if you haven't seen. And shout out Susanna, our video editor, who's in the audience here. We started a listener donation campaign and we were kind of overwhelmed by the amount of support we received. We work really hard on the show. We love doing it. But it really wouldn't be possible without our audience who I must say are probably the smartest, most engaged podcast listeners out there. There is no heterodox economist too obscure or too niche for you all. We see your emails. We know we have a long list of those to get through and we will. But really, thank you for listening every week. Thank you for coming to events like these. Thank you for donating and supporting us in all the ways you do. We normally record these virtually over two, sometimes three time zones and often not so great Wi-Fi. So, it's always a pleasure to be able to do this under the same roof together. And even more so with you all here. So, thank you again for coming. I know they have some pretty fun topics tonight. A little twos after dark, if you will. So, I won't delay it any further. Let's give a warm welcome to the hosts of my favorite podcast, Ones and Twos, Cameron Abati and Adam Twos.

Milk. Actually, the entire hour and a half is this music. We're just gonna leave the stage after this. Um, hi. Yes. Excellent. Okay. Uh, it is, uh, excellent to be here. As Claudia suggested, it's fair to say we're pretty comfortable here. This is our kind of home base in New York. Uh, and I think it's especially nice to be here because it's sort of bookending our week. We started the week in Washington DC. Uh, and that is, you know, we were talking to a different portion of our audience. I think it's fair to say it was the International Institute of Finance.

I'll take your word for that. There were a lot of suits in the audience. Um, uh, they were having breakfast as we talked. Yeah. We go from the 8 a.m. Washington DC, uh, chandeliered hotel lobby to, um, uh, to the caveat where we love being. And yeah, even if I understood this correctly, uh just as an indication of how, you know, how wide the podcast audience uh spans, I Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary spoke, uh before the IIAF and we almost were his lead-in. Um and apparently he even like requested us or maybe wanted us as his lead-in and that I don't know if that means he's a listener of the podcast. I wonder if he is. Hi Scott, if you're listening. Yeah,

Yes, exactly. I was ushered out of the green room urgently as a potential dissident. Various Trump administration officials. We we we w we welcome all our listeners is the point. But we're happy to be here. But first um uh another data point and that is 1 million. Uh that is the threshold of uh votes that Zophran Mamani cleared when he was uh elected mayor of New York City uh last year. That was the first time that a mayor uh cleared that threshold of votes uh since 1969. And clearly there was a lot of interest in uh Mamani in New York City. And it's probably easy to understand why uh he is uh uh you know the first mayor raised in Atoria to post-colonial academic uh parents and um and yeah I mean more specifically he uh came in with a really committed background to democratic socialism and yeah for New York City this was at least in the near-term relatively new. I grew up near New York and you know through through the kind of populism of Rudy Giuliani. I mean you know racism I guess one could say and uh um and then the kind of technocracy of Michael Bloomberg and then the vague progressivism of of of Bill Delasio and now you know we have an an interesting uh new uh ideology at the helm of of the city. Um and so yeah we thought we'd check in on what exactly Mdani is doing for the city. And so yeah start off with Adam. It's been about a little more than 100 days. Uh

Yeah. So, uh you know, you live here. I'm passing through. What sort of difference has Mamani made for the city as far as as far as you can you can tell?

