Policy / January 1, 2026
John Lindsay expanded welfare, civil rights, and government spending, while leaving New Yorkers politically disarmed. Zohran Mamdani should learn lessons from his town hall.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reacts during a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York on November 5, 2025. Most of Mamdani’s major policy goals will require funding from the New York state government, as well as universal child care and free busing.
(Stephani Spendel/Viewpress via Getty Images) There are many ways for a progressive politician to fail. They may not be elected. They may fail to live up to their platform once in power. And they may also fail to strengthen the power of the left in a way that endures beyond their administration.
This third possibility has often been neglected by the comments surrounding the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. However, this scenario fits perfectly with the tenure of John Vliet Lindsay: a New York City mayor who, from 1966 to 1973, passed progressive legislation that leftists would dream of winning today, but whose administration nonetheless oversaw an erosion of working-class power.
As a result of this failure, Lindsay’s good intentions and accomplishments were largely in vain. By the end of the 1970s, his legacy was virtually destroyed and the ex-mayor himself became, in THE The New York Times in other words, an “exile in his own city.”
To avoid this sad fate, Mamdani must do more than implement good policies in favor of the city’s most marginalized. It must also build lasting power within New York’s working class through its political organizations, coalitions, and approach to the city’s political economy. If Mamdani can learn from Lindsay, he can establish a progressive legacy that can survive and build upon. If he doesn’t, he will become what a reporter once said of Lindsay: someone who “gave his good intentions a bad name.”
A liberal triumph
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Lindsay, like Fiorello La Guardia, won the 1965 mayoral election on the Republican Party ticket. This was not his only difference from Mamdani. Lindsay came from a family of impeccable blue-blooded wasps. He gained notoriety on a national rather than a state level. And he clearly wasn’t interested in spreading socialism.
Again a look at his 1965 mayoral campaign postertouting demands such as “free tuition at city universities,” “strict rent controls,” and “better social housing,” alludes to the similarities between Lindsay and Mamdani. Like Mamdani, Lindsay was swept to power in the face of divided opposition, with the support of college-educated professionals and groups long alienated by the city’s established power structure, particularly black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers.
Like Mamdani, Lindsay viewed municipal government as a tool of social justice. His platform called for neighborhood-focused policymaking, increased social spending, and strong anti-discrimination measures. Indeed, in many ways his program embodied elements of both the students’ radical Port Huron Declaration for a Democratic Society and Lyndon B. Johnson’s liberal effort for the Great Society. As a city white paper reads, his administration sought “the full participation of citizens affected by this policy in determining government policy, while achieving large-scale operating economies and consistent, coordinated use of resources citywide.”
And, in many ways, Lindsay delivered. Under his leadership, the number of municipal unions in the city increased. Its social spending has quintupled, its health spending has quadrupled and its education budget has doubled. Lindsay integrated anti-discrimination policies throughout his administration, inaugurated major “be-ins” designed to revive civic spirit, and launched experiments in decentralized policymaking in education, planning, and poverty alleviation.
Yet these progressive successes are not how Lindsay is remembered. Instead, it is widely considered a failure. This is partly due to forces beyond its control: the many misfortunes that befell the 1970s, from stagflation to urban budget crises, would have posed a challenge for any local government. But Lindsay’s decisions as mayor left New York without the political muscle it needed to secure and advance its achievements in the face of these crises.
A city hall without a base
Lindsay and his idealistic team sought to make City Hall both accessible and efficient. What he accomplished in practice was to fragment the progressive coalition and alienate the city’s working class from his liberal administration and from liberalism in general.
To understand how this happened, we should compare the civic engagement of middle-class Lindsay with that of traditional “machine” leaders. These leaders grew up in the neighborhoods they represented, belonged to the same local civic associations that voters joined, and set up their political clubs in the districts where voters lived. Voters came to these clubs seeking material assistance: a job on the waterfront, a business license, help navigating the city bureaucracy. And the machine’s leaders, whose livelihoods depend on being re-elected by local votes, were more than happy to oblige.
But Lindsay’s professional base had neither the need nor the desire for such neighborhood policy. They did not need public patronage to earn a living given their professional salaries, and their idealism militated against relying on “patronage” for the sake of votes. For them, politics was about ideals and problems, not about material give-and-take. Working-class voters visiting a reform club were more likely to find young professionals discussing important foreign policy issues rather than parochial issues like street paving. And by operating on a volunteer basis, these reformers excluded residents without the time and resources to fully participate.
