To this turn of events — a Muslim socialist chief executive of America’s largest city — the Right responded with characteristic restraint. “Democrats in New York City have chosen a true extremist and Marxist,” warned House Speaker Mike Johnson, “and the consequences will be felt across our entire nation.” The hard-Right commentator Laura Loomer posted: “The Islamic takeover of America is in full swing.” Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) posted a cartoon of Lady Liberty dressed in a burka.

Nearly a year on, the Big Apple has yet to succumb to an Islamo-communist takeover. Nor has it, much to the chagrin of the Left, transformed into a socialist utopia, with free electric buses gliding through the streets, public grocery stores on every block, and children playing freely under the supervision of nonbinary government employees. 

In fact, what’s notable about Mamdani’s first nine months in office is not what he has accomplished — but what he hasn’t. Despite all the predictions of a communist revolution with Islamic characteristics, the Big Apple today doesn’t look all that different from, well, 2025. We were promised Islamo-Marxism; all we got was a progressive Democrat who likes the camera.

What gives? 

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The more germane detail about Mamdani’s biography isn’t his faith or his socialist ideals. It’s that he is an urban Millennial who — avert your eyes, mullahs — met his wife on Hinge. In other words, he is a creature of social media, instinctively attuned to the demands of online self-promotion. His constant TikTok-length videos and mostly symbolic initiatives — free tickets to the Met Opera! government babysitters to allow couples to take date nights! arresting Benjamin Netanyahu! — have helped him project the image of a radical new politics while mostly allowing the city’s various bureaucracies to conduct business as normal.

Those bureaucracies, moreover, are formidable in their own right. And some of them are answerable not to City Hall, but to the state legislature and the governor’s mansion in Albany. Thus, in addition to his own taste for symbolic politics, Mamdani is hemmed in by the realities of governing.

During Mamdani’s inaugural address, the new mayor promised a “new era.” He pledged that the city would “govern expansively and audaciously,” replacing the “frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” His suite of expansive (and expensive) policies — free public buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze, and public grocery stores — gave proof of this collectivist embrace. On Jan. 1, 2026, it really seemed as though a new socialist dawn was breaking over the world’s financial capital. 

The record since is more mixed than either his admirers or his enemies allow. First, the achievements: a rent freeze for many New Yorkers, $1.2 billion in state funding for childcare, and a $22 billion pledge to build or preserve 400,000 affordable homes over the next decade. But the policies that defined his campaign haven’t panned out quite as well. His plan to launch five public grocery stores by 2029 is already mired in legal challenges, as is his controversial tax on expensive second homes in the city. Meanwhile, budgetary constraints and divisions within his own party have stalled progress on free buses.

Mamdani has been merrily posting his way through these setbacks. Whether it was singing “The Wheels on the Bus” with Barack Obama at a school, cutting an ad featuring Charli XCX music in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, or brandishing green plantains at a grocery store, Mamdani has shown a gift for political optics. Through hundreds of zippy, viral videos, he has cultivated the impression of a hyper-productive mayor Citi-biking around the five boroughs to address the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers.

By (literally) rolling up his sleeves on camera, Mamdani has turned the less glamorous aspects of the job into a hallmark of his mayoralty. Since January, he has shared cheery videos of him fixing water fountains with plumbers, shoveling dirt onto the Williamsburg Bridge bump with city transportation workers, and filling potholes with repairmen. He has also scored easy populist wins with free opera seats for the public and discounted World Cup and US Open tickets to the public. 

Conservatives have responded by variously casting Mamdani as a reincarnated Deng Xiaoping or a closet Islamic extremist biding his time. They have seized on his decision to wear an Arsenal kurta during Eid prayers and his greeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a smile at the 9/11 memorial. The latter brouhaha was quickly debunked after the full footage revealed that he’d only briefly embraced AOC before turning his attention, solemnly, to the reading of the names of the victims; meanwhile, Right-wing officials — not least JD Vance — were seen smiling or chuckling at various points, too.

That isn’t to say that his symbolic politics have lacked for missteps. A city-produced map of “Immigrant Enclaves” conspicuously excluded Little Italy, triggering a Sopranos-style eruption in downtown Manhattan. (The map, meanwhile, included a reference to “Little Palestine,” a phrase that has never crossed the lips of an actual New Yorker.) The mayor’s video protesting financier Ken Griffin’s house in Manhattan was roundly criticized as an ill-judged attempt to turn a billionaire into a political prop. And his grandstanding on arresting Benjamin Netanyahu — which he walked back a few days later — was a weak attempt at serving red meat to his Left-wing base.

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But by portraying Mamdani as an Islamo-communist hellbent on turning New York into Gaza-on-the-Hudson, his opponents have allowed the mayor to present himself as a moderate, even technocratic, leader more interested in reducing the cost of groceries than imposing Sharia law. Worse still, these attacks have distracted from more substantive concerns about Mamdani’s policies and ability to govern. Most pertinently, can a 34-year-old with five years in the state legislature really deliver the most ambitious agenda in a generation?

Today, Mamdani is the most popular elected official in the city. Some Democrats have even lamented that the Uganda-born mayor can’t run for higher office. But it is also possible that his symbolic gestures will soon wear thin — not with Republicans, but his own supporters. Recently, the Democratic Socialists of America and various Mamdani allies attacked the mayor over his failure to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, hated by the Left for being a tough-on-crime law-enforcer and a Zionist to boot. Mamdani has not only retained Tisch from his predecessor’s administration, but given her wide berth to do her work. 

For as long as he keeps Tisch — and the relationship between the two appears strong — Mamdani has an answer to the accusations that he is weak on crime, a common critique of Left-wing leaders. For now, crime in the city is at record lows, and subway ridership is nearing pre-pandemic levels, but a recent spate of subway killings and rise in felony assaults and hate crimes could yet test his approach to public safety. Posting slickly edited social media clips on his channels won’t suffice.

Who, then, is the real Zohran Mamdani? Is he a run-of-the-mill social democrat who realized that the key to governing was to play the radical, without actually being one? Or is his newfound pragmatism a way of demonstrating that a democratic-socialist future needn’t mean street-level disruption, chaos at City Hall, or intra-Democratic turmoil? Perhaps even he doesn’t know. But at some point, the mayor’s honeymoon will end, and Mamdani will have to show what he really stands for.

