Zohran Mamdani Is Not Radical Enough
Dorothy Day would not have voted for Zohran Mamdani.
When Mamdani took office as New York City’s 112th mayor, he became the first self-described democratic socialist to lead a major American city since Milwaukee’s Frank Zeidler left office in 1960. His sprawling platform centers on the city’s affordability crisis and includes promises to freeze rents for two million rent-stabilized tenants, build two hundred thousand new affordable units, and provide government-run grocery stores and free universal childcare.
Dorothy Day was a New Yorker as well. She arrived in the city in 1916 and never really left, dying at Maryhouse in Manhattan in 1980. With Peter Maurin, she co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, launched a newspaper, and opened houses of hospitality that feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, more than 180 of which still operate today. Both Mamdani and Day are defined by their commitment to workers and the poor, but only one still stands as a radical in the fight for justice, and it isn’t Mamdani.
Behind Mamdani’s Political Success
Mamdani won for a number of reasons. His charisma, his sharp messaging on affordability, and Andrew Cuomo’s uninspiring performance all contributed. But the primary reason centers on his grassroots community organizing, campaigning, and persona. The third proved powerful enough to draw out a whole new cohort of young, first-time voters who secured the election for him. To these voters, Mamdani, unlike the establishment, cares about making real change for working and poor New Yorkers rather than just winning elections. During his campaign, he built a reputation for showing up everywhere, canvassing neighborhoods typically ignored in mayoral races, meeting people on the street, appearing at clubs, and riding subways, buses, and Citi Bikes. During the recent winter storm, a video of Mamdani helping to shovel out a car from the snow went viral, causing a flurry of adoring memes to appear on X.
Despite the effectiveness of this image in winning him the election, however, Mamdani’s actual political platform leaves New Yorkers wanting more. Though he crafted a public image as a community organizer, his actual policy lacks that altruistic, humanitarian substance.
The Original Radical
Dorothy Day was a radical. As a young adult in New York, she threw herself into the city’s left-wing movements, experimenting with socialism, communism, and syndicalism. But it was anarchism, especially the Christian anarchism of Leo Tolstoy, that captured her deepest political convictions. Her ultimate conversion to Catholicism in 1927 finally convinced her to leave the movements she had been part of: “My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.” Five years later, Day came under the influence of the Catholic laborer-philosopher Peter Maurin who, as she put it, came to her “with Kropotkin in one pocket and St. Francis in the other.” Meeting Maurin influenced her to systematically fuse her anarchism with her Catholic faith, a fusion she would live out for the rest of her life through the Catholic Worker movement she and Maurin co-founded.
Living in voluntary poverty on the Lower East Side of New York, Day regularly joined strikes and protests that landed her in jail. One of her most famous acts of civil disobedience came in 1955, when she and fellow Catholic workers refused to participate in the Civil Defense Administration’s nuclear attack drill. Instead of taking shelter, they sat on a park bench in front of New York’s City Hall. Their pamphlets explained that the Catholic workers considered the drills “to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war.” Day would be arrested five times for these protests.
An Unlikely Comparison
Zohran Mamdani’s theory of social change is more moderate than Day’s. His strategy aims to capture political power, appoint allies to key positions, and pass legislation. That isn’t to say he hasn’t had his share of strikes and protests, though. In the plethora of demonstrations he joined during his time as an assemblyman, (most recently, when he stood with striking Starbucks workers alongside Bernie Sanders in December 2025), he demonstrated his belief that solidarity in the streets and power in city halls reinforce each other. For Mamdani, the government is an institution to be captured and mobilized against the rich.
