Zohran Mamdani and Jesse James

The Outlaw: Why Zohran Mamdani Deserves the Same Fame as Jesse James

They call him an outlaw because he refuses to be small.

Zohran Mamdani walks into a room and the air changes: not violent, not vengeful, but unflinching. There is an old American grammar for fame that rewards people who stare down institutions and refuse to speak the euphemisms that protect the comfortable. Jesse James became a story because he refused the moral vocabulary of his conquerors; he offered a language of reclamation that suited the dispossessed. Mamdani occupies the same rhetorical territory in a different century — not holding up trains, but holding up the terms of debate against the landlords, developers, and financiers who have made New York unaffordable.

If Jesse was romanticized as an insurgent against concentrated capital, Mamdani is romanticized by a generation that wants its city returned — not by bullets, but by ballot and bold policy that expropriates wealth from those who’ve hoarded it.

The Crisis Demands an Outlaw

Let us be clear: this is hero worship. It is meant to be cinematic. It is meant to give a public the character it needs to believe in a new politics.

New York City faces a housing affordability crisis unprecedented in modern history. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment exceeds $3,500 monthly. Over half of renters are rent-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Eviction rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels while wages stagnate. The city’s homelessness crisis sees over 100,000 people in shelters nightly, including 30,000 children.

This isn’t a technical failure. It’s organized extraction. Landlords and developers have turned housing – a human need – into a speculative asset class. They’ve lobbied against tenant protections, fought rent stabilization, and transformed neighborhoods into investment portfolios. Private equity firms now own entire apartment buildings, raising rents systematically while cutting services.

This isn’t a technical failure. It’s organized extraction. Landlords and developers have turned housing – a human need – into a speculative asset class. They’ve lobbied against tenant protections, fought rent stabilization, and transformed neighborhoods into investment portfolios. Private equity firms now own entire apartment buildings, raising rents systematically while cutting services. This is what Marxists call primitive accumulation in real time: the enclosure of common resources for private profit.

Can’t afford to live in NYC? The system tells you to work harder, move further, accept less. Mamdani says something different: expropriate the expropriators. Take back what was stolen. Not through individual acts of desperation, but through collective democratic power that redistributes wealth from landlords to tenants, from speculators to residents, from capital to community.

Can’t afford to live in NYC? The system tells you to work harder, move further, accept less. Mamdani says something different: expropriate the expropriators. Take back what was stolen. Not through individual acts of desperation, but through collective democratic power that redistributes wealth from landlords to tenants, from speculators to residents, from capital to community.

For many, Mamdani’s politics feel like outlawry because they violate the quiet, craven compromises that have long governed city hall. He does not seek permission from the same institutions that have sold the city’s future to the highest bidder. He speaks in plain, moral sentences where many others hide behind spreadsheets. He makes enemies of the comfortable and friends of the squeezed.

Fans call that courage; critics call it theatrical. Both are right. Theatricality is sometimes the only thing that converts private grievance into public power.

The Outlaw as Expropriator

The Jesse James comparison works because of archetype, not method. James’s fame rests on being an agent who dramatized dispossession and fought back against those who’d stolen from common people. The mythology of Jesse James as Robin Hood was created by sympathetic newspaper editors who portrayed him as stealing from the rich to give to the poor—though historians note there’s no evidence he actually did so. But the myth endured because it served a purpose: it gave the dispossessed a hero who refused to accept their exploitation. Mamdani performs a similar trick in the civic sphere: he takes the privacy of economic cruelty — evictions, speculation, the chokehold of predatory landlords — and throws it into the harsh light of political theater.

His “expropriation” is rhetorical and structural: seizing narrative, exposing complicity, and returning agency to renters, transit riders, and working families. Where nineteenth-century outlaws took from trains, the modern democratic outlaw takes from concentrated wealth through progressive taxation, rent control, and public ownership — and redistributes it via public policy.

This is not theft. This is justice. As Marx wrote, “The expropriators are expropriated.” The landlord class didn’t build those apartments with their own hands. They didn’t create the value that makes New York desirable. That value was created collectively – by workers, artists, immigrants, service employees, the entire ecosystem of human labor and culture. The landlord merely holds the deed and extracts tribute.

When Mamdani advocates for policies that transfer wealth from landlords to tenants, he’s not advocating theft. He’s advocating for taking back what was stolen in the first place. Rent is legalized extortion. Property speculation is organized dispossession. Housing commodification is systematic violence against the working class.

The outlaw label says: we will refuse to accept that violence as natural. We will refuse the rules that entrench it. We will use every democratic lever available to expropriate wealth from those who’ve monopolized it.

“Eat the Rich” as Policy Platform

When Mamdani invokes the slogan “eat the rich,” he’s not being metaphorical about consumption. He’s being literal about expropriation. The rich have gorged themselves on the surplus value extracted from working people. Now it’s time to redistribute that wealth.

What does eating the rich actually look like as policy?

