Cautionary Histories

Progressive enclaves have long faced blockades, sieges, and subversion by opponents operating at a higher geographic scale. Relentless pressure usually ends either in the enclaves’ destruction or a deeply warped form of politics. But tragedy is not an assured outcome.

Perhaps the classic examples of blockaded enclaves are twentieth-century communist revolutions. After the Russian Revolution, Western intervention on behalf of White Russians prolonged a “catastrophic” conflict. After the Cuban Revolution, the United States deployed “far-ranging” economic and covert tools in a “long-term strategy of destruction.” The cascade of CIA efforts to murder Fidel Castro may have veered into the comical, but their material, human, and political toll was no laughing matter.

Within a nation, perhaps the most famous instance of reactionary massing against a progressive enclave was the ten-week-long 1871 Paris Commune. As Bruno Leipold has shown, the commune “witnessed a flowering of democratic experimentation and cultural and social liberation” in its brief span of ten weeks. Yet these experiments in radically democratic government ended in indiscriminate massacre at the hands of Adolphe Thiers’s provisional national government, the Semaine sanglante (“Bloody Week”).

American history features nothing so dramatic, and Mamdani isn’t aiming to carry out an old-school revolution in New York City. But the progressive state and local governments of the late nineteenth century faced a hostile national government. Their redistributive efforts were stymied repeatedly by federal judges brocading a “liberty of contract” out of ether.

This history suggests it’s easy for a left enclave to collapse under external strain, or at least become distorted beyond recognition — but that neither outcome is inevitable.

The Coming Siege of New York

Assume that Mamdani has been invested with office and moved into Gracie Mansion: What kind of blockade will the federal government enact? Trump’s acts and words suggest three entwined modes of attack are likely. These have more parallels to the Cuban and Paris blockades than the juridical fights of the progressive era.

First, there would come direct assaults on the person of Mamdani and those close to him. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) has the dubious honor of being among the first to suggest stripping Mamdani of citizenship, a suggestion taken up by Trump megaphone Karoline Leavitt. Subsequently Trump has suggested arresting Mamdani for hindering immigration enforcement, which is a criminal rather than a civil immigration charge.

These targeted threats should not be taken as mere rhetoric. Denaturalization is allowed only when a person lies on their citizenship application. Trump officials have already floated the notion that Mamdani “lied” by not disclosing his support for “terrorism.” The argument is absurd on the facts but no more far-fetched than many accusations it has leveled over the past six months. In February, the Justice Department issued a policy memorandum defining the “harboring” of undocumented people in sweeping terms, effectively criminalizing much ordinary interaction with the undocumented. Already one Wisconsin judge has been indicted under its terms.

The point of an indictment or a denaturalization action may not be for the government to win. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has already shown it’s happy to manipulate criminal charges for partisan ends unrelated to criminal law. Its favorable treatment of New York City mayor Eric Adams is the most glaring example. Rather, its hope would be to tie up Mamdani in personally costly litigation, making him incapable of effectively governing and hence torpedoing his term in office.

Layered onto these personal assaults will be the use of the federal government’s purse as an instrument of blackmail. Trump has already threatened to withhold funding if Mamdani “doesn’t behave himself.” In other states, his administration has withheld money in exceptionally cruel forms of blackmail. So when Maine allowed trans athletes to compete in sports, secretary of agriculture Brooke Rollins cut off funding for nutritional assistance in schools. Bend the knee, she effectively said, or your children go hungry.

Finally, Trump has claimed “tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to.” In early June, Trump signed a presidential proclamation mobilizing two thousand National Guard troops to deploy in Los Angeles (the deployment ended in July). It was solely good luck that the ensuing deployment didn’t degenerate into a larger, more deadly conflagration, taking the lives of protesters and bystanders. The LA deployment was based on the thinnest of legal rationales, although a pair of Trump-appointed judges rejected a legal challenge by the state. Hence it’s reasonable to foresee an East Coast repeat based upon some shabby pretext, perhaps teed up by violent and cruel immigration raids.

The Trump administration would likely try to gin up a kind of municipal-scale polycrisis that overwhelms citizens’ ability to register and understand what’s happening and fosters an illusion of uncontrollable chaos. In a classic reactionary pivot, it could then point to the havoc it’s enabled as evidence of the impossibility of progressive reform.

Dealing With a Five-Borough Polycrisis

A municipal politician’s instruments for dealing with this kind of assault are limited. Neither the formal instruments of office nor the informal levers of mass action completely negate the force of federal weapons. One lesson of past progressive enclaves such the Paris Commune, however, is that deflecting direct, spectacular confrontations is wise. The ensuing tactical options compel hard choices between building alliances through a claim to the moral high ground and playing hardball against a lawless national government.