According to the complaint, Lisa Cantwell of Queens, New York, visited my online store, but issues with a product page’s metadata interfered with her screen-reading software, ultimately keeping her from completing the purchase. This, the suit claimed, constituted “a concrete and particularized injury,” that led to “direct harm and frustration” and constituted a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Cruelty, thy name is … Snugarooz Floos N’ Fun Ball.

The toy in question was one I carried in my Manhattan dog-training center, School For the Dogs. Dog-training classes, private lessons, and playgroups were the place’s main income generators, but near the front desk, I curated a small selection of toys and training tools. Some of these items were also sold through an online store I built myself on Shopify in 2017.

I liked carrying products from small vendors with stories behind them: a rubber bully-stick holder invented by a woman whose dog nearly died after swallowing the end of a chew; handmade treat pouches designed by a California mother after her daughter began volunteering at an animal shelter. The Snugarooz toy was made from recycled materials by a small business on Long Island.

The same week I got the summons, I’d begun discussions with another pet-business owner about buying a majority stake in my struggling company. I was desperate for a way out — or at least, a way forward. I’d started the training business in my living room in 2011. I had no business background and yet for years, pretty much every month was better than the one before it. But then the pandemic hit. At that point, I had more than a dozen employees, a two-story East Village storefront, payroll approaching $40,000 a month, and a 1-year-old daughter. 

I had to close for a few months at the start of the pandemic, but there was no break on rent or utilities. Many of my best clients fled Manhattan that spring and never came back. The electric bill tripled. Some key employees left in the fog of it all, and those who stayed demanded higher wages because their own bills had skyrocketed. Determined to get to the other side of the madness, I took out loans and pivoted so many times I became dizzy trying to follow my own strategic plans.

Then I had another baby.

I had once thought of my business as my firstborn child, but increasingly, I wondered if it were more like Audrey Two, the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors — a ravenous organism that survived only if I continued feeding it my own blood. I was already barely hanging on. A lawsuit felt like it might finish me off.

The ordeal seemed terrifying but also … kind of fascinating. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the great moral achievements of modern America. Of course, blind people should be able to access websites. Of course, businesses should make reasonable accommodations. But the ADA was enacted in 1990, back when “going online” involved listening to a modem screech like Yoko Ono trapped inside a fax machine, and Amazon was merely a rainforest. 

But, small problem, the law doesn’t define what an accessible website is. That has created a vacuum now filled by consultants, remediation firms, accessibility software, and armies of highly specialized plaintiff-side law firms. To understand how this world worked, I spoke with David Stein, of Stein & Nieporent LLP, a Manhattan-based firm that has represented defendants in nearly 1,000 website-accessibility lawsuits over the past decade.

“There are no binding standards,” he told me, “and the cases almost never go to trial” — a combination that turns out to matter enormously.

Simply put: if you want to build a website that you can be sure will evade a lawsuit, you can’t; and if you want to go to court to make the case that your site does make accommodations for disabled people, you shouldn’t. 

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Sure, when building your site, you would be wise to follow a set of guidelines called WCAG — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines — created not by Congress or the Department of Justice, but by the World Wide Web Consortium, an independent nonprofit founded by the web’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The guidelines recommend using image descriptions, keyboard navigation, readable color contrast, standardized page structures, and about 1,000 other things. The most recent update is longer than most of my favorite Victorian novels. 

While there are plenty of companies out there that may help make your site be more WCAG-y, no site is safe from litigation. This is because Congress has never written a standard into law, regulators have never formalized one, and courts rarely interpret any because the cases almost always settle before going before a judge.

“You’re dealing with an impossible situation,” Stein said. “The official guidelines are nonexistent, and even the unofficial guidelines are aspirational and somewhat subjective.”

In practice, this means accessibility litigation often functions less like traditional law enforcement and more like procedural roulette. Anyone who self-identifies as disabled and claims to have had a bad experience on a website for any reason can bring a suit. 

Said Stein: “The plaintiff says the site is inaccessible; the defendant says it isn’t. That creates what’s called a ‘material factual dispute.’” He noted that some plaintiffs have filed hundreds of these cases. Some attorneys have filed thousands. His site lists 12 of the most prolific law firms filing these suits, and their 38 favorite plaintiffs. “The cases often seem less about improving accessibility,” he explained, “and more about recovering attorney’s fees.”

That, it turns out, is the heart of the matter: the fees. 

ADA suits are referred to by the legal trade as involving “bits,” like websites, or “bricks,” like ramps. In both cases, the plaintiffs, if they were to go to trial and win, won’t walk away with damages; the verdict simply compels the defendant to attempt to fix the issue. So, in order to incentivize people with disabilities to pursue these cases, law firms guarantee that they’ll have their lawyers’ fees covered by the defendant if they win. 

This is called “one-way fee shifting”: if the plaintiff prevails, the defendants owe both sides’ legal fees. The process isn’t transparent, but it’s likely the law firms are taking the work on pro bono for the plaintiffs (who then won’t owe anything if they lose), and that some money is passed from attorney to plaintiff when the cases, as they almost inevitably do, settle. For defendants, it’s lose-lose: even if they win, they still pay their own lawyers. 

And if you want to bone up on ADA law yourself and represent your own business … you can’t. Limited liability corporations — the corporate form I used to organize my shop, and which many other small businesses likewise use — are required to be represented by a licensed attorney in court. 

Every attorney I called told me the same thing: win or lose, going to trial would be more expensive than settling.

Once a company has been sued, Stein told me, the cases are easily found in public databases, and this makes the business statistically more likely to get sued again. I guess it makes the copy-paste procedure especially easy. This is why, Stein told me, after several rounds of getting sued and trying to improve their site and then getting sued again, several companies he’s represented have stopped investing in trying to remedy the problem; instead, they just budget for litigation. 

Many businesses try to rectify the issues by using third-party overlays that will change the site’s contrast or read the site aloud, among other features — you can activate them usually by clicking an icon in a site’s bottom corner. But Stein said that some plaintiff-side lawyers specifically target sites that use these tools because they can be an indicator that the company opted for a Band-Aid-type solution, rather than addressing the underlying issues. Copy, paste: more tidy litigation. 

