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Zohranpocalypse?

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Zohranpocalypse?

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What will Zohran do? Early next week, New York City is set to elect our first democratic socialist mayor (if we’re to believe the polls). The luxury-beliefs class is thrilled. The rest of us? Not so much. I, for one, don’t think Jews are about to be victimized by widespread antisemitic hate crimes that go unprosecuted, or that sharia’s about to come after me for the way I dress, or that we’re going to have to wait in breadlines to get anchovies and steak from Citarella. But I am confident New York will get worse in more insidious ways, and that national Democrats might take the wrong lessons away from this and seek to reproduce this candidate and these results elsewhere.

Transportation: First off, Zohran Mamdani has championed “fast and free buses.” This really misunderstands New York City’s transit problems and “feels like an argument imported from another city,” as journalist Megan McArdle put it on X.

As Janno Lieber—the Metropolitan Transportation Authority head—recently told a group of New York journalists, “compared to the whole country, people [here in New York] spend a lot less on transportation as part of their budgets.” The city already administers programs that subsidize fares for poor New Yorkers, and there are weekly fare caps so the lowest income New Yorkers are never expected to pay more than $17 in a given week on transportation—as many trips as they want, to anywhere within the five boroughs. About half of bus riders choose not to pay their fares, stealing from the system (which already has revenue issues). And a big issue making buses move slower is the rampant double-parking that happens in bus lanes—something authorities have begun to crack down on via automated ticketing by camera.

Mamdani seems to really misunderstand what slows buses down and which affordability issues actually bother New Yorkers, and he seems blissfully unaware of how the system is currently administered.

Public safety: Over the course of his campaigning, Mamdani has tried hard to distance himself from his earlier 2020–2023 sound bites about defunding the police (whose boot…on your neck…was “laced by the IDF“?):

“I don’t think the system actually makes us safer,” he said several years ago, referring to both the way prisons are run and to how policing is conducted, alluding to underlying problems and “trauma” that needs to be addressed.

He hasn’t really pivoted away from these underlying nonsensical views; he’s just tried to play a smarter PR game in recent months, recognizing that totally crapping on the NYPD won’t help him win. And he still seems in favor of some amount of diverting certain issues to social workers, an idea that looms large in the progressive imagination.

But public safety, more broadly, is an area where he might actually be able to do some damage: The mayor has a lot of control over the NYPD’s budget; Mayor Eric Adams restored funding for training to try to grow the police force.

 

Housing: Incredible.

Schools: “The mayor’s authority over education in New York has long been a political Rorschach test,” writes The New York Times. “Supporters argue that it promotes accountability and makes possible large-scale changes, such as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rollout of free prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds. Critics say it shuts teachers and parents out of decision making, and means that educational priorities can change with every election cycle.” Expect these dynamics to worsen as Mamdani takes charge.

Mamdani has said he wants to phase out gifted programs and gifted tracking for young students; he has at times said he wants to eliminate the specialized test administered to middle school students that allows some of them to gain entrance to the city’s eight elite public high schools (talking about how “segregated” such schools are, as if there was some sort of deliberate racism at play); and he has plans to create universal pre-K for all children, starting at 6 weeks of age. It’s unclear where he’ll get the money to fund such a high-cost initiative, and whether this will be a new program or an expansion of the 3-K program pioneered by Bill de Blasio.

(Policy aside: Mamdani, contra opponent Andrew Cuomo, actually wants less mayoral control over the city’s school system, but it’s not clear how he reconciles these issues with the system-wide changes he’s advocating, like axing certain gifted and talented programs; and some mayoral-control critics are in fact in favor of giving more power to teachers and their unions, not to parents, so it’s not totally clear what flavor of devolution Mamdani supports—to the extent that he’s thought about the mechanism at all.)

In some cities, mayors are sort of pointless figureheads, in charge of relatively little. This is not the case in New York City.

The mayor can “appoint hundreds of commissioners, department heads, their deputies and other senior managers without the advice and consent of the City Council,” notes Vital City. He oversees 300,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $115 billion. The mayor totally controls the Department of Education (“a function often overseen by semi-independent Boards of Education in other cities,” adds Vital City) and there are relatively few checks on his power. Some entities, like the MTA, actually respond to the governor, which makes it a little funny that Mamdani has made transit issues such a huge part of his campaign, given the relatively little control he will have there.

But Mamdani seems to believe he’ll have powers that he won’t have, and seems to advocate for an all-out war on the rich, whom he seems to view as cash cows who will serve as infinite revenue streams, never changing their behavior—or their domicile—to avoid such abusive treatment.

“To pay for his plans, Mr Mamdani proposes two tax hikes: an additional tax of 2% on incomes of more than $1m a year, and raising the top state corporate-tax rate to 11.5%, from 7.25%,” reports The Economist, which he seems to believe will raise $4 billion and $5 billion. But, “mayors cannot set income or business taxes. Hiking them would require the state legislature to act, plus the governor’s signature. And Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, has already ruled the idea a nonstarter.” So that’s good, but also somewhat weird that Mamdani doesn’t appear to realize this.

Perhaps the real problem—aside from the fact that my fellow New Yorkers seem persuaded by Mamdani’s bad policy proposals and disturbing rhetoric; aside from the fact that Mamdani doesn’t seem to know which powers he would have and which he wouldn’t; aside from the fact that the sort of generic, vague antisemitism and 9/11 disrespect is unnerving—is that Democrats nationally might overextrapolate from this likely win. Mamdani ran against an incumbent who messaged badly and was plagued by corruption scandals, and a former governor who had resigned that post embroiled in multiple scandals. One takeaway they might have is that Mamdani was a post-wokeness candidate who made cost of living the center of his platform. I think that would be a decent takeaway, leading to them running better/more serious candidates, but I don’t really buy that that’s what’s happening here:

I think it’s simpler: Mamdani is fresh and new and reminds the luxury-beliefs liberal-arts-school class of themselves. He’s a class-solidarity vote. He’s one of them. And he was running against rather bad opponents who read as blatantly corrupt. He won’t improve the cost of living in the slightest, and he will be forced to confront over and over again that he doesn’t actually have the budget to do the things he wants. And over here in Roundupville, we get constant entertainment as other people discover in real time that socialism lite isn’t, in fact, all that great.

 

Scenes from New York: 

QUICK HITS

  • Looks like China has a ton of bargaining power—and has started to use it, securing rather favorable trade deals from Trump.
  • Inside the rise of Luddite clubs. (“People are just sick of this march forward and having to view technology as progress,” sociologist Caitlin Begg tells The New York Times. “They don’t want their time and attention to be commodified anymore.”)
  • “Defense Department officials do not know precisely who they have killed in multiple military strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean that have claimed the lives of at least 57 people, according to Democratic lawmakers who attended a classified House briefing on the issue Thursday,” per Politico. Military lawyers were apparently “pulled from the briefing shortly before it started” and members of Congress from both parties “were left frustrated over the lack of clarity on the justifications for the military actions.”
  • “Children born to mothers infected with covid-19 during pregnancy faced a higher risk of autism, along with other neurological differences such as delays in speech and motor development, according to a study published Thursday,” reports The Washington Post. “The analysis of more than 18,100 births in Massachusetts, published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, is among the largest studies to date examining children born to women who contracted the virus starting in the early months of the pandemic through some of 2021, before vaccines were widely available.…as an observational study, the findings do not prove that covid-19 causes the conditions diagnosed in children, but rather signal an association between maternal infection and these outcomes.”
  • Insane:



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