The result was a fundamental division between reformers and the city’s broader electorate. As one reformer lamented: “The reform movement…is made up mainly of college graduates and the wealthy, who care about the conditions of workers. Unfortunately, it is the workers themselves, those with economic problems, who vote against us.”
Similar problems arose when Lindsay was in power. The mayor, it must be recognized, built a network of materially based favoritism in several ways. His experiments in decentralizing anti-poverty efforts to local advocacy groups undermined the basis of local machines while rewarding groups aligned with the mayor. These efforts rebounded to Lindsay’s electoral advantage in some respects: his 1969 re-election, for example, was led by both high-income New York reformers and low-income racial minorities who benefited from his anti-poverty programs.
However, by going through the mayor’s office and nonprofit organizations rather than local clubs, Lindsay’s policies distanced the city’s political parties from his administration. His efforts to build a network of local town halls that would serve as one-stop centers, for example, were seen by neighborhood representatives as competition for their own authority – and were dutifully rejected by the city council. In the 1970s, many of Lindsay’s policies had more to do with his office and personality than with his party and were therefore easily dismissed when there was a change in leadership. And on a broader level, Lindsay has accelerated the growth of the “nonprofit blob,” membership-free organizations that provide services to, but not through, the general public they ostensibly serve.
All of this would serve to reduce the political capacity of New York workers in a way that would leave them vulnerable to future revanchism.
The coalition that disintegrated
Lindsay’s mayoralty also increased tensions between certain segments of the city’s working class. It was not a foregone conclusion. Lindsay was initially elected by a broad coalition: Silk Stocking Manhattan Republicans, the city’s business elite, middle- and lower-class white Catholic homeowners in the outer boroughs, Manhattan’s liberal reformers, middle-class Jews in the outer boroughs, and many blacks and Puerto Ricans. What united these groups was the common feeling that the city’s quality of life was in decline and that the established parties were unwilling or unable to halt this decline.
However, as mayor, Lindsay focused most of his rhetoric and reform energy on supporting particular segments of this coalition, particularly low-income blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Of course, this was right and necessary in many ways, and Lindsay’s policies (and the broader growth of public sector unions) helped bring enormous progress for the city’s racial minorities.
But framing the city’s problems solely in terms of race and poverty has obscured the broader set of problems facing the city’s working class. New York’s cost of living, for example, grew the fastest in the country during most of his tenure as mayor. Inflation was increasing. And while public sector unions grew, those in the private sector began to atrophy.
But Lindsay has paid little attention to these developments in relation to issues of racialized poverty. This was in part because Lindsay and his professional-class supporters had little respect for the white ethnics who made up the majority of the city’s unionized working class or for their “parochial” concerns for lower taxes or better street paving. Such lack of concern was illustrated by the snowstorms of 1969, when the mayor left Queens streets unplowed a week after Manhattan streets had been thoroughly swept. As one critic said, “People around Lindsay didn’t know what a neighborhood was. If you didn’t live on Central Park West, you were some sort of lesser being.” [to them].”
It was also true that Lindsay’s employees, many of whom had become deeply immersed in neoclassical economic theory, cared little about the type of policy anti-inflationary, industrial policy or public price controls that could have addressed the broader material concerns of the city’s working class. Lindsay therefore did little to address the rampant sources of economic instability that would explode in the 1970s. As one taxi driver said of Lindsay: “He alienated almost every man in every union in this city.” »
Racial politics influenced all of this development: any attention paid by Lindsay to rectifying racial discrimination and inequality could be seen by white workers as an attack. A wiser mayor, however, might have found ways to resolve this dilemma without excessively hemorrhaging support from the white working class, whose population made up the bulk of the city’s unionized private sector. But Lindsay opposed this approach. As he once said of the white working class: “I understand how they feel and I don’t blame them. But it had to be the year of the poor in New York.”
Politically, this strategy backfired on the mayor and, ultimately, on his most vulnerable supporters. It is true that Lindsay’s coalition of “limousine liberals” and racial minorities propelled him to re-election in 1969. But that coalition was not, and never will be, enough to propel the progressives into power consistently. Instead, as one historian wrote, “the most lasting consequence of the Lindsay years on the city’s political landscape was the rise of white ethnic sensibility,” epitomized by the later success of Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and, to some extent, Donald Trump himself.
In this way, Lindsay’s administration missed an opportunity to create a popular front composed of anti-poverty groups, civil rights organizations, and labor unions that could have better resisted the assault on progressivism in the 1970s.
Betting on capital, losing work
If Lindsay’s patronage and coalition policies were detrimental to progressivism in New York, his economic policies were disastrous.