Day’s approach was vastly different. Day never cast a ballot in her life. Her mode of change was pure direct action, performed without appealing to legislation or municipal budgets. Pursuing social change through the mechanism of the state, Day believed, meant participating in a system that dominates the vulnerable while upholding the wealthy. She saw many of the left-wing figures of her time as succumbing to the tyrannical temptations of the state and noted how this happened with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara: “They work where they are. They begin at the bottom. And then, of course, they go off and become the bureaucratic state.” For this reason, Day ensured from the beginning that the Catholic Worker would not seek government funding. She was adamant that “[g]overnments should never do what small bodies can accomplish.” For Day, lasting change happens through what small bodies can accomplish voluntarily with mutual aid, not through the coercive powers of the government.
Mamdani’s signature initiatives make the contrast particularly stark. His plan for the Department of Community Safety, for instance, would deploy teams of government-employed social workers to respond to mental health crises and homelessness across the city, with proposed funding of more than a billion dollars. The New York Police Department currently handles roughly 180,000 calls involving emotionally disturbed individuals each year; Mamdani wants trained professionals on the municipal payroll to take over that responsibility.
Universal childcare is another key plank in Mamdani’s platform. “The best way to keep families in New York City is to make it cheaper to raise one here,” Mamdani argues. He notes that families with young children are twice as likely to leave the city, and he cites estimates that inadequate childcare cost New York $23 billion in lost economic activity in 2022. His solution is a massive expansion of state-provided childcare so that parents can get back to work. It is an ambitious vision of the state as a healer, presenting a “humane” approach that aids the vulnerable through the deployment of professionalized workers funded by public dollars.
Day would have recoiled.
She believed that love cannot be legislated and must be performed voluntarily. In The Long Loneliness, she laments that the state had set up “so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials” and that this apparatus was, drawing on the title of the book by Hilaire Belloc, “aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State.” The Catholic Worker houses of hospitality were designed to help the homeless without the coldness of bureaucratic mediation that Day so reviled. Regarding childcare, she detested “the dictatorship of the benevolent state, which takes possession of the family” and thought that “[t]he family should look after its own.” In fact, she rejected technocratic solutions of all kinds. This was because of her “strong sense of man’s dignity and worth and what was due to him in justice.”
Day wanted the poor to encounter not a caseworker operating in an institution, but a brother or a sister. “I felt that charity was a word to choke over,” Day wrote. “Who wanted charity?” Rather than the mechanical distribution of “charity,” Day believed in the personal sacrifice of taking care of one’s neighbor. Day extended this understanding of love in action to the political level, where she envisioned widespread “family ownership of land, workshops, stores, transport, trades, professions, and so on” that took care of one another through community rather than the state. She believed strongly in the power of the local “insight and knowledge” possessed by those who were powerless, and thought they had real capacity to organize and help one another in a way that is worthy of their innate value as human persons. It was her keen understanding of the human person as transcendent that yielded this personal and political call for such a self-sacrificial, dignified response to injustice: “The mystery of the poor is this,” Day wrote in 1964: “That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him.” The poor, for Day, were not objects of policy or constituents to be served, but Christ present in the world. They deserved to be treated as such.
Day lived out this conviction as a metaphysical reality. When Catherine Doherty, founder of the Friendship House movement, visited the Catholic Worker and no beds were available, Day offered to share her own. Later that night a woman with syphilis came to the door seeking shelter. Day told Doherty to sleep in the bathtub and took the sick woman into her bed. When Doherty worried about contagion, Day replied, “You don’t understand, this is Christ who has come to ask for a place to sleep. He will take care of me.” When a social worker once asked how long guests were permitted to stay at the house of hospitality, Day answered:
We let them stay forever. They live with us, they die with us, and we give them a Christian burial. We pray for them after they are dead. Once they are taken in, they become members of the family. Or rather they always were members of the family. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ.
The road to meet the poor face to face is extremely difficult as Day’s life, and contemporary saintly souls, prove, but it is indeed the most humanizing. Her witness is a call for us to do the same, especially when it is so easy to outsource our own work of loving to institutions rather than willing it ourselves. Day’s radical call to love rings louder for us today than Zohran’s Servile State solution ever will.
Image licensed via Wikimedia Commons. Image resized for scale.