Did you say that in your interview? No, but no, but but uh but anyway, so I kind of feel I feel an obligation to actually be more be well better informed. So your questions on this have always been really helpful. Um and and today I had the privilege of talking to a good friend Lucas Herzmmeer who's one of Germany's leading experts on the American left. Um and he's just actually signed a book deal to write a the first Europe, you know, because it isn't just Americans and New Yorkers who are interested in Mandani. Is attracting attention all over the world and Lucas is writing a a summary for a German audience of this project of democratic socialism in the US and and how it's working. So, thanks to Lucas for for for briefing me uh earlier this evening. And I think the way he's thinking about it and I find it a really useful framework is kind of a three-fold thing that's going on and and things really are going on. If you live here, you know it. Um the first is um delivery on certain key items of the agenda and we can we can get into that and it's a technical story. Then the other one is the sheer effectiveness of the PR campaign that they're running in and of itself is a phenomenon really worth focusing on. I mean the mayor's Instagram game, the mayor's video game is just really second to none in modern democratic politics. It's incredibly effective and clocking up huge numbers of views. You could say it's giving hostages to fortune, but it's it's a democratic achievement in its own right. And the third level, which Lucas was really really bringing sharply into focus for me, is that the aim of the game is to change the understanding of what government can do in a general sense. Right? So, it's not just a matter of delivering on point point, which I'll come back to in a minute, but it's actually trying to reposition government as a much more versatile, much more mobile kind of responder to to problems. And I think that's the ambition level that's being set here. I mean, concretely, you know, the M Dani just has the most extraordinary message discipline, right? And that was so striking during the campaign as well. And it's it's three things. It's rent freeze, buses, and child care. And those are the those are the those are the agenda items that just have to be delivered on. And it's too early to really be able to say, right, all those items checked off. Far far too early. But there's a deal that's being shaped up also with Albany over child care that's very promising. There is a uh and they have effectively some would say packed. Other people would say positioned the board which oversees rents in New York uh in a way which means they almost certainly have the votes for a freeze. Whether they'll get a two-year freeze or one-year freeze is not clear at this point, but the pieces are being moved into place for delivery on key items of the agenda later on this year. This is the this is the kind of Mamani side story. Where I think it gets a lot trickier is the fiscal politics. Um because the promise after all was not just um to deliver on these three key items and to demonstrate a rather different vision of what government can be um but to do so with a taxing agenda that um took a leaf out of the modern monetary theory book. Not in the sense that New York has the fiscal sovereignty of the federal government in the US because it doesn't. This is what's really interesting in US government right now. As much as the federal government has, you know, exorbitant privilege can just can really can just blow out the deficit. This was the talk of Washington earlier this week. Six 7% of GDP and no one's flinching. Uh the state level and the city level are very tightly constrained by balanced budget requirements and they are spending almost as much as federal government in terms of total service delivery to the American population. And so at that level, the fiscal politics are hard as nails. And what's been going on is this back and forth between the two checks on the Mandani project, which are governor Hul and uh and Albany, and on the other hand then um the city council, so the elected parliament of of New York, where the speaker is a what are we going to call her? Hardline centrist, um radical centrist. Uh extremely affluent uh representative of the local local upper middle class. And so the project which was to tax the rich is blocked at the state level and the alternative which was to raise property taxes is political poison. And so it has turned out and so the struggle now is over how you deal with a deficit which Mani came in rather hyping at like 12 billion. This is on a total budget of $120 billion a year. So it's not massive by federal standards but it's big. Turns out actually we settle closer to five and a half. And then the question is how you close that. And if both the taxing routes are actually shut, how do you get within that realm? And how do you assert political autonomy against the folks in the council who are basically selling you a package which is a very unappetizing and rather unglamorous collection of, you know, itty bitty tax gains and um quite a lot of threats to services. And the hope I think and this is where the politics with Hul gets so interesting is they actually have money um because they were overcautious in their budgeting at the state level and so there are some say up to about $15 billion in in funds and so this is why Bamani moved early to endorse Hul like there is a trade opening up there where in fact there's a partnership between the city and the state in which some of that large s actually rains down on the But that is where the the degrees of freedom are much more much more constricted. Um, and this is I think those are going to be the fights because the budget um I'm learning all about this really fast, but I think that the New York budget is proposed right now in the spring and it has to be resolved by the early summer unlike unlike in DC. So, this is going to play out now over the next couple of weeks.

Yeah. Uh I mean even just walking around the city it's very obvious there's a it's an affluent city with a lot of money and one would think that yeah raising money should be possible but it's not all in Mamani's obviously power as you were

Yeah. I I guess I want to ask about what kind of you know we use the term socialism uh to describe uh uh Madam Dani's politics or he uses that term or has used it and what are we talking about when we talk about socialism in this way. We spend plenty of time on this podcast talking about socialism. I mean we we've done episodes on different socialist thinkers. Uh we've and and you know we've talked about your own troskiest background even on this stage I think at some previous episodes and previous shows here. And so um uh you know Mamdani has seems to be leaning into this uh term or this definition of himself right now as a sewer socialist. Um, and this is actually a term from what I can tell is is actually indigenous kind of US tradition of socialism that is really different than kind of European style socialism that we've kind of tended to talk about where the idea is, you know, maybe seizing the national uh means of production that being the path to liberation is like the the to liberate the people you need to really take power on a national level and you know Mandani is taking I think this this sewer socialism seems to take a fairly different approach. So I mean what what does sewer socialism amount to in in that sense?

Sewers. Sewers are the answer to cola and um there's actually really serious social scientific work on the political coalitions necessary to build sewers in say British cities in the late 19th century. And those are hard hard deals because they cost money. You have to borrow money. Then you have to raise taxes to pay the debts. Like getting to sewers. There's this famous incident where Queen Victoria visits my old home Cambridge, England, and indiscreetly asks a question about some paper floating down the cam and they have to avoid telling her that it's shitladen toilet paper that's going past, you know, the decorative windows of the C because Cambridge didn't get sewers until the 1880s. So, we had collera outbreaks in the English Ivy League until the late 19th century. So, sewers are like they're for real. That's actual serious politics and it did have analoges around the world. Um so popularism in in Britain in the late 19th century was a similar form of non-revolutionary reformistbased social democracy that was about delivering services. And if you hear Mamani again like message discipline, message discipline and he credits Bernie Sanders with it. He says, you know, the great mayor of Burlington taught me the central lesson that, you know, an American socialism must be about delivery. And I am going to take that lesson from Burlington and apply it to New York City. Um, and and so we are going to fix things, right? There are not going to be, you know, we're not going to tolerate potholes. We're going to go after potholes. It's that kind of principle of um trying to sort the small stuff as well as the big stuff. But I mean I can sense the old is the old Trosky in you the old Marxist in you must find this somehow objectionable right I mean socialism socialism to just providing services of like basic kind what about the liberation movement