Cheap Living, Costly Politics

In the press conference following their meeting, President Donald Trump and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani presented what has widely been read as an unexpected moment of political harmony. The men appeared relaxed, even complimentary toward one another. Trump congratulated Mamdani on his victory and repeated, "The better you do, the happier I am,” all while shielding Mandani from the press’s often hostile questioning. At one point, when a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still believed Trump was a fascist, Trump humorously cut in to deflect the question, telling him he could simply say, “Yes”and move on. Coverage highlighted the ease of their interaction and the shared focus on lowering costs for New Yorkers, including joint criticism of high energy costs.

Many interpreted the friendliness as a shocking departure from expectations. A democratic socialist known for championing tenant power, free transit, and critiques of the United States’ complicity in genocide appeared congenial beside a reactionary politician who has spent years fueling racist, authoritarian movements. Yet what appeared surprising to many was in fact a predictable meeting of compatible political logics. Both appeal to popular material demands while leaving intact the deeper structures of power that require inequality, extraction, and coercion to function.

Popularity and the Politics of Cheap Relief

Trump has always treated popularity as the foundation of legitimacy. He mobilizes mass admiration, celebrity status, and populist rhetoric not to democratize power but to justify domination by a figure with immense wealth and personal legal vulnerability. The admiration he extends to Mamdani serves as validation by association. Aligning himself with a youthful, newly elected figure who commands broad public support strengthens his claim to represent the people, even as his agenda remains focused on legal survival, personal enrichment, and elite power.

Mamdani’s strategy rests on a different calculus that converges with Trump at the surface. The politics of affordability resonates because it speaks directly to lived capitalist crisis. Housing, groceries, utilities, and transportation devour household budgets while wages stagnate. The cost of simply existing in a city like New York has grown unbearable. Mamdani’s platform identifies that pain as the entry point to socialist reform. He connects his administration’s mandate to policies like rent freezes, fare free buses, and municipal ownership of basic goods. The focus on lowering costs mainstreams socialist policy by shaping it as pragmatic relief rather than ideological transformation.

This strategy carries value. It can anchor left politics in material need and build popular support for public services. But affordability also carries risk. If reducing prices becomes the central horizon rather than a bridge to systemic change, the political project risks evolving into a more humane version of the same order. Or even worse, it creates the conditions for an even more repressive and inhuman form of fascism in our time. Life becomes cheaper without becoming freer.

Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive.

This reflects a deeper contradiction in contemporary capitalism. Liberal democracy and market institutions are no longer accepted as inherently legitimate. Their worth is increasingly measured by whether they can deliver immediate material improvement. That shift creates openings for radical change because it breaks the old belief that the system deserves loyalty simply for existing. Yet it also gives the system new ways to protect itself. Popular leaders can step in to offer short-term relief that restores confidence in existing institutions while leaving the forces that create crisis untouched. Affordability becomes a pressure valve rather than a pathway to transformation. And it also limits the demands of the left to a universalized middle-class desire for a less expensive capitalist existence, regardless of its exploitative impact on the rest of society.

The cordial meeting did not signal an ideological unity between democratic socialism and right-wing populism. It showed how both now operate in a political landscape where legitimacy rests on delivering short-term economic gains to supposedly all New Yorkers rather than on the principles they claim to represent. The question is what must be surrendered to secure those gains.

How Affordability Buys Consent

Cozying up to Trump, may seem like a good political tactic, but it ultimately plays into an attempt to make authoritarianism seem not only acceptable but even progressive. In wealthy capitalist states, a long-standing, but too often conveniently ignored, political bargain is being updated. People can receive short-term economic improvements, subsidized public services, and relief from acute cost pressures in exchange for accepting the continued existence of imperial violence abroad and racialized coercion at home. In the present era, this “old” bargain carries the heightened risk of helping to usher in fascism.

The working populations of imperial centers are granted better access to goods while wealth continues to be extracted from workers in colonized, sanctioned, or militarized regions. Domestically the same bargain allows inequality to deepen as long as its effects are managed through policing, welfare targeting, and selective investment.

This arrangement relies on economic relief as a tool for preserving the broader system. Rather than confronting the structures that create poverty, states manage discontent by making survival marginally less difficult. Political institutions become custodians of a society where inequality is expected and stability is achieved through regulated compromise rather than emancipation.

This bargain is increasingly reinforced by what can be understood as an authoritarian financial complex. Contemporary capitalism is stabilized through a fusion of financial power, corporate control, and coercive institutions that contain unrest when inequality becomes volatile. Policing, surveillance, carcerality, and militarized foreign policy do not simply uphold order; they function as profitable sectors that expand precisely because inequality persists. In this context affordability works to preserve the system by easing everyday pressures while leaving intact the industries that rely on repression at home and abroad for growth.

