Zohran Mamdani will be the next mayor of New York City He’s already at 50% in the latest poll, so even with New York’s abominable ranked choice ballot, Mamdani will likely be declared the winner on election night or soon after.
There has never been such an unapologetic socialist winning an executive office like the New York City mayor. We’ve had socialist congressmen (AOC) and senators (Bernie Sanders) win federal races. Still, there has never been a socialist in charge of a city with a population of more than 8 million people and an economy the size of some small countries.
Giving Mamdani the keys to a city that large with a $116 billion budget is like giving your teenage son a bottle of Scotch and the keys to your car and telling him to go out and have a real good time. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
That disastrous situation has happened in NYC before. In 1975, “runaway budgets, gimmicky accounting, overpromised entitlements, and politicians more interested in ideology than arithmetic” created a budgetary crisis so profound that Washington had to bail out the city, says Richard Farley, author of a recent book on the causes and effects of that crisis called “Drop Dead.” Farley told Reason.com’s Nick Gillespie that he sees a mass exodus from the city if Mamdani gets most of what he wants.
“If you increase the budget by $20 billion—which I think he’s capable of doing—that’s an increase of 15 to 20 percent in a time when every projection says revenue is going to decrease. If you throw into that taxes that will drive people to New Jersey, Westchester, etc.” Farley warned.
The difference between 1975 and today is that Donald Trump sits in the White House, and Republicans own Congress. Neither is likely to sign off on a city bailout.
Against this backdrop, the wokest of woke politicians is about to get into office, have much of what he wants enacted by the New York City council, and then sit back and watch the city explode.
Manhattan Institute’s Greg Conti wonders if Mamdani’s failures and the possible implosion of the city will end up killing wokeness.
First Things:
All in all, though some sharp edges have been smoothed, Mamdani still operates by the late-2010s academic-radicalism-escaped-from-campus playbook that we call wokeism. He demonstrates the approach we can expect to see from the far left of the Democratic party in a post-peak-woke age: in some ways softer in presentation, more capable of retailing an economic message, but still laced with a cultural radicalism that clashes with American traditions.
In all of this, Mamdani espouses the convictions of an important segment of the Democratic party base. Though support for many of these positions was never very high even in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death and has fallen off still more since, in New York City there is a key class of voter for whom these elements remain central to their worldview. The crucial sociological facts about Mamdani’s support are two. First, he won college graduates handily (though, tellingly, his advantage waned at the tiptop of high-education areas).
Indeed, as Conti points out, a large segment of Mamdani’s support is among college degree holders who make roughly $70,000 to $140,000 per year. That would be a fortune in Streator, Ill., or most red states. In New York, it’s the middle class.
This is a group we might call, to adapt Karl Marx, the lumpencommentariat. They are those whose investment in education and induction into the worldview of university progressivism leads them to expect knowledge-work that is not only financially remunerative but also morally or socially fulfilling and valorized. Think here of NGO staff, grad students, many full-time academics, social workers, journalists, those in (or trying to break into) the city’s artistic scenes and cultural industries, and the medley of folks one acerbic twitterato calls “marginal creatives.” For several years, political scientists have been noting that the surest source of support for left-wing parties is now “high-education, low-income voters.” This cohort was the beating heart of wokeism even at its apex. (Wokeism was never, despite leftist self-fashioning, widely popular among the working class.) But now that wokeism has receded, this class is just about its last bastion.
Mamdani’s inevitable failure to bring about a socialist paradise will disillusion these “marginal creatives” and other members of the “lumpencommentariat.” More importantly, it will move the city’s elites to ensure that Zamdani and his “Woke 2.0” cohorts never get close to the levers of power again.
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A Mamdani turn as mayor will not totally kill wokeness, but it will almost certainly force a retreat from which it might be impossible to recover.
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