Accessibility lawsuits are hardly unique in the way they target businesses of all sizes in the name of an ostensibly good cause. California’s Proposition 65 — the law behind the cancer-warning labels on nearly every tangible item sold in the state — has spawned a similar industry of private-enforcement suits. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act regularly generates massive settlements over marketing texts that haven’t received the proper consent, even though the law was written long before text messages were even a thing. In 2018, Bloomingdale’s settled a class action suit for $1.4 million because of texts it sent to loyalty-reward customers who hadn’t opted in; the content of the message was “Reply Y now to confirm you want texts!” (And yet, there’s no law that has me opt in to condone the felling of forests required to keep my mailbox stuffed with Garnet Hill catalogs — it is legally allowed to send them because it sold me a fitted sheet in 2009.)

The broader pattern is hard to ignore: laws passed with generally admirable goals evolve into systems where settlement becomes more rational than compliance. In consequence, small businesses in America increasingly operate inside a haze of invisible rules, selectively enforced standards, and ambient legal risk. 

Website-accessibility lawsuits represent this dynamic distilled to its essence. A law meant to help one disenfranchised group ends up hurting another group that might be struggling with a different set of problems. In between those two parties is a lawyer with a degree that he probably didn’t need if all he’s going to do is spend a matter of minutes updating a court filing template that’s worked countless times before. 

What struck me most during this ordeal was how little either side benefits in the end, and how detached it all felt from human interaction.

I called a blind client of mine and asked whether she had ever struggled using my website.

“No,” she said. “And if I did, I’d probably just call the phone number at the bottom of the page.”

Exactly.

According to the lawyers I spoke with, I probably could have settled the case and covered my own legal fees for under $5,000, but I got served at a moment where I was struggling to keep my business bank account in the four figures. And even if I’d settled, I was afraid there would be remediation expenses, plus the lingering possibility of future lawsuits. “Just ignore the whole thing!” was the advice I got from my friends, none of whom is a lawyer or a business owner. The problem was that it’s hard to sell a business that is in open litigation. 

I hated the idea of closing the store because it was one of the few parts of the business still doing reasonably well. The store and the rest of the business generally operated as a unit, but the retail arm had its own site and LLC. This was good news: it meant if the training studio failed, I could maybe continue operating the online shop from home while slowly paying down debt. 

But now that I had someone likely taking over the business, that calculus changed. 

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Unsure what to do, I asked the prospective buyer what her preference would be: settle the suit, or let the site go dark and hope the case evaporated? 

She picked option two. So I shut it down. 

A week later, she backed out of the deal entirely, and I had to pull the plug on everything. 

This left me spending much of last year navigating a different — but simpler! — legal process: personal bankruptcy.

Under the ADA, plaintiffs don’t receive damages, but as I mentioned above, I am guessing that Lisa Cantwell walks away from the cases she’s named in with some token of appreciation from the lawyers. When I explained the situation to my blind client, she pointed out that most visually impaired people have trouble finding work. This made me feel for Lisa. A little bit. But it is a strange state of affairs if a blind woman’s inability to find employment leaves a bootstrapped small business like mine unable to continue supporting small vendors, who often had their own compelling stories — think single mother hand-stitching dog toys in her kitchen so she can put herself through nursing school.

I wondered if Lisa really had had an issue with buying the toy or if the lawyers perused sites and then just put her name on the filings? I found her on Facebook and messaged her to ask, but I never heard back; I emailed her law firm, but it didn’t reply. 

The same week she sued me, Lisa was named as the plaintiff on 40 other cases against a motley crew of other businesses including Williams-Sonoma, Lululemon, and the Manhattan restaurant Balthazar. A lawsuit brought on by a stranger creates a funny kind of intimacy with odd parties. I began to think of these businesses as my litigation kin. 

When I couldn’t sleep at night worrying about the collapse of a business I’d put my heart and soul into and had spent years of my life building, I went deep into Google to try to see what I could find about Lisa. I learned she had received a Labrador guide dog named Louie through the Guiding Eyes For the Blind; a profile of her on the organization’s site informed me that she was blind because she was born with underdeveloped retinas. Also: she worked in special education for 25 years, belongs to three book clubs (psychological suspense and historical fiction are her preferred genres) and likes to play ’70s folk music on the guitar. I knew I was behaving a little like a scorned ex-girlfriend by looking into these details, but I was heartbroken and stressed out, much like when I’ve been a scorned ex-girlfriend. Also, my business was created by a human being, me, and I wanted to know if there was a human being on the other end of the final straw, and if so, who she was.

Going deeper, I found out her address, her middle name, maiden name, and parents’ names. She has a son in his 30s who is married and lives in Connecticut, and a 29-year-old daughter who loves Disney World. Her husband is a New York Rangers fan and voted for Donald Trump. At one point, I even tracked down an old realtor’s listing for her home, and found myself studying her bedroom set and beige wall-to-wall carpet. There were green and blue Sterilite storage bins stacked in a corner, and an empty wire dog crate with a fleece blanket folded inside of it. 

The details made the whole thing feel both more absurd and more sad. I couldn’t really bring myself to hate this person because, well, I didn’t actually know her. What I hated is a system that turned two ordinary people — two New York City dog lovers — into opposing parties in a federal case over a rope toy.

I absolutely support the underlying principle behind laws protecting Americans with disabilities, and wish I had known that my site needed to be better optimized. But as I now know, I could’ve invested a boatload into optimization and ended up in the same place. For that reason, I don’t think these cases are doing anything to improve the situation. 

The internet once lowered barriers to allow for the creation of funky little businesses like mine — businesses that could be run without in-house counsel and a budget for litigation. Now, I worry that the web has been booby-trapped to prevent the rise of anyone whose Chief Accessibility Officer sleeps at the foot of their bed. 

My own e-commerce days are certainly over. But I still participate on the other side of the equation. When my dog needs a new tug toy, I buy it from Amazon.

The Madison Square Garden marriage of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift was a perfect representation of a 2026 pseudo-event: this American mega-wedding was famous for being famous. No matter how charmless and inauthentic, it was an object that one could have an opinion on — and thus was an incarnation of internet culture. It symbolized how much our appetites have been shaped by social media; we want to experience, to obsess over, to be around, what is already familiar. Everyone doing and talking about and following the same pseudo-events, or producing them themselves, however, does not produce culture or aura. Rather, it displaces and draws energy from the original, spontaneous, and organic.