John Lindsay served as mayor of New York from 1966 to 1973. He passed progressive legislation, but his administration nonetheless oversaw an erosion of working-class power.(Bernard Gotfryd / Newsweek via Library of Congress) These policies were, for the most part, intended to attract wealthy businesses and their employers to the city. Lindsay hoped that taxing these groups would help provide the revenue needed to fund the city’s social programs. As Lindsay’s financial advisor argued in 1968, “concentrations of need in central cities” had to be “matched” by “urban concentrations of wealth and ability to pay taxes.”
But in retrospect, Lindsay’s pro-corporate strategy undermined the political and fiscal base of progressivism in New York. Lindsay’s economic approach took several forms. He formed an Economic Development Council made up largely of banks and businesses to convey his economic strategy. He advanced initiatives long promoted by groups like the Regional Plan Association of New York and the Downtown – Lower Manhattan Association, such as a new Midtown convention center and the World Trade Center complex. And he launched new initiatives benefiting the city’s white-collar workers, such as tax exemptions for high-income apartments, which one critic criticized as “another step in Lindsay’s attempt to subsidize the rich.”
Lindsay associated this strategy with a relatively blasé attitude toward the city’s continuing deindustrialization—and deunionization more broadly. In a 1967 New York Times In an article titled “Mayor Cuts Industry Loss,” the mayor dismissed a new report of a flight from manufacturing, pointing to the city’s “business growth boom” as a sign of its good economic health. An unpublished draft report on the city’s 1969 master plan, documenting the flight of manufacturing industries, asserted that “the displacement of manufacturing activity is the complement to the expansion of office construction which results in higher investment…than the manufacturing activities which it replaced.”
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The new corporate economy (and subsidies in its name) not only failed to save the city from fiscal crisis, but it exacerbated it. The flight of manufacturing jobs has increased the city’s social costs. As journalist Robert Fitch argued, New York’s “financial collapse” was a consequence of its “national center strategy,” which “crowds out industry, requires enormous infrastructure, and generates very heavy debt.”
Beyond these fiscal costs were the broader political costs of Lindsay’s strategy. For example, allowing deindustrialization has weakened the city’s private sector unions. Its emphasis on social measures as the ultimate standard of progressivism has left the city ill-equipped to propose alternative economic strategies needed to address its fiscal crisis. And the tax revenue that these corporate entities brought to the city’s welfare state was arguably offset by the disenfranchisement they brought to the city’s poor. As Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote in a 1969 article for The Nation“the economic lot [of the poor] will be somewhat improved, of course, but their long-term economic prospects depend on their potential political power, and this will be diminished.
This, coupled with the fragmented working class and weak community roots of Lindsay’s liberalism, left the city unable to combat the wave of neoliberal austerity measures it faced.
The result was that where previous fiscal crises had been met with waves of municipal revolts against prevailing economic policies, New York experienced no such revolts in the 1970s. As one scholar wrote, the city’s fiscal crisis—what one radical called “an opportunity, unparalleled since the Vietnam War, to organize a broad movement for economic change”—had passed. And while its social welfare state has been dismantled and degraded, its corporate welfare state has survived and thrived, helping to create the unequal metropolis that Mamdani is called to govern.
Learn from Lindsay
Fortunately, there are plenty of signs that Mamdani won’t repeat Lindsay’s mistakes. Mamdani’s allies are already committed to building a sustainable infrastructure capable of developing the political capacities of his base. But this apparatus will only matter if it meets—and, above all, meets—the material needs of this base, just as the old machines once did: through legal defense of tenants, public jobs, and neighborhood-based service guarantees.
Mamdani also understands that “public excellence” cannot be limited to social policy alone; it must extend to all municipal governance, from education to street cleaning. Restoring the fundamentals will be essential to maintaining broad confidence in the working class.
The new mayor’s early appointments further distinguish him from Lindsay’s approach. He brought into his consultative orbit figures linked to the solidarity economy, including Lina Khan, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Deyanira Del Río. The task before us is to ensure that economic policy strengthens – rather than undermines – the political capacity of the working class. Unlike Lindsay, Mamdani must view economic strategy not only as a revenue-generating tool, but also as the foundation of sustainable democratic power.
The lesson of the Lindsay years is not that progressive governance is futile but that it is fragile. Policies adopted without lasting organizing, broad working-class coalitions, and a political economy that builds working class power will not survive. If Mamdani succeeds where Lindsay failed, it will not be because his ideas are purer or his intentions firmer, but because he has learned that governing on the left requires more than the moral clarity of a single progressive administration: it requires building an infrastructure that sets the stage for the next one.
