To judge from many of the comments on this site, a substantial number of readers have difficulty understanding the sophisticated modes of thinking of the New York progressive. Looking at New York’s official progressive orthodoxy in action, these readers often see illogic and inconsistencies that seem to make no sense at all. And yet, despite the apparent internal contradictions, the New York progressives themselves generally achieve near or even complete unanimity as to many of the important policies that they seek to implement. How does this work?
We need to take a deeper look. So I thought for today it would be useful to examine some recent policies touted by the progressive crowd, to see what insights we can glean about exactly how they think about the world.
As a starting example, there is the proposal of our boy Mayor Zohran Mamdani to solve the problem of “affordability” of groceries by opening five large City-owned stores to sell groceries more cheaply. I wrote about this proposal in my post of September 2, titled “Here’s An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!” The post reported on a big City announcement on July 28 of a plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to open the new stores, with the announcement specifically claiming that a “core basket of everyday groceries” would be “30 percent cheaper” at the City-owned stores. And yet, the post reported, the same progressive crowd had been fighting — successfully! — for decades to keep Walmart out of New York City. And meanwhile a big Consumer Reports study from February 2026 had found grocery prices at Walmart to average about 30% less than prices at some other large chains with big market shares in the City.
Are the opposition to Walmart and the simultaneous support for subsidized City-owned stores just completely inconsistent? Or is there a deeper logic that we are missing?
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