I’ve noticed that written communication, texting and emailing, increasingly sounds the same as more and more people either have AI directly write for them or have internalized the syntactical structures of AI writing. The word most associated with this era of modern life, “slop,” is itself a memetic cliché that can’t illuminate how eerily homogeneous and fake life in big cities has become, or perhaps life everywhere has become.

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With minor differences in uniform and language, the arrival of tourists from around the world in New York only demonstrates the convergence of habits, tendencies, and mores across cultures in our era. The old, useful animus Europeans, for instance, had towards American culture is gone; large swaths of Brooklyn and Manhattan, in parallel, have no accent, no culture, no distinction, no history. The lingua franca of the affluent, whether tourist or local, is what we might call “globalese”: a compressed super-language patterned on English, but increasingly reliant on Instagram. Its images, gestures, and catchphrases convey a compressed reality that works as well in Paris as it does in New York or any other place where digital media reaches.

Lack of difference, lack of friction signals a die-off in culture. Neighborhoods don’t have their own culture, cities don’t have their own culture, regions don’t have their own culture; it is all globalese.

And though we are all the same, we’re isolated from each other. As much as the conventional wisdom says that it’s exciting to be in New York and other American cities during the summer of the World Cup, I sense that tourists and transplants, new arrivals and also longtime residents themselves, are not really mixing or encountering each other accidentally; it’s too easy to pre-sort an experience, to find the bar showing your game, to find overly like-minded friends, to find algorithmically-vetted romantic interests. Even if there are sublime matches, like England-Mexico, uniformity is apparent in the way that World Cup teams play, all driven by the same academy training and analytics, just like in Major League Baseball and the NBA this summer.

Compare this, for instance, to culture at the beginning of the globalization era. In the early 1990s, movies such as Before Sunrise and Chungking Express were romances of the accidental. If you meet someone on a summer evening in a big city, as happened to the characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise, you might never find them again. As we learn in the sequel Before Sunset, Jessie and Celine take nine years to find each other again; this is romantic. Qiu Miaojin’s cult 1995 novel Last Words from Montmartre, about a Taiwanese woman in Paris writing letters to a lover who’s abandoned her, is one of the most beautiful examples of the romance and melancholy of early globalization: everything is loosely connected, but there is still distance to imagine; travel still involves some risk and uncertainty; lovers and friends cannot be searched up and realized on a screen (“stalked”) at any moment of the day.

Social space, suffering a recession of the accidental and a corresponding inflation of the easy, has become a zone to gratify desires implanted by the phone, and to aggregate, not differentiate; there doesn’t seem to be much to do in public other than playact a lifestyle.

A friend always used to say that Los Angeles was the great American city of private experiences and New York was the city of public experiences. But New York has become more like what LA used to be, superficial, Instagram-driven, pneumatic and soulless, while LA has deteriorated and lost its raison d’être: the film and TV industries.

The implication here is that being offline has become impossible, because the internet has matriculated into material reality. Menus reflect trends; the optics and layout of bars, restaurants, and pubs cater to TikTokkers and Instagram influencers; bars are places to be on your phone. Slop content has become slop reality.

And high inflation and rent inflation make it difficult for small businesses to say no to slop reality. Entrepreneurs and business owners with soul can’t compete with the ruthless and soulless and are driven out. High rent means that ostentatious fine dining is next to a bank, next to a gym, next to a spa that sells peptides, next to a startup office.

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If a place or community that is real or unique slips through the financial dragnet, then it is at risk of being turned into viral content, rushed, overwhelmed, and abandoned. Everything from churches to dive bars is subject to influencer promotion. For this reason, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that private space will start to play the role that public space used to play: a place for strangers or near strangers to meet and have interactions and conversations, to drink and to eat, in ways that are not algorithmically determined. 

If public space is going to survive as more than a zombie playground, young people — who bring life to cities and public spaces — will have to be intentional about letting things happen by accident, and about spending significant chunks of every day operating with 1990s-level technology. 

A few weeks ago, I was at an event in Tompkins Square Park for the “Summer of Ludd” — a no-smartphone movement started in part by one of my former students, an amazingly outgoing and charismatic figure. The event was mostly young people sitting on blankets and playing drums and guitar, very Summer of Love. It wasn’t wildly new in appearance, but because no one was on their phones, the participants seemed genuinely connected and excited to be there. They weren’t keeping a visual record of their afternoon in the park. It was just happening. It was a unique event, meaning it couldn’t be replicated or resold because the people involved would only be there in that exact combination once.

The split might be between those who are only comfortable with packaged pseudo events and those willing to cultivate, to see what happens, to show up — and then to go home without telling a soul, or getting a Smashburger on the way.

The former New York City comptroller and Zohran Mamdani ally is running to replace Rep. Dan Goldman in the state’s 10th Congressional District, spanning Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. By every “normal” measure, Goldman’s should be a safe seat: the two-term lawmaker faces no scandal, takes conventionally center-Left stances on every issue, and is, of course, furiously anti-Trump; indeed, he rose to fame in the 2010s as the lead counsel in President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Yet Goldman is trailing Lander by 34 points, according to a recent Emerson College/PIX 11 poll. 

Goldman, then, is effectively doomed. Why is that? If, on issues like health care and housing and the economy, there aren’t great differences between Lander and Goldman, they do diverge significantly on Israel and the fate of the Palestinians. And it’s here where Lander, who is proudly Jewish like Goldman, points to the future of the Democratic Party.

He might, in time, come to embody it fully.

To be sure, the lopsided nature of the polls isn’t just about “revulsion” at Israel, which is overwhelming among Democrats and Independents and growing among Republicans under age 50. Lander just ran for mayor, served as Gotham’s chief financial officer, and represented significant chunks of the district for 12 years as a member of the city council. Lander, in other words, is no ordinary insurgent. Goldman has much shallower roots in the district.

Then, too, Lander sits to Goldman’s Left, and the district is among the most liberal in the country. While Goldman notably refused to endorse Mamdani for mayor in the general election, Lander proudly co-endorsed and campaigned with the democratic socialist. The mayor, in turn, has endorsed Lander in his congressional race.

