Would Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores work? Ask some that tried.

Anne Rathbone Bradley is the vice president of academic affairs at the Fund for American Studies.

In September 1989, two years before he would be elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin visited a Randalls grocery store outside Houston during a speaking tour of the United States. The visit was life-changing for Yeltsin; he was stunned by the quality and quantity of goods available to ordinary Americans, compared with what was then obtainable in the Soviet Union. In his words, the average American had access to a greater abundance of food options than even Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time.