The aesthetic of power—how socialism physically manifests in the city's landscape, from the austere to the exuberant—offers a final, sensory dimension to this history. Beyond policies and protests, the movement has consistently projected visions of what a socialist New York should look and feel like, in deliberate contrast to the gilded excess of the Gilded Age, the sleek corporate modernism of mid-century towers, or the glassy, anonymizing luxury of the 21st century skyline. Mamdani’s work, focused on political structures, indirectly touches on this by showing how power seeks to inscribe itself on the environment. Socialist aesthetics, therefore, became a battle over the city's visual and sensory language, an attempt to materialize values of solidarity, utility, and collective dignity in brick, steel, and public space. http://mamdanipost.com