Reihan Salam has a lot in common with the man he is trying to stop.
They went to rival New York City public high schools. Both are South Asian Muslim men with a talent for remembering faces and names. Mr. Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, and his democratic socialist foil, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both favor merch embroidered with the same 1970s cursive City of New York insignia.
They share something else. They are convinced that their beloved city is in crisis. For the mayor, the crisis is affordability. For Mr. Salam, the crisis is Mr. Mamdani.
“You have a couple of decades of prosperity that are slipping away,” said Mr. Salam, 46, who lives with his family in a Brooklyn neighborhood that voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Mamdani. “We are squandering this incredible opportunity to show that urban life can work.”
He fears that many of his fellow New Yorkers have been seduced by what he sees as the mayor’s vilification of the city’s wealthiest residents and misled by Mr. Mamdani’s vision of free buses, free child care and frozen rent. He believes the mayor’s big plans to subsidize the costs of city life for even well-off New Yorkers (“unlimited welfarism for the near-rich,” Mr. Salam calls it) could steer New York City into a financial tailspin reminiscent of the dark days of the 1970s.
To counter all that, Mr. Salam is trying to make the Manhattan Institute, a think tank with a roster of New York City obsessives, the intellectual engine of the resistance.
Slowing down the mayor and his popular movement will be no easy task, as others have discovered. The city’s vaunted business elite spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade voters that Mr. Mamdani’s ideas about capitalism and Israel were too radical for New York, without success. The Democratic establishment has largely been cowed by the mayor’s political strength. Elected Republicans are so outnumbered in New York that they have no real power to stop him.
Neither does the Manhattan Institute. Over a half-century, the organization has lobbied constantly for shrinking the city’s sprawling bureaucracy and letting private industry work its magic. The election of a democratic socialist marks a low point for the institute in New York, where its project has never been further from the halls of power.
But Mr. Salam, its president since 2019, sees an opportunity. Mr. Mamdani’s electric campaign has created unusual interest in big ideas about what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to administering government in the city.
Where some right-wing critics have caricatured the mayor as a communist, a jihadist and a candidate for deportation, Mr. Salam and his fellow conservative urbanists are testing a less hyperbolic approach. They have taken direct aim at Mr. Mamdani’s policy agenda, deploying deep knowledge of city history and policy expertise to try to serve as a voice of skepticism whispering in the city’s collective ear.
Do people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year really need free child care?
Read the rest here.
The DSA is the political equivalent to the Flat Earth Society. They are not serious people. The MI on the other hand is a refreshingly sober group of people offering cogent alternatives to the fringe platform of the DSA and its followers.