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Lander holds several positions on Israel that, several years ago, would have been considered taboo. He opposes all military aid to Israel until the Jewish state complies with international law, particularly in regards to the occupation of the West Bank. He backs the Block the Bombs Act, which would curtail weapon sales to Israel. And he’s labeled the war in Gaza a “genocide,” defying a still-powerful Israel lobby that insists the mass-casualty horrors of the operation were a necessary response to the Oct. 7 attacks. 

“With young people,” Lander says, “it really is a disconnect between what they can see with their eyes and what received political wisdom is trying to tell them.”

Lander, however, is willing to break from the furthest-Left flank of his party, which has become explicitly anti-Zionist. He believes in two states for two peoples, with one that is explicitly Jewish. Unlike his friend and ally Mamdani, Lander doesn’t back the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, though he doesn’t censure it, either.

Goldman, by contrast, represents the Democratic Party’s past. On Sunday, he participated in the Big Apple’s Israel Day Parade, marching steps away from Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has vowed to “bury” Palestinian statehood and recently threatened to evict a Bedouin village in response to an International Criminal Court indictment; Lander gave the parade a miss. 

The awkward proximity to the likes of Smotrich cast into sharp relief the unenviable position of pro-Israel Democrats, like Goldman, forced to defend a very different Israel than the one their parents championed. 

An heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Goldman has grown critical of Netanyahu but is unwilling to back the blanket suspension of military aid that Lander is calling for. He is not voting for the Block the Bombs Act. He is, at least, supportive of restrictions on offensive weapons but still backs funding for the Iron Dome missile-defense system.

In 2023, Goldman voted to censure his Democratic colleague Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for using the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A year later, Goldman backed a GOP-led effort to undercut a lawsuit lodged by South Africa against Israel on charges of genocide. Goldman rejects the term. 

“Goldman has made it clear he is always going to vote for US military aid to Israel,” Lander tells UnHerd, “regardless of how much it violates international law or Palestinian human rights.”

Maddy Rosen, a spokeswoman for Goldman, defended the congressman’s record.

“Brad’s hypocrisy famously knows no bounds, which is why he’s blatantly lying about Dan’s record to deflect from the fact that he invested New Yorkers’ taxpayer dollars in Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer as comptroller,” she said. “The military aid that the US provides to Israel already requires Israel to follow human-rights law. When Israel has not, as with the West Bank, Dan has supported withholding weapons from that region and is a co-sponsor of Rep. Nadler’s West Bank Violence Prevention Act.”

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Still, there are going to be more Lander-style Democrats in the House. American democracy often works on a lag, with politicians trailing public opinion. They do, though, eventually catch up. A Pew survey taken last month found that a stunning 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents take an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022. These are generational numbers: the youth have an even dimmer view, and their opinions will likely only harden with age. This is why more and more 2028 Democratic presidential candidates are swearing off AIPAC cash altogether. Netanyahu’s decision to drag Washington into a war in Iran seemed to be the final straw.

“Americans don’t want to keep providing unconditional military aid to Israel after watching the genocide in Gaza … and yet Democrats and Republicans in Congress keep voting for it,” Lander tells UnHerd. “The numbers are increasing of Democrats who are saying no. We should not vote for additional US military aid to Israel.” And there will be “Republicans,” he predicts, “who will be voting that way, as well.”

That remains to be seen, especially with AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups’ successful demolition of Thomas Massie. What Lander may be right about, though, is that Republican voters are becoming less reflexively pro-Israel, if evolving at a slower clip than Democrats. What’s disappearing from the electorate, broadly, is any particular affection for the Jewish state. Gen-Z conservatives, especially those who take MAGA’s America First credo to heart, are far less likely to back Israel than older generations, and there probably will come a point when Republican members of Congress begin to reflect those views. How long that actually takes is anyone’s guess.

What’s clear is that, for the Democratic Party, there is no going back to the status quo ante on Israel. The next Democratic president won’t indulge Israeli leadership the way Joe Biden did. A Democratic House or Democratic Senate won’t speedily authorize billions in unconditional military aid. House Democrats, at least, will be sounding a lot more like Lander. 

“There was sympathy for Israel on Oct. 7 that might have been built upon in such a different way, if Israel had a different leader and different political coalition,” says Lander. “It wasn’t, and here we are.”

“Bob always took care of people who cooperated with him,” Screvane told Moses’s legendary biographer, Robert A. Caro. But only the people who cooperated, as Caro notes in his biography of Moses. “If you didn’t there would be no consulting jobs, no authority make-work, and you would find your pension was less than you had believed you were entitled to.” 

Not long ago, Caro turned 90. In a short recent book on his writing career, he reflected how he came to write his biography of Moses after realizing what he was doing as a journalist was “bullshit”. In contrast, people like Moses wielded powers of patronage that startled politicians like Screvane who stood to benefit from them. Caro recalled: “Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power.” 

The book that he eventually completed, The Power Broker, has passed into legend along with its author, becoming widely recognized as one of the greatest biographies ever written. It offers many lessons, from how a new road or housing development can generate blight in a neighborhood to how the Tammany Hall system of political corruption worked in New York. However, its main subject matter is how Moses effectively deployed a new, technocratic, form of corruption.

Most importantly for us perhaps, The Power Broker sheds light on how democracies are fragile and open to erosion and exploitation, casually handing away their crown jewels without realizing it — and with hardly anyone noticing. For the Britain of 2026, it helps clarify how a trusted and even loved institution like the BBC has lost its way, getting carried away on its own hubris and — crucially — remaining detached from public accountability thanks to the license fee. 

Moses’s hubris arose not just from natural arrogance but a deep well of achievement. He studied at Yales, Oxford and Columbia, where he wrote an admiring PhD on the British Civil Service, before he sought to apply his learnings to the state government of New York. His goal in this work, he explained in a later report, was “[to] press for progress toward responsive, responsible, efficient and democratic government in the state.”

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But he got to advance in his career only by accepting the compromises and accommodations of politics. As assistant to New York State Democratic governor Al Smith, Moses became an expert in drafting bills to conceal their real content. He got himself appointed to various independent Commissions and built parks, playgrounds, parkways (i.e. roads) and even beaches for families to flee to in the hot summer months. He built up a reputation as someone who Got Things Done — things which helped people. 