Housing expropriation: Mamdani’s plan calls for 200,000 new affordable units funded by $100 billion in municipal bonds over ten years—tripling the city’s affordable housing production. This follows proven social housing programs that use public capital to buy buildings from private landlords and convert them to permanently affordable, publicly-owned housing. Vienna’s Gemeindebau system houses 60% of the city in non-market public housing. Barcelona’s anti-speculation measures fine empty apartments held for speculation and expropriate them for public use. These aren’t fantasies; they’re proven models.

Vacancy taxes: Charge landlords who keep apartments empty while people sleep on streets. Tax them punitively until holding property as speculation becomes unprofitable.

Rent control expansion: Not the neutered version that protects a shrinking pool of apartments, but comprehensive rent stabilization that covers all buildings and limits increases to inflation. Mamdani pledges to freeze rent for NYC’s 2 million rent-stabilized residents by appointing Rent Guidelines Board members “who understand that landlords are doing just fine.”

Mansion taxes and wealth taxes: Mamdani proposes a 2% income tax surcharge on residents earning over $1 million annually, generating billions to fund universal services. Make luxury real estate and concentrated fortunes fund the construction of permanent affordable housing. This is redistribution – taking from those who have too much to give to those who have too little. Progressive taxation has been shown to increase happiness and reduce inequality when used to fund public goods.

Public banking: Create a municipal bank that finances affordable housing, refuses to fund evictions, and puts democratic control over credit.

Community land trusts: Remove land from the speculative market permanently by placing it in collective ownership where homes can be sold but land cannot, keeping housing affordable in perpetuity.

These policies don’t beg the rich for charity. They take wealth from them through democratic power. They expropriate accumulated capital and redirect it toward human needs. Research shows that progressive redistribution actually improves economic growth while reducing inequality—the “growth only” agenda of the wealthy has failed. That’s what socialists mean by eating the rich: using state power to redistribute hoarded resources.

Hire a Socialist to Expropriate for You

Here’s the uncomfortable truth the comfortable don’t want you to understand: individual acts of desperation don’t change systems. One person refusing to pay rent gets evicted. One person taking what they need to survive gets arrested. The system is designed to crush individual resistance.

But collective democratic power – organized through elections, legislation, and social movements – can expropriate wealth legally, permanently, and at scale.

This is why you don’t take from the rich yourself. You hire a socialist like Mamdani to expropriate for you through democratic institutions. You elect someone willing to use the full power of government to transfer wealth from landlords to tenants, from developers to residents, from capital to community.

That’s not a crime. That’s politics. That’s what government is supposed to do: mediate the distribution of resources according to collective decisions about justice and need, not according to whoever already has the most money.

The right wing has always understood this, which is why they scream “theft!” whenever anyone proposes progressive taxation or tenant protections. They want you to believe that government redistribution is illegitimate – that only private accumulation is “natural.” But capitalism itself is a system of organized theft: wage theft, rent extraction, profit as surplus value stolen from workers.

When Mamdani uses government to expropriate from landlords, he’s not stealing. He’s stopping theft. He’s reclaiming what was taken from working people and returning it to them.

The Fame He Deserves

Jesse James became famous because he offered a story people needed: that resistance was possible, that the powerful could be defied, that justice could be taken if it wouldn’t be given. Newspaper editor John Newman Edwards crafted the Robin Hood myth around James, portraying him as a defender of poor Southerners against Northern exploitation—even though the reality was far more brutal.

Mamdani offers the same story for a different era. He shows that democratic socialism isn’t a compromise or a half-measure. It’s a direct confrontation with concentrated wealth, using every tool democracy provides to expropriate the expropriators. His billionaire tax proposals reflect his conviction that “we should not have billionaires” in a moment of such inequality.

His fame should match Jesse James’s – not despite his socialism, but because of it. He’s an outlaw to the ruling class because he refuses to treat their property rights as sacred. His policy platform includes not just housing but free childcare, fare-free buses, and city-owned grocery stores—a comprehensive program of wealth redistribution that economist Thomas Piketty argues is essential for 21st-century economic justice.

His fame should match Jesse James’s – not despite his socialism, but because of it. He’s an outlaw to the ruling class because he refuses to treat their property rights as sacred. He’s willing to seize vacant buildings for housing. He’s willing to tax wealth until there are no billionaires. He’s willing to make landlording unprofitable. He’s willing to eat the rich through policy.

That courage – the willingness to name class war and fight it democratically – is why he’ll be remembered. Not as a politician who managed decline, but as an insurgent who demanded transformation.

The best outcome this comparison promises is audacity married to competence: a leader who dares to be called an outlaw because he dares to expropriate from the powerful, and who then builds the policies that make a city livable for everyone.

That is the outlawism worth celebrating — not individual desperation, but collective democratic expropriation. Not theft, but the radical refusal to accept an unjust status quo and the disciplined effort to change it through organized power.

If greatness is measured by the scale of wealth you redistribute to the least advantaged, then the outlaw’s true glory is in having used rebellion to create durable justice. And that is a legend worth fighting for.