Within this context affordability becomes a pacifying tool—especially for working class New Yorkers who are demanding real systemic change. Cheaper transit and lower utility bills offer real improvements, but they can also function as incentives to accept a political order responsible for global extraction and domestic repression. The issue is not whether material relief has value; it is that such relief can substitute for structural transformation rather than build toward it.

This framework clarifies what is at stake in New York. Mamdani’s focus on affordability could lead to transformative public ownership and a challenge to capital. It could also become a mechanism through which New Yorkers receive lower prices while the underlying machinery of exploitation remains in place. The reported decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, outlined in coverage of Mamdani’s choice to keep Tisch in place, highlights this tension because it signals continuity with a policing regime that has historically prioritized property protection, broken-windows enforcement, and surveillance over structural justice. If these institutions remain in place, affordability risks functioning as cover for a system that deepens inequality while appearing to relieve it. Or more precisely, it creates new acceptable forms of repression, inequity, and exploitation—expanding more widely the unethical desires of an aspiring middle class who ignore the oppression of others so that they can live comfortably.

This pattern already exists internationally. European welfare systems were largely built on colonial resource extraction. United States prosperity relied on global dominance, military power, dollar hegemony, and dispossession. Cheap goods do not emerge from nowhere. They are subsidized by unseen human costs. A left project that seeks to lower the price of living without confronting those global and racialized foundations risks reproducing a moral economy where the comfort of the metropole is purchased through others’ subjugation.

Beyond Cheaper Survival

The shift in public consciousness that enabled Mamdani’s victory should not be underestimated. People are no longer persuaded by justifications that capitalism or liberal democracy are inherently legitimate. Legitimacy is now measured by whether institutions deliver tangible improvement. That shift makes sense in an era of crisis. It erodes ideological loyalty and opens space for radical alternatives grounded in meeting basic needs. Crucially, just as Mamdani uses the discourse of “affordability” to make his brand of liberal socialism seem more politically acceptable, so too is Trump using these desires for his own project of fascism.

This transformation creates an opening for socialist politics. If people demand material improvement then the left can demonstrate that market-based systems cannot provide it reliably. Success requires more than lowering prices. It demands democratizing control over production, land, energy, transit, and finance. It demands replacing private ownership with social ownership and treating housing, transport, food, and utilities as public rights rather than profit sources.

Affordability can accelerate this transition if it is framed as a step toward decommodification. Free buses point toward collective transit. Rent freezes point toward social housing and community land trusts. Lower energy bills point toward democratically owned utilities. However, it can also distract attention from more radical demands such as for a living wage and the socialization of the economy.

The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront.

But without such grounding affordability can consolidate the system instead. A state that lowers prices without challenging ownership leaves profit structures intact and relies on subsidies, taxation, or temporary regulatory pressure rather than structural change. When that occurs the governing project becomes managing capitalism responsibly rather than ending it. Even more concerning, it creates the condition for the far-right to claim the demand for “affordability” as their own.

This risk is amplified by electoral politics. Winning office creates pressure to compromise with existing institutions. Mayors must navigate financial markets, credit ratings, property tax structures, policing unions, federal funding constraints, and real estate interests. Under those pressures affordability becomes a technocratic tool to pacify the public without challenging the interests that make the city unaffordable. It provide the very legitimacy for both “progressive” and far-right authoritarian elites to justify their own power and rule.

A socialist movement must therefore build power outside electoral institutions. Tenant unions, worker cooperatives, public banking campaigns, fare strikes, climate blockades, and mass organizations can exert pressure that elected officials alone cannot.

A Crossroads for the Left

The Trump-Mamdani meeting symbolized a potential broader turning point. The crisis of capitalism has eroded ideological certainty. People demand results. Political actors from different factions will compete to supply them. Some will promise affordability without freedom. Others will promise belonging and national cohesion without justice. The real radical left must offer something different.

The stakes are not small reforms or ideological purity. Instead, they are whether a politics rooted in affordability may become a transitional stage toward democratic control of society or, more likely, a permanent settlement that normalizes exploitation in exchange for a comfortable life. One path leads to public ownership, internationalist solidarity, abolition of punitive institutions, and dismantling of capitalist extraction. The other path stabilizes oppression by making it less painful.

The meeting showed how easily a left project that prioritizes cost of living can be absorbed into the political logic of the system it aims to confront. Trump gained legitimacy through proximity to a socialist victor. Mamdani gained access and cooperation through cordial tone. Both walked away stronger, and the system stayed exactly where it was.

The moment demands strategic clarity. Affordability must not replace emancipation. The goal cannot be cheaper survival; it must be a society where survival is no longer determined by market forces or secured through imperial violence.

There is a chance to move beyond comfort into collective power. The task is to seize it and build socialism from below.