As Caro writes, the prevailing image of Moses in the pre-Second World War years “was of the totally unselfish and altruistic public servant who wanted nothing for himself but the chance to serve… The image was of the fearless independent above politics. The public believed authorities — entities outside the normal government setup, entities whose members were unsalaried and appointed to terms long enough in theory to ensure their independence from politicians — to be ‘nonpolitical.’”

This image helped Moses to get away with his greatest power grab. This was to turn the Triborough Bridge Authority, which built what is now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, from an instrument of the city into an independent, permanent entity insulated from interference by city and state officials.

Using the drafting prowess he had obtained while working for Al Smith, Moses had concealed the power-grab in the financing documents of the bill that established the Authority. Once the bridge itself was complete (1936) and had paid off its bonds, its toll revenue flowed into the Authority’s coffers, rather than going to the city that had commissioned it.

With the end of the Second World War, the volume of car traffic soared. The Triborough Bridge went from carrying 11 million vehicles in 1941 to 23 million in 1949 and 46 million in 1960. Meanwhile, the Authority’s income from this and other infrastructure swelled from $8 million in 1941 to $26 million in 1951, $37million in 1960 and $75 million in 1967. The money allowed Moses to attract extra financing through bond issues, giving him an extra  $750 million to spend on public works in New York City in the 15 years after the Second World War. All this money also allowed him to grease the wheels of New York politics whenever resistance arose to his projects from citizens and their representatives. 

The Triborough Bridge Authority acquired some of the powers of a sovereign state, including the power of eminent domain, permitting the seizure of private property. The bill Moses drafted gave it power not just over bridges and their approaches but roads, streets, and parkways connecting with those approaches. And so Moses started hacking through highly populated areas of the city to build expressways to connect to his bridges. One of the most stunning chapters in The Power Broker, “One Mile”, details the consequences of this in a one-mile stretch of the Bronx where a community was torn apart and destroyed.

Altogether, around half a million city residents were forced to leave their homes to make way for Moses’s projects. He built 627 miles of major road infrastructure and much more besides. The justification he used for his road-building was that it would reduce traffic congestion on existing thoroughfares. But his projects only ended up creating more traffic. Within a few years of them being built, the new roads were as congested as those they were meant to relieve. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway’s infrastructure was decaying. Moses successfully blocked any new track being laid.

“In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator’s powers,” Caro writes. “And he used them. He enjoyed using them — for using them gave him what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on other people.” But all along, Moses maintained that he was not political, that he was the antithesis of the politician and never let political considerations influence his projects. Compromise was what politicians did, he said. He saw himself as above politics: concerned with right and wrong, where he was right and anyone who objected was wrong. 

Of course, these ideas of “independence”, of “independent expertise” and being “above politics” retain a powerful currency today. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestine Territories, describes herself as a “UN Independent Expert”, despite her evident sympathy towards Palestine. In Britain, whole swathes of government functions are farmed out to supposedly independent bodies. One of the most high-profile is The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which provides authoritative and easily-available predictions which, in practice, work to heap pressure on the government of the day. Never mind that those predictions have proved consistently wrong.

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But perhaps the most egregious examples appear in the non-economic sphere; see the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which sometimes appears vulnerable to activist exploitation. There is a distinct tendency for “quangos” to start acting like mini, alternative governments. This tendency is exacerbated when the quango is expected to have an impact, not just in its own particular areas of concern but on society as a whole. Arts Council England (ACE), for example, has broadened its remit from funding artistic work to supporting “creative practitioners” which it describes as “an umbrella term for all those who work to create new, or reshape existing, cultural content.” This has pulled in all sorts of groups and people who would not previously benefit from arts funding, including a BAME-only organization called Rising Arts Agency, which plastered the billboards of Bristol in 2020 with messaging including “The blood is on your hands” repeated three times accompanied with the message: “So, Mr White Man… What are your plans?” As the ACE chief executive Darren Henley has said, “Together, let’s create better lives.”

However, perhaps the best match to Moses in Britain, in terms of scope, style and impact, is the BBC. It is a carved-out part of the British state, but with independent income. In this respect, the license fee mirrors the tolls Moses collected from users of his bridges and tunnels — tolls that were almost compulsory for those living in the suburbs. Like Moses, with his manic road- and bridge-building, the BBC has magnified itself over time, intruding into ever more areas of life with a proliferation of channels, platforms and activities, while giving us news high on interpretation and promotion — from Israel-Gaza to Trump, the latest celebrity clickbait and puff pieces on drag queens. Moreover, the corporation’s ability to do this without advertising or charging extra has deterred any competitors, similar to how Moses deterred competition from railroad and subway.

Like Moses, the BBC has exploited its previous reputation as a trustworthy, broadly impartial and high-quality broadcaster to push in the opposite direction. Its commitment to “due impartiality” has become heavy on what it has thought is “due” and lighter on “impartiality”. If Donald Trump is a bad man, so the logic runs, then it is appropriate to emphasize that rather than report accurately on his ongoing activities. The approach could cost the BBC dearly, with a vengeful Trump suing it for $10 billion in a Florida court over Panorama doctoring his January 6 speech — a case that has already led to the resignations of both the Director-General and Head of News.

In truth, the very idea of being independent of politics, or “anti-” or “above” politics, is another kind of politics. The activists who heap pressure institutions like the Beeb, from inside and outside, have a point. All are sites of power; and the BBC is no exception. Politicians from Ed Davey to Harriet Harman want the BBC to be a bulwark against right-wing populism, but in doing so they point to how this idea goes wrong. They treat the BBC as an arbiter, promoting what is right — basically liberal-left progressivism — rather than serving in a more modest fashion as a reporter, mediator and facilitator for discussion. Theirs is the logic of the dictatorship rather than democracy, of Pravda against the old BBC. If a national broadcaster becomes a voice for some, in opposition to others, it does not deserve to survive while taking the money of both groups.

William Exton, a reformer and critic of Moses’ West Side Improvement project, told Caro: “His only reply to everything we had proposed was an ad hominem attack on us, and it was all a lie, a goddamed lie.” Cut to the reactions of BBC supporters to its present crisis and you hear talk of “right-wing” conspiracies and even “coups”, of nefarious “political” forces that are trying to destroy the noble Corporation. These could come straight out of a Moses playbook; except that Moses used accusations of Communism.

