I have called the Atlantic “the worst magazine in America,” in part because it tends to take unfair swipes at leftists, making contemptuous declarations that aren’t backed up by sources and arguments. I compiled plenty of examples of this in my original essay about the magazine, but now we have one more to add to the pile. Annie Lowrey, in an article criticizing New York’s ranked-choice voting system, discusses the current mayoral race between disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo and democratic socialist State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. She writes: 

Mamdani is Cuomo’s rumpled, earnest foil. His résumé is thin; he worked as a campaign operative for a few years before winning a state assembly seat in 2020. He is a leftist in the Bernie Sanders mold, with a raft of great-sounding policies. Free buses! Free child care! Cheap groceries! Frozen rents! But a lot of these are impractical at best. Free buses would deprive the MTA of needed revenue. Free child care would require a mammoth tax hike that Albany would need to approve, which it has shown no interest in doing. Cheap groceries, Mamdani says, could be provided by new city-run stores—which would compete with existing bodegas, delis, and supermarkets owned and staffed by New Yorkers. A rent freeze would help people who live in rent-controlled apartments but inhibit housing construction, making the cost-of-living crisis worse.

Ah yes, all the classic tropes are here. I’m reminded of Hillary Clinton’s memoir, in which she mocked Bernie Sanders’ plans for free college and free healthcare by saying it was like offering every American a pony. Clinton portrayed Sanders and his supporters as unreasonable and naive, unwilling to answer pragmatic questions like “How are you going to pay for it?” and “How will you get it through Congress?” (In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that Medicare For All would be a much less expensive system through “lower administrative costs, lower reimbursements for medical services, and lower drug prices.”) 

“Impractical at best” implies that Lowrey really thinks the policies are worse than impractical. But are they? As usual in the Atlantic, no effort is made to actually dig into the question: How much would it cost to provide free citywide child care? Lowrey dismisses it out of hand by saying that the tax hike required would be “mammoth” and the state government would never approve it. She doesn’t mention that New Yorkers United For Child Care has put out a 79-page plan for how universal childcare for New York could work and be funded, including explaining why it’s necessary. For that matter, free childcare already exists in many places around the world. Last year, Chris Bryant of Bloomberg—who lives in Berlin—wrote a piece explaining his city’s system, and asking why more cities didn’t have similar systems in place: 

These policies sound radical, but kids in advanced economies attend primary school for free, so why not before? Relying on a tribe of near-relations to help is no longer realistic for many folks.

Bryant is right. Free universal childcare should sound no more radical than free public elementary school. It just involves lowering the age at which the government is willing to step in and provide care. New York City already did that once, with its universal free pre-K program that New York magazine described as a “miracle” and “incredibly popular,” a “testament to the ability of city government to execute ambitious and seemingly durable policies that help families across class and race and borough.” (Naturally, if you look back at The Atlantic in 2014, the year New York City’s program started, you’ll find “The Case Against Universal Preschool.” I cannot reiterate enough that this is the worst magazine in America.) I don’t understand what problems Lowrey has with the New Yorkers United For Child Care plan for how to implement and fund a universal program, because she doesn’t bother even trying to explain. You don’t have to when you’re crapping on a leftist in the Atlantic. You’re allowed to just say: Unrealistic! Impossible! Leftist proponents of a plan could give you a giant, carefully-written policy brief on exactly how they’re going to implement something, and it won’t matter in the slightest. 

Free childcare exists. It has been tried. It works. There may be political opposition to it, but what the naysayers like Lowrey never acknowledge is that their own dismissal of these ideas contributes to that very political challenge. I am sure plenty of legislators in Albany read the Atlantic. So when its writers heap scorn on proposals for change as being impossible, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, we often don’t know what’s politically possible (Mamdani’s successful campaign itself was highly improbable!) because politics can surprise us. Barack Obama, too, had a “thin resume” when he ran for president compared to his rival Hillary Clinton, but people turned out to be more interested in whether a candidate could inspire them and offer them hope than in whether they had political experience. In 1945, Britain was a hugely class-stratified society under Conservative governance, but shortly afterward it elected a Labour government and introduced a free universal public healthcare system that became the pride of the country. That required changing the political system. It required a massive fight. But it got done. And the people who weren’t helpful in that fight were those who played the part that Lowrey plays today, confidently opining that the plans were impossible.

One especially irritating tendency left-bashing centrists have is their selectiveness about what they consider “realistic.” (Matt Yglesias, for instance, loves to call leftists unrealistic while advocating increasing the American population to one billion.) Lowrey herself is actually concerned about poverty and inequality. (Her husband Ezra Klein, in the acknowledgements to Abundance, bizarrely credits her with having coined the term “affordability crisis,” which she did not.) But her own preferred antipoverty policy is a universal basic income. That policy—giving every single person free money from the government every month—is surely just as radical, and a much heavier political lift than free childcare (and UBI schemes have their own problems). In fact, Lowrey tells me she is a supporter of universal childcare, but just believes it should be enacted by the federal government. Given that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, surely getting such a program nationwide is a much heavier political lift! 

Free public transit is also not some totally kooky scheme. The entire country of Luxembourg has free transit. The city of Alburqueque made public transit permanently fare-free in 2023 after a successful two-year pilot program. As the city’s mayor said: “Since the zero-fare pilot program began, we have seen the positive impact it has had on the lives of our neighbors, friends and visitors getting around town… Zero-fares is one example of how Albuquerque is paving the way for cities across the nation to implement equity-based initiatives that benefit everyone.” There is evidence that free buses get more people riding the bus, make the bus faster, and reduce assaults on drivers. Whether those objectives will successfully be achieved under Mamdani remains to be seen, but making New York City’s buses function like Albuquerque’s buses doesn’t seem so utopian that it can be dismissed in a single sentence. 

It’s intensely annoying to me to see someone not engage with the serious arguments for a public policy change, and then pretend that they’re the ones being serious. But I remind myself that this happens whenever a progressive politician proposes a major change. It is always called impossible, unrealistic, naive. Every single damn time. And you just have to ignore the people who say this, unless they can actually provide proof that what you’re proposing can’t be done. I do think it’s the responsibility of advocates for a policy to explain how it can be funded. But since advocates of universal childcare have done that, they deserve a proper response. 

I do not know how much of Zohran Mamdani’s program is politically possible in New York. I do know that in order to test whether it’s possible, you have to first build a movement in support of it and fight hard to get it done. If you fail, and fail again, then it’s possible you just can’t win. But if the history of social movements tells us anything, it’s that the limits of the politically possible are hard to determine in advance, because many things that looked like they could not be done—the election of a Black president, nationwide same-sex marriage, Medicare, the end of slavery, the enfranchisement of women, free public schools—were nevertheless accomplished through the diligent efforts of hardworking activists who defied the skepticism of useless pundits.