Take heed Democrats. The Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is a Socialist and, much worse, an antisemite.
New York City has had a foreign policy ever since Peter Styvesant was Governor of New Amsterdam and was instructed from the Netherlands to accept Jewish immigrants from Surinam even though he didn’t want them. In the second part of the twentieth century, candidates for mayor visited “the Three I Ring”, which meant Italy, Ireland and Israel, so as to appeal to their constituents. Ed Koch refused to meet with Yasser Arafat when he visited New York to attend the United Nations and Fidel Castro made a point of staying at a Harlem hotel when he came to New York. It has been a long time since Richard Hatcher became the first Black to become mayor of a major city when he became mayor of Gary, Indiana in the Sixties and now most major cities are led by people of color or women or both. And now Zoltan Mamdani, a follower of Islam and a naturalized citizen from Uganda has won the Democratic nomination to be mayor of New York, the only Muslim mayor of a big city. New York belies Tip O'Neill's old adage that politics is always local. It is always bigger than that as in a mayoral race in New York or a Presidential race taken control; by national events and figures.
Mamdani is a member of the association of Democratic Socialists along with Alexandra Olivia Cortez. That might seem quite radical but Mamdani has offered a minor set of proposals such as providing free transit service when students and elders have highly reduced charges and lower fees for heavy users and it is not clear how hoodlums riding the subways could not be curtailed except by turnstiles and minimum feeds. Offering government groceries, one to each borough, so as to avoid food deserts, wouldn’t make much of a difference unless heavily subsidized and that would interfere with the chain supermarkets available in most neighborhoods. Sounds good but does not address the problem of why the poor eat badly, relying on McDonald’s rather than cooking.
Mamdani’s biggest proposal is to create more affordable housing by making rent needs tested so that rents could not be stabilized if tenants pay less than a quarter of their income. But that would result in middle class people having to abandon the city, including the civil servants and elected officials like Mamdani himself. The problem of affordable housing goes very deep. There has been a shortage in housing since at least the end of the Second World War when housing projects were expanded and middle class people moved to the suburbanized potato fields in Long Island where cheaper homes were built in new developments with no payments down and many mortgages guaranteed for veterans benefits. The question today is that there is little open land to claim within NYC and money can be made by adding a few amenities to luxury apartments rather than by building many on a smaller margin. Housing construction needs to be revolutionized rather than trying to cut off the middle class and Staten Island is too far away from Manhattan to make it an extension of NY even if there are plans to make it more amenity filled, the borough more connected to New Jersey
In general a socialist agenda is not very plausible or progressive. Socialism means the government ownership of the means of production, such as coal as when Attlee was UK Prime Minister. I support the American system of a mixed economy whereby large corporations are regulated by the government and the government requires high taxes of the rich so as to provide entitlements to whomever needs them so that they can fulfill their own aspirations. That gradualism resulted in Obama's ACA that resulted in 90% health coverage for the American people. Bernie wants it to be 100% and more efficient but we are not starting from scratch and would never have gotten that far if insurance companies had not been brought in and it would still have required regulations equivalent to what the insurance companies do to control expenses. My meds can't be renewed until the time about when my meds are used up.