Moses ultimately fell victim to a ruse of the kind that got him his power in the first place. He was eased out of Triborough by New York Mayor John D. Rockefeller while he wasn’t paying attention. It may be that this sort of ruse, of an intensely political kind, is the only way the BBC can be reformed and restored to anything like the entity that built its reputation. Maybe the insiders and outriders are right. Maybe the leaking of the Prescott memo was a political act. And maybe it will prove to be the beginning of the end of an activist BBC, provoking a return to the rigor, trustworthiness and restraint that made the BBC worth exploiting in the first place.

But, like the formidable Robert Moses, the Corporation shows few signs of turning and few signs of regret.

A festive hit in 1972, The Poseidon Adventure was among a clutch of disaster movies that thrilled and chilled Seventies audiences. The optimism of the Sixties had dissipated; Vietnam was going down the toilet; New York was broke, with random crime and visible decline terrorizing the residents of Fear City and their horrified compatriots. Airport in 1970, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno in 1974: all mirrored the secret fears of moviegoers whose faith in authority had waned, who braced for catastrophe in a world gone dark with only their pluck to buoy them.

Two decades later, at the end of history, CGI inflamed the disaster-movie genre: Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998) and Deep Impact (1998) offered sweeping apocalyptic visuals — crumbling landmarks, waves dwarfing Midtown skyscrapers, cows mooing in the carousel of a hurricane. These were fantasies of Western annihilation, fantasies which peered into the White House situation room and caught the bead of sweat on the president’s forehead. At a time of relative prosperity and security — and before 9/11 — the focus was on the spectacle of destruction, how far directors could push newly available special effects. The usual bungling authorities still made an appearance: stock hawkish commanders, dumbfounded local cops — but unlike in many Seventies equivalents the threat was external, rather than a crumbling moral core.

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These days the disaster blockbuster has fallen out of fashion. Covid killed the zombie apocalypse by bringing the weary realities of contagion to our doorsteps; climate anxiety shattered the comet careening through space with its promise of slow and sweaty demise. But visions of urban destruction have not disappeared; they’ve simply migrated to the news. The 2020s, so far the decade of disease, decline and demographic transformation, have taught us that the most psychically terrible threat is no longer immediate apocalypse — it’s the insidious, years-long erosion of protections and values taken for granted, whose loss is written on the sidewalks of London, and written on the wall for a New York City preparing to welcome an untested Millennial mayor.

In the real world, social contracts are not blown up but forgotten in the back of some dusty drawer. Personal safety is not, for the most part, violated by a lone attacker — it disappears when we acclimatize to the petty transgressions of normal people, those who press their bodies against us to shuffle in on our subway fares, who strut out of Tesco with bottles clinking in their pockets, who hock spit at minor officials when their toddler antics are reprimanded. Disaster happens, yes, when planes crash; but it also happens when they don’t — when dismal passengers rub their bare feet, puff clouds of sickly vape smoke into the cabin, rage at the stewardesses for no reason at all. Politeness, consideration, conformity: these are the casualties of a real-life disaster movie, a world forever changed by a lost expectation of a sensible and cohesive public. Citywide breakdowns recall riots, looting, mass catastrophe — but social orders can buckle under the weight of less spectacular tragedies, and barrier-bumpers, gum-spitters and participants in the pavement pissoir are all doing their bit to lower trust and heighten quotidian horror.

New York landmarks have been nuked, flooded and blown up countless times on screen. Lady Liberty has been decapitated (Cloverfield), buried in sand (Planet of the Apes) and entombed in ice (The Day After Tomorrow). She embodies a shining city, a way of life worth saving — but today that image reads differently, a dismal cliché, probably because the gleaming metropolis she represents has given way to a grimier reality. In the disaster movie, New York and London are depicted quaintly, sentimentally, flattened into tableaux of cheerful hot-dog vendors and chintzy tearooms, overcoats on Madison Avenue and urchins in the East End. The fantasy of the disaster movie is that, apart from the approaching asteroid or the mile-high tidal wave, nothing of note has ever changed in the endangered city. The person-sized disasters of managerial neglect, low-level lawlessness and economic hardship don’t exist.

Yet in 2026, disaster looks different. As New York prepares to inaugurate a 34-year-old, untested and catastrophically naive mayor on New Year’s Day, its merrymaking residents, much like the Champagne-popping revelers of the fictional Poseidon, don’t know what’s coming their way. Melodramatic, you might say — but consider how fragile is the order of the day-to-day. Even without a total naif in Gracie Mansion, life here rests on a knife edge: street-corner encounters turn violent without provocation, sly parcel-swipers continually invade hallways, and looking askance at the wrong commuter can earn you a slashed cheek or lit match. Mamdani has threatened to make the city’s buses, already mobile circus wagons full of antisocial sideshows, free — they could well go the way of the Central Park pool this summer, which became de facto baths for the “unhoused” and handy toilets for the disturbed. Men who pay for sex, ravaging the city’s desperates and driving women and girls into the hands of pimps, may no longer even be rapped on the knuckles: decriminalized “sex work” and scot-free soliciting could rob prostitutes of already scant protections under the guise of well-meaning toleration and sex positivity. And those beaten by partners might, if Mayor Mamdani’s campaign pitch comes off, be referred to swamped and bureaucratic social workers instead of police officers — shoved through a consequence-lite muddle of paperwork instead of their abusive partners being shoved into a cell.

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These are the real disasters headed for the American city: a peek across the Atlantic is all New Yorkers need to envision the immediate possibilities of progressive mismanagement. Sadiq Khan’s London, a city swamped in antisocial miasma, shows us what happens when incompetent policing collides with vanishing public values, when going easy on the violent and depraved becomes cruelty to the innocent. Sexual offenses on the Tube up 10% in a year; violent crime up 40% in a decade; security tags on bottles of Persil. Of course, New York has its own charms — subway cars becoming sleeper trains for fent addicts with hands down their pants; guns. With Mamdani installed, the complaints of the law-abider look soon, as in London, to be drowned out by the appeals of our betters to see bad behavior as evidence of victimhood. As Fraser Nelson has pointed out, Khan has overseen a TfL whose staff are told not to intervene when riders vault or shove through barriers, creating a stark division — also visible in New York — between those who gleefully bump and those who sourly tap their way in. The Met have a similar institutional limpness when it comes to shoplifting; as Nelson puts it: “You can walk into a shop, steal anything you like, walk away — and the chances are you won’t be caught.”

