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Posted on 10/30/2025 7:23:58 AM PDT by MtnClimber
History shows that such leaders offload resentment onto their enemies.
New York City is poised to elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-identified democratic socialist, as its next mayor. Mamdani has run a sophisticated campaign based in part on his intersectional identity as a Muslim immigrant and in part on promises cherished by progressive whites.
Mamdani’s policy proposals are wrapped in slick advertising and catchy slogans, such as “Afford to live, afford to dream.” But his agenda is standard-issue socialism with hard-left cultural politics: free buses, government-controlled housing, platoons of social workers, and millions in funding for child sex-change operations.
Such policies may sound novel and inspiring. But if history is any guide, they will make the city more chaotic, more unstable, more violent, and, for taxpayers, more expensive.
Why, then, have New Yorkers responded so positively? First and foremost, the Left has mastered the art of hatching political stars and dominating deep-blue districts.
Mamdani built his campaign on the infrastructure of the Democratic Socialists of America. The DSA and its city allies can dispatch activists across New York and, with a network of progressive partner organizations, can mobilize young people, get out the vote, and do the work of door-to-door politics.
Mamdani’s innovation has been to harness the movement’s base—white, college-educated, downwardly mobile young people—in combination with the most radical fringes of the city’s Muslim communities. That includes a visit with an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing meant to appeal to this group.
What will this yield? I can see the rise of New York socialism playing out like a film script.
In the first act, a plucky, young, charismatic candidate beats Gotham’s political machine and rides his newfound stardom to the mayoralty of America’s largest city. In his administration’s early days, he tries to implement his transportation, policing, housing, and cultural policies, notching some initial victories. He also rewards key demographics with patronage, sending millions in taxpayer cash to identity-based NGOs, which become city contractors that deliver vague “social services.”
Then, in the second act, Mamdani encounters the inertia of the political machine and financial realities. His promises—such as freezing the rent, building government-controlled housing, and making buses free—become harder to achieve. To the extent they are implemented, they generate unintended consequences. He finds that rebranding public housing as “social housing,” for example, doesn’t make the program any less disastrous for the city or its housing stock. His attempts to punish landlords, while thrilling to some young leftists, prompt many small property owners to leave the city.
On transportation and policing, he makes similar discoveries. Mamdani makes buses “free”; as a result, New Yorkers see more vagrants, addicts, and psychotics on the buses. It becomes harder for families to navigate the city safely.
He transfers some funds from the NYPD to social workers, which creates a small wave of good will among left-wing voters. But, in the long term, quality-of-life crimes increase, requiring the intervention of police—not social workers with clipboards.
Which brings us to the third act. If the second act concludes with the young mayor’s reckoning with reality—economic limits, unintended consequences, and escalating public hostilities—he may try to mask his failures by stoking resentment. We saw this dynamic many times in the twentieth century: socialists rise to power, their policies degrade the quality of life, and, as they enter the endgame, they tighten their grip on power and offload resentments onto their ideological, racial, and economic enemies.
How will the movie end? I’d love to watch a film about New York City residents coming to see the world differently. But the twentieth century taught us that left-wing voters have extraordinary defenses against reality.
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That’s putting it politely. Democrat voters live in a fantasy universe totally unmoored from reality. In fact their delusions are so entrenched in their tiny minds that people who threaten their mindset with facts logic and reality are considered to be so dangerous to their fantasy that they must be killed. Example Charlie Kirk and multiple attempts on Trump.
You cannot reason with them. Their belief system is not based on reason. You cannot bargain with them because they never keep their end of any bargain and further they have nothing to offer anyway. You can only defeat them or be defeated by them. There is no middle ground.
The ten per cent is a myth, but they do get a lot. A lot.
https://www.newsweek.com/map-states-rely-food-stamps-most-snap-funding-expires-10942866
> How will the movie end?
It ends with New Yorkers becoming the new Somalis, wretched refugees trying to escape from the s**thole they created but insisting on bringing with them everything that made that city a s**thole in the first place. They’ll spread like a pestilence through all the other major cities in North America.
The difference between leftists and conservatives is this.
Leftists look at the world as it is and see injustices everywhere and want to blow up the status quo and replace it with the same tried, repackaged, feel-good ideas that have failed whenever they have been tried in the past.
Conservatives look at the world as it is and try to make the best of it using hard learned lessons from the past of what works and what doesn’t.
That difference is captured brilliantly and poetically in the poem by Kipling - “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. It should be the anthem of conservatism.
https://www.poetry.com/poem/33442/the-gods-of-the-copybook-headings
"Inertia of the political machine"...no. NYC Council is hard left, and the militant activists have a stranglehold on it. Zero chance they'll act as any kind of brake on Mamdani. They'd go over the cliff with him before they'd do that.
"Financial realities"...that's the third act. The second act is when they use whatever residual wealth they can loot from the city to finance their goals. And for awhile, it will work and they'll be lauded by the leftist media.
It's when that money runs out in the third act that it is going to get really, really ugly. And that might take a couple of years. In time for the 2028 election, but probably not in time for 2026.
Re socialism: You can vote your way into it but you’ll have to shoot your way out of it. Always holds true...SSZ
Leftists see people are malleable -- that they can change human nature in a way that makes their dream societies work. That's why the implementation of their ideology necessarily requires indoctrination/authoritarianism. They intend to change the way people think, and they do that by pushing their ideas and suppressing all others. The people who won't change are imprisoned or simply eliminated, or they simply hide in one form or another.
That concept is present in the socialist/communist concept of the "New Man". "We're going to make people better!".
Conservatives see people for who and what they are, accept that there is both evil and good, and deal with those accordingly. We value individual choice and freedom, and believe that left to their own devices, most people can achieve happiness on their own. We value the market because we don't try to fit square pegs into the round holes of our ideology.
We don't need to force any particular ideology on anyone because the natural state of man is freedom.
Please, point to me the differences between socialism and what NYC is right now.
NYC has been socialist for a long time now.
Well said, sir…
“Imagining a Socialist New York”
Easy.
“I thought it already was socialist”
New York and Chicago are already something else for which there are no words.
Detroit is making a comebacck. NY and Chicago never will.
I’d much rather be in Detroit than those other cities.
There’s still a long way to go, but the arrow is pointing up.
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