A few days ago, CNN news anchor Abby Phillip interviewed the Democratic candidate in the New York City mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani. He did what he always does, staying focused on his core message of making the city more affordable for ordinary New Yorkers with initiatives like free childcare, rent freezes for already rent-stabilized apartments, and eliminating bus fares. Mamdani has emerged as one of the best messengers for a democratic socialist agenda, combining a consistently compelling and charismatic delivery with relentless message discipline. As always, it was a pleasure to watch him in action.

Phillip’s side of the conversation, by contrast, revealed the limited political imaginations of the custodians of respectability at CNN. She seemed to be arguing that any moves toward substantial redistribution of wealth from the rich to everyone else should be off-limits.

At one point, Phillip raised the topic of Tesla’s proposed pay package to Elon Musk, which is poised to make him a trillionaire. Presumably fishing for a sound bite where Mamdani would come off as a fire-breathing radical, she asked him, “Do you think trillionaires should exist?”

He’s already on record proudly saying that billionaires should not exist. As a matter of logic and arithmetic, he clearly believes that we shouldn’t have trillionaires either. In his answer to Phillip, though, he took the opportunity to broaden the topic and emphasize the other half of the equation. New York is full of working-class people “who keep the city running,” he said, but who, in many cases, now have to commute to work in the city from homes across state lines. What kind of society combines that with such rampant accumulation of wealth that we’re now talking about trillionaires?

Mamdani emphasized that these aren’t two separate, coincidental phenomena. Highlighting recent cuts to Medicaid and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, which have coincided with tax breaks for the wealthy, he painted a picture of a massive transfer of wealth in the wrong direction.

Phillip’s response was fascinating. She said:

I definitely take the point that this inequality has only increased in recent years. But we also live in a world, especially this city, where it is powered by businesses that come here, that hire people. Job numbers came out just today, indicating that there’s a slowdown across the country in hiring. Is now really the time to raise taxes on those corporations, but also, to exacerbate the tensions between the rich and the poor? Or do we need each other to make this economy work?

Mamdani countered that inequality itself is what generates tensions, that it’s a lot harder to hire people when applicants don’t feel like they can afford to live in New York, and that his tax proposals are actually fairly moderate. He wants to increase the top corporate tax rate to match what’s already in place in New Jersey, and the modest increase in personal income taxes to fund his proposal would only impact the tiny minority of New Yorkers who make at least a million dollars a year.

Those are all pretty unassailable answers. But what was most astonishing about this exchange was the juxtaposition of Phillip’s two back-to-back questions. On the one hand, she herself told Mamdani that the wealthiest Americans are poised to start becoming trillionaires. On the other hand, she wanted to know if “now [is] really the time” to raise taxes on the rich and their companies. If a time when the distribution of wealth has become so farcically unequal that we’re going to have trillionaires isn’t the time for some redistribution, when exactly is the time?

To put this in perspective, here’s an example I used a couple of years ago in Jacobin to illustrate how absurd it is that we even have billionaires:

Imagine that a vampire came to the New World with Christopher Columbus in 1492. Every day from the moment he landed on Hispaniola to the present, the vampire somehow managed to earn or steal the equivalent of a thousand 2023 American dollars. (The vampire just stacks the money in coffins, so he isn’t earning any interest and none of it ever gets spent.) Not only would he be nowhere near a billionaire today — he wouldn’t even be a fifth of his way there. Five hundred thirty-one years have passed since 1492. That’s 139,815 days. He’d have less than $140 million.

Well, let’s change the example. Now, instead of stacking a thousand dollars a day in coffins, the vampire stacks up a million dollars a day. This time, he’d be a billionaire by 1495. But it would take him almost two thousand, seven hundred and forty years to make it to a trillion dollars. If he started in 1492, he’d become a trillionaire in the year 4232.

We can argue about exactly how much inequality a decent society would tolerate, or which principles we should apply to decide whether any given inequality can be justified. Plato believed that, ideally, a well-run city shouldn’t allow any citizen to accumulate more than four times as much as any other. He believed such a vast gulf in wealth made it impossible for people to feel like they were part of a single community and thought that — at least in a city being started from scratch, where such excessive inequalities could be nipped in the bud — the laws should allow any citizen suspected of exceeding this maxim to be taken to court. Plato’s proposal makes Mamdani’s proposal that New Yorkers who make at least a million dollars a year pay an extra $20,000 in taxes to fund programs to make the city more livable for the working class sound downright conservative.

Perhaps you think Plato went much too far. Maybe you think a ratio of ten or twenty or fifty to one is fine. But that’s hairsplitting. The central question is how anyone — that is, anyone who isn’t an absolutist libertarian implacably opposed to all redistribution as a matter of principle — could oppose redistributing wealth at a time when our most bloated plutocrats are about to become trillionaires? Do we have to wait for quadrillionaires? Quintillionaires? When rich people own their own planets, can we grant that that might be the time? Or even then, will we have to wait to see what the rate of job growth was like in the last quarter before we begin to entertain the idea that an incremental increase in the top marginal tax rate might be in order?

The best thing about Zohran Mamdani is that he represents a break from the consensus definition of “reasonable” politics safeguarded by the likes of CNN. Now is exactly the right time for that to happen.