Why do we love disaster movies? The blockbusters of the Nineties impart a strange comfort: they impress on us the value of what is under attack, how lucky we are to live unmolested by comets and quakes, how charming and functional regular life is. But how true is that today, when urban life is the way it is? While violent crime in New York is down since the Nineties, petty offenses — just like in London — have jumped since Covid owing to lax enforcement, creating the perception of depressing lawlessness. Maybe that’s why the big-budget disaster film has fallen out of fashion; the city no longer feels like the symbol of national or Western order, and the stakes of mass destruction seem lower when the target is itself a crucible of chaos. It is telling that the only recent cinematic success in this genre, Twisters (2024), jeopardized not a noble metropolis but a ramshackle rodeo town and the main character’s humble homestead. Today the atmosphere of the city more closely recalls the Seventies, when moral decline and distrust in authorities created the first true classics of the disaster genre. If the on-screen apocalypse has a third wind, it will be in this mold. As for reality, will 2026 be a disaster? Very possibly; the real question is whether those in London or New York, so accustomed to demoralizing, ubiquitous delinquency, will even notice.

“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programs is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretizes your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilizations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilizations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighborhood. Russia and China, also rich civilizations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a nonprofit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

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The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighborhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighborhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply skeptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

If these are Mamdani’s biggest fans — he performed best among what New Yorkers grimly call “transplants” — then I have no doubt that his appeal to well-meaning, well-heeled Zoomers is bolstered by the presence of his very chic, very right-on wife. Rama Duwaji is a bobbed artist born in Houston (though her Instagram bio protests “from Damascus”) who ranges, according to the resident babe-raters of X, from a sulky, pouting narcissist to a Princess Diana-level national treasure. At 28, she is at the top end of Gen Z; she met her husband on Hinge and wore knee-high black boots on her wedding day. One Facebook post from a “digital creator” in the run-up to the election rhapsodized over her “high boots, bare shoulders … showing off her gorgeous legs with confidence”. This, it read, was the liberated modern Muslim couple “about to lead the most Zionist city on Earth” (ever heard of Tel Aviv?). It seemed Mamdani’s untested political talent was secondary to his wife’s decision to get her shoulders out.

This may seem like the logic of a deranged naïf, but aesthetics increasingly matter in politics. This is particularly true when the target voter is a social media native whose engagement with policy is restricted to what friends put on their Instagram stories. For young liberals, Duwaji’s look signals the promise of progressive politics: her haircut alone is shorthand for being on the right side of history. In the age of Maga mavens with long barrel curls, tangerine foundation and stiff faces, here is someone who looks like she belongs at a Ridgewood party, where she’d drink High Noons and discourse on prison abolition with other illustrator-activists and their software-engineer boyfriends.

To a certain kind of bright-eyed young professional, Duwaji is the model proletarian (aka just like me!): a veteran of dating apps with a cool but humble art job, where you churn out doodles of cats and hijabis, and a commitment to social justice sternly meted out on social media. A direct message on Instagram from weeks after the October 7 attacks shows that she was ticking people off for not advocating for Palestine online: “shift ur energy for speaking out about genocide!!!” Then, last month, she posted broken hearts on Instagram about the death of the Palestinian influencer Saleh al-Jafarawi (“beloved Jafawari”, she wrote), who had celebrated the October 7 attacks in a gleeful viral video. Duwaji embodies the ineffectual radicalism of young activist voters, sharing their frustration over “complicity” and “silence” which they presume is also held by the working masses. But Mamdani and his wife represent “the people” — those inconveniently conservative lumpens more interested in utility bills than the global intifada — about as much as King Donald Croesus represents the red states. That is, not at all.

Duwaji’s physical appearance has drawn ample attention since Mamdani’s victory. Luckily, she also seems to spend a lot of time obsessing over it — to the extent that her own face appears to be the principal subject of her art. X users have been uncharitable about her tendency to “self-insert” in her drawings, but the evidence is pretty damning: to my philistine eye, Duwaji’s style looks like the poorly drawn Wojak memes born on imageboards in the 2010s — except in the place of soyjacks, chuds and tradwives is… the artist herself. In one particularly egregious example, she draws a policeman kneeling on a brown woman’s neck; his handcuffs dangle over her keffiyeh. It’s difficult to escape the interpretation that, here, Duwaji was reimagining the murder of George Floyd except this time, she — or a woman who looked remarkably like her — was the star of the show.

Being a rubbish artist isn’t a problem in itself, but the spectacularly shallow social commentary this first lady’s illustrations provide is depressing indeed. What strikes me is how very 2020 the whole thing is: Instagram activism, fantasies of victimization, nebulous “advocacy” which relentlessly centers the advocate. And, crucially, it’s all so oppressively cringe.

But this may be key to Duwaji’s fascination for a certain kind of voter: the politics of New York do skew embarrassingly earnest. When they enter Gracie Mansion in January, Mamdani and Duwaji will be at the helm of a city where quirky indie rebellion has long amounted to self-aware posturing. Here, the streets are awash with “wholesome chungus”, as one recent tweet put it: memelords tape onto lampposts flyers which invite passers-by to scan QR codes if they’re “looking for a hot performative male” or to “smoke a cigarette with me” in the West Village — all for the incomprehensible cause of being offbeat and, ominously, “creating”. Businesses, too, plaster NYC with vigilante graphic design: one poster on my road, in a corner where the fentanyl addicts huddle overnight, advertises a local dispensary with the tagline “weed made me gay”, along with emetic phrases like “toasted twink” and “puffing pansexual”. Duwaji is a hit here because her gauche art resonates with the city’s softcore radicalism, something which would be laughed out of the room in most of London.

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The real problem, of course, is that what Mamdani and his coterie stand for makes no practical sense to the people they profess to be representing — the killer catch in many radical projects of recent years, including Corbynism and its grim sequel Your Party. Squiggly art about protests and soup kitchens may make Zoomