I moved to New York City within days of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s birth in October 1991. For the next 34 years, its inhabitants—even some of my fellow libertarians—assured me the Democrats aren’t communists or intifada sympathizers, indeed that it was rude and troublemaking for me to say so. Now, thanks in part to that fuzzy, self-congratulatory tolerance talk, unless most of the political spectrum here unites behind Andrew Cuomo for mayor at the 11th hour, I’ll likely soon be governed by a self-proclaimed socialist who also wants to “globalize the intifada.”
On the bright side, I guess we’ve left behind the era that was in full swing back in the 1990s, peaking around the time the World Trade Center was destroyed, when the left was explicitly against “globalization” of almost any kind.
Recall that the big popular leftist tome at the time the Towers came down, published one year earlier, was Empire, the anti-capitalist and anti-globalist manifesto cowritten by Duke literature professor Michael Hardt and Italian terrorist/murderer Antonio Negri. Some of its cultish readers wondered online in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks whether a few of their own might have been responsible.
Political fads change. Authoritarianism usually advances, though. Angry young males of numerous different philosophies particularly love authority—not the current authority, perhaps, but the hypothetical one they’ll soon impose on us all.
Every such movement has its fig leaves of apparent anti-authoritarianism. Mamdani doesn’t want to turn New York City into Mecca, as some of his more bigoted opponents might fear, but he loves talk of boycotting, defunding, and arresting parts of the overseas Israeli governmental support network—and he does say he wants New York City to become a mecca for publicly-funded sex change operations, even for minors.
I had thought even very liberal parents were cautious enough to fear lifelong body-altering decisions being made by impressionable minors—about things as superficial as tattoos—but liberals have been patting themselves on the back for pushing sex change operations for kids for over a decade now, so a Mamdani mayoralty would be a big win for them. It doesn’t even undermine his Muslim cred much, since the attitude in much of the Muslim world is that being a gay male is so monstrous, one is better off transforming into a lady. I don’t make the rules.
Ironically, one of the blowhards who profited most from promoting a crusade against the Muslim world in the aftermath of 9/11, William Kristol, now says he’d vote for Mamdani if he lived in New York City, even if Mamdani is a 34-year-old radical who has previously worked only for his rich and famous filmmaker mom and, almost unnoticed, briefly in the State Assembly. Would that conservatives, or former conservatives or whatever Kristol is now, cared as much about keeping New York City a functional part of the United States as they do about making Venezuelan oil part of the U.S., one imperialist mission potentially so lucrative that the often anti-neoconservative Trump can get behind it.
It’s hard to feel urgently threatened by socialists in Venezuela when we’ve got plenty of them in pockets right here in the U.S., particularly in Manhattan, Brooklyn, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and various college campuses. Their liberal enablers are palpably champing at the bit for opportunities to lecture people about how young Muslim mayoral candidates are not necessarily socialists and only a crazy right-winger would think so, but the Democrats are the ones on the verge of electing another self-proclaimed Muslim democratic socialist, Omar Fateh, for mayor in Minneapolis, so there may be a pattern here, just saying (at least at this juncture in history; as noted above, times change).
One faux-moderate New Yorker, semi-comedian Jon Stewart, plainly having learned nothing from his recent friendly interview of libertarian Nick Gillespie, has enthused that Mamdani’s mayoralty would be a “Jackie Robinson”-like historic win for various marginalized constituencies—including Muslims, youth, progressives, and democratic socialists, though there’s nothing marginal about those communities in New York City.
By the time Mamdani’s ruling us and funneling taxpayer money to left-wing boondoggles and allies, we’ll probably have heard numerous other local celebrities join the desiccated Fran Lebowitz (the inexplicably famous Phyllis Diller of New York intellectuals) in fawning over him—maybe a They Might Be Giants fundraising concert or two. Prove me wrong, John and John, please. Again, if you called them all commies back when they were on Letterman in the 1990s, you’d have been called paranoid.
If, even as I type this, a last-minute Andrew Cuomo surge does rise to save us, though, rest assured I haven’t forgotten he’s a menace in his own right, having with his early-Covid policy of putting the infected in vulnerable and densely-packed nursing homes caused about half of the U.S.’s Covid casualties and thereby led to all sorts of panicked, skewed, unscientific extrapolations about how super-dangerous the disease supposedly was and how radically the world would have to be altered forevermore to keep us “safe” and separated by at least six feet from our loved ones with the help of constant surveillance and endless booster shots, etc.
For the most part, civilization lumbers along regardless of its leaders—and Andrew’s reporter brother Chris shows some signs of growing more moderate and open minded than when I worked a few doors away from him at ABC News back in the 1990s, so maybe there’s hope for the whole family—but a few stupid ideas can wreck a major metropolis, whether here or in Detroit, Portland, San Francisco, and other places incapable of admitting error. Another Covid-like lockdown or EBT/SNAP-induced wave of riots could change New York City in ways we are for the moment too complacent to anticipate.
If it all goes to Hell now, history suggests the leftists who voted for it will rationalize that right-wingers were to blame somehow, and when that doesn’t work they’ll claim they were nostalgic for the 1970s days of subway violence and graffiti here anyway, like a leftist science columnist for The New York Times I knew several years ago. The squalor is cool if the left causes it, outrageous if the right or capitalism does.
The real anti-squalor mayoral candidate still making a dent as election day arrives here is Curtis Sliwa, famed beret-wearing vigilante. You know he wouldn’t want the whole city turning a blind eye to crime and skipping out on its checks come budget time, but he can probably only play spoiler at this late point in the Democrat-dominated race. He’s technically a Catholic conservative, like many urban non-leftists in America, but unlike most of the ones with whom I’ve rubbed elbows here (including a few visitors from England in the orbit of The Spectator just the other night), he’s also crusty and more-populist-than-the-populists, favoring some almost adorably humble policies such as using feral cat colonies to combat rats, saying the cats would be “caped crusaders at night.”
That’s nice. Instead, we may be trying to figure out how to survive as feral colonies of humans here in a couple of years.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