The problem with Mamdani is not that he is a Socialist. Cuomo the groper is to be preferred to Mamdani the antisemite. He refused on “Meet The Press” though repeatedly pressed not to disavow the phrase "globalize the intifada" and offering only the platitude that he wants peace for all people. At another point he said that he was retiring the phrase, which was like Trump saying he would no longer call Obama as born in Kenya but without admitting the birther claim wasn’t true. At some other point, Mamdoni said the phrase was ambiguous. He can’t rid himself of the idea because it is so close to his core. The phrase isn’t ambiguous. It refers to two uprisings against Israel which included bombing pizza parlors in Jerusalem, IThe phrase is a declaration of war which was ended when Israel set up walls around their own territories that are thought of to be humiliating in that there are checkpoints to allow Palestinians into Israel proper which allow a number of Palestinians to enter so as to get work. The phrase is ambiguous only in this sense. Does it just mean kill all the Jews in Israel or also Jewry all over the world? Half of world Jewry was killed by Hitler. The population of world Jewry is now 15 million. There are 7 million Jews in Israel. Kill half of world Jewry again? That is what Hamas proposes. What does Mondami say about that? If he wants the Palestinians to win their war just say so even though it might cost him the mayoral election. So he trims
And I didn't notice that the Allies sent food to the starving blockaded Japanese until Japan surrendered. In fact, those in subsequent generations who disapproved of using atom bombs against Japan said that a better course was the continuation of a blockade that would starve the Japanese into surrender. Have we advanced so far that starvation of the enemy which was used in medieval sieges and at Vicksburg by Grant no longer morally acceptable or is it that higher moral standards are to be applied to Israelis rather than other people, which a suppose is a kind of left handed compliment despite the hatred of Jews implicit. Politics is very enlightening because it reduces debates to very clear choices.
Mamdani is important because his charm, eloquence and easy solutions can change the present political balance of forces. Nancy Pelosi and now Hakleem Jeffries have been able to control the Far Left. They contained the Squad of Four by being nice to them and they knew that being obstreperous would hurt the party in elections. So they lay low. The Republicans, for their part, are solidly behind Trump. So much for a collection of old fashioned traditional Republicans concerned to lower the debt and stand up to Russia and promote traditional values in local communities rather than congressional legislation. Only Rand Paul and Susan Collins and the lame duck Thom Tillis voted against the Big Beautiful Bill, which is Trump’s major achievement, because other arbitrary executive orders can be reversed. Even Lisa Murkowski could be bought off by goodies to Alaska. So there is nothing to do but wait until the midterms to change things but impatient Democrats could turn to an off year election to get their juices churning . Mondomi can shift the Democratic electorate so that the Progressive wing of the party, which follows the lead of Schumer and other centrists, can become the leading caucus and drive the Democratic agenda out from under Democratic centrism despite the fact that Biden was not really a centrist but wanted a more active intervention of government into society since Lyndon Johnson
If Mamdani is elected mayor he might be the catalyst for a Progressive agenda made up mostly of non-solution solutions to long standing problems but that would be in keeping in an age of Republicans who solve the American debt by increasing it, arresting and expelling aliens even though the nation needs their workers and threatening to annex Canada, which nobody wants. .But Mamdani could also do real mischief with his half baked domestic agenda such as defunding the police which a few years ago he supported and serious damage to foreign relations by palling around with Hamas, just as Trump pals around with Putin, and demonizing the Israelis and the Jews,Yes, Democrats might need new blood, but not that one, just as Republicans who are not opposed to a woman President were just opposed to the two particular ones who got nominated.
Then there is the problem of age. In recent years there is much concern about how old political leaders have become. Biden seemed superannuated and so were Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, while Trump seemed alert and his mental deficiencies were of long standing rather than age. He never did read much. But today, with the changing of the guard, the United States is facing some leadership which is too young, and Zoltan Mamdani qualifies for that. He is in his late twenties, not eligible to be a U S Senator, and served only three two year terms as a state assemblyman, and yet he is in line to become the second hardest elective office in the country, the Secretary of Defense not elected. The budget is every year and there are more constituencies to flatter and overcome than in most countries. You might expect that a mayor of New York has enough experience to know about emergency management and political crises. How did he emerge at all as a contender to juggle New York City? Bloomberg had no political experience but he was the head of a major corporation but it is still a surprise that he fit so well into the harness of government while Trump, also without political experience, still seems an ignorant and mean spirited man, a wild card who might say and do any number of things off the cuff. Mamdani is, to say the least, not seasoned and so, I would think, not sure about how to evaluate assistant commissioners and their policies, executives having learned that they have to make decisions about which they know little, something any upper management type has learned or at least experienced and so made do. Forget about national politics. What about New York City?. I think of New Yorkers as pretty smart cookies about voting and they are right to think of Adams and Cuomo as damaged goods and Curtis Sliva is an always ran. Mamdani is fortunate to have to contend with a very low bar.