Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. In a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than six to one, this is no minor footnote—it is a likely preview of the future. Barring the unexpected, Mamdani is now poised to become mayor of America’s largest and most iconic city.

This is more than a local election. It is a cultural and ideological bellwether for where the urban left is heading: deeper into redistributionist dogma, hostility toward markets, and a worldview that romanticizes struggle while ignoring the wreckage that follows it.

Mamdani is not hiding what he believes. His campaign has openly championed housing as a “human right,” the dismantling of capitalism, and the public takeover of essential services. These are not pragmatic tweaks to an imperfect system. They are revolutionary goals rooted in a utopian ideal that has never worked in practice—anywhere.

But the trouble with utopia (from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place”) is that it always sounds better than reality. Shakespeare understood this long before Karl Marx penned a word. In King Lear, the aging monarch imagines he can relinquish power and “live as a guest” in a kingdom of mutual love and harmony. Instead, chaos follows. The kingdom fractures, cruelty replaces charity, and Lear is left to wander mad on a heath, raging at the storm he helped unleash.

“So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough,” Lear says—noble in theory, but disastrous when divorced from accountability and human nature. Shakespeare knew that trying to remake the world through forced equality invites ruin, not justice.

In Timon of Athens, another wealthy idealist gives freely to friends and flatterers, only to be abandoned when the gold runs out. Stripped of illusion, Timon flees the city and curses it from afar. His story is not one of redemption, but of disillusionment—of how generosity becomes naive when untethered from discernment.

Mamdani’s rise is a warning: New York is falling for the oldest political mirage of all—the idea that equality can be engineered by decree, that wealth can be redistributed without cost, and that freedom can coexist with centralized economic control. But these dreams always collapse under their own contradictions.

Look at the cities already walking this path: San Francisco, where progressive policies have driven out businesses and created dystopian public spaces; Chicago, where crime soars while the mayor insists it’s a “perception problem”; or London in the 1970s, before Thatcher reversed its economic death spiral.

Socialism survives not because it works, but because it flatters the resentful and absolves the irresponsible. It tells the struggling that someone else is to blame. It turns envy into a platform. And in an age of rising urban discontent, it sells beautifully.

But what it never does is build.

New York once stood as the capital of American dynamism—where immigrants chased dreams, where capital met labor, and where innovation shaped skylines. If Mamdani wins in the end, the city risks becoming a museum of its former self: hollowed out, hostile to enterprise, and run by ideologues who treat economic reality as an obstacle to be overcome by sheer will.

“The fool doth think he is wise,” said Shakespeare’s Touchstone in As You Like It, “but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”

New Yorkers still have time to be wise. To see this moment for what it is—a temptation, not a solution. If they fail to resist it, they may soon find their great city ruled by yet another well-spoken fool chasing fantasies off the edge of a cliff.

Michael J. Hout is Editor-in-Chief of Liberty Affair. Based in Warsaw, Poland, he writes about politics, culture, and history. Follow his latest insights on X: @michaeljhout.