The prospect of individualized targeting of the mayor with criminal or immigration law counsels against a highly concentrated, personalized form of decision-making. There’s a need for redundancy at the apex. The mayor might start with a team of trusted deputy mayors with experience in navigating policy and a general scheme for reform plotted out.

As Peter Dreier has already observed, many pieces of his proposed “sewer socialism” are already in view. Dreier also predicts that Mamdani would appoint experienced and aligned allies — he names comptroller Brad Lander as one — as deputy mayors. The appointment of people who have experience working the levers of municipal power who are aligned with Mamdani’s policy ambitions would be a kind of insurance against the punitive exercise of federal law to hassle and disable Mamdani. In effect, such appointments would mitigate the disruption caused by the federal targeting of the mayor personally.

Persecutory government actions targeting individuals offer the chance to seize the moral high ground, building a measure of hegemony across the political left. One doesn’t need the Paris Commune’s martyrs to achieve this effect. Even California governor Gavin Newsom looked sympathetic when threatened with arrest. Trump’s attacks on Mamdani have already induced New York Governor Kathy Hochul to draw closer to Mamdani.

As to the use of federal funds as a coercive tool, the city is as vulnerable as Mamdani personally.  According to the city’s comptroller, 8.3 percent of the city’s budget ($9.6 billion) flows from the federal government. Last year, the state as a whole was a net recipient of federal money, after having been a net donor for many years.

Yet funding cutoffs have been one of the few Trump strategies that have been successfully challenged in court. (Maine, for example, sued and got the funding restored). It seems likely that New York’s federal bench will be responsive — especially now that Trump has plainly stated that cutoffs would be motivated by illegal partisan ends. The crudely lawless Supreme Court, however, is another matter.

Moreover, New York City might engage in some self-help in response. When Gov. Newsom threatened to withhold Californians’ tax payments earlier this year in response to Trump’s actions, it was unclear how he would do this. By contrast, the financial hubs through which tax dollars flow are all in New York, as is the pivotal regional Reserve Bank. Just as the United States has used its control over key economic nodes to advance its ends, could the city leverage its privileged geographic position? Could it order banks to transfer illegally withheld dollars back to its coffers? What regulatory powers could it use to hinder the federal government’s other projects, imposing a friction to Trump’s unlawful threats?

The city might also use its regulatory power against the Trump organization in a tit-for-tat response for the president’s personalization of politics. Imagine, for example, a rigorous application of building and sanitation codes to all New York City structures owned in the president’s circle. This wouldn’t shake loose $9.6 billion, but it could rattle the president and his allies. The state’s attorney general already mooted seizing some of Trump’s properties as civil penalties — a threat that might be re-upped in response to the personalized, partisan use of prosecution powers.

Such tactics, however, would undermine Mamdani’s claim to moral high ground and so perhaps undermine attempts to win over centrists, especially in state government, who would otherwise be open to alliances. Whether this trade-off is warranted is hard to say in advance. A savvy administration might be able to deploy hardball tactics without losing the propaganda battle. But it needs to think through how to do so in advance.

Finally, given the second Trump administration’s actions thus far, we have to consider the possibility of military occupation. Such an action would be calibrated to elicit a mass response from the public — which, as in LA, can be framed through selective or misleading snapshots to discredit and defame the city and its supporters.

Given that mass action is unlikely to prevail ultimately against phalanxes of heavily armed troops, the key question is how to maximize the costs of military occupation on the federal side. Such action would likely impose steep costs on the financial and commercial elites making NYC their home, who are the anchor tenants in the current Republican coalition. How, then, could the municipality make federal military power a double-edged sword for Trump, perhaps triggering a market panic of the kind that provoked the retreat from his beloved tariffs?

While he responds to each of the federal government’s dictates, a new mayor would do well to look for other tools for placing pressure on the president and his allies, as well as the federal government. He could declare that federal officials need written permission to enter any and all city properties, including courthouses, or else be subject to criminal trespass penalties. Or the city could follow the example of the New York attorney general by using its general regulatory powers to force Trump businesses, including his new crypto-based dealings, to a halt.

Would any of this work? A sufficiently cruel and lawless federal government is unlikely to be fully dissuaded. But a carefully calibrated response by a Mayor Mamdani can minimize the costs of federal bullying, staving off its efforts to wound the vulnerable as blackmail, and making a measure of progressive self-rule possible. History teaches that while all this is difficult, it’s not impossible.