In a comment to our previous post, Vito Caiati linked to an outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald on the consequences awaiting New York City as Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office. Her essay begins:
William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.
American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging. Zohran Mamdani, the quintessential product of the academy, is poised to take such performative grievance to one of the biggest stages in the world. The results will not be pretty.
Indeed they will not. Read the whole thing here.
3 Comments
I wonder if he’ll end up like John Lindsay, another charismatic and handsome fellow who was just completely unable to fulfill unrealistic expectations.
Jason- Zohran is no Lindsay, despite the latter’s failings.
My wife and many around me are very worried, but frankly, I am not.
Zohran is now the face of the Democratic party, and all of the damage he does will be laid at their doorstep.
Keep in mind that he squeaked by with barely 50% of the vote.
Adams and DeBlasio each got more than 60%.
Despite the momentary gloating and celebrations from the usual suspects, Mamdani is not popular with half the population, and once his incompetance is laid bare for all to see, more moderate voters will abandon him in force.
Heather makes many great points, as she always does, and I’m also not looking forward to 4 years of potential increases in crime and general dysfunction, but… Zohran will end up doing much more damage to the Democrat brand among moderates, many of whom never lived through the 70’s and 80’s and saw that level of chaos that NYC was notorious for.
Yes, Zohran will make my beloved NYC the laughingstock of the country, much as Newsome has done for California, but that ultimately drives a more intense sociopolitical bifurcation, and drives more sensible people to the right, as they are confronted by the reality of leftist insanity.
As Malcolm knows, NYC has seen many peaks and valleys, with the violence of 70’s and 80’s being much worse than anything seen since then.
As much as I loathe frauds like Zohran, and the Know Nothings that voted for him, I look forward to their utter humiliation and defeat, as they reveal themselves to the rest of the world.
Thanks for your response Another Dave. Actually, I was thinking afterwards that my analogy to Lindsay was probably rather labored. I’m not an expert in that era by any means, but it seems the Republican then Liberal mayor inherited a tough hand during the late 1960s with rising debt and crime. It may have been more reasonable then to respond with liberal governmental measures, since that was the Zeitgeist considering the seeming success of the New Deal and other more recent interventions. It’s hard to justify such progressive technocratic mechanisms now, as MacDonald points out in her essay, since there’s so much documentation that they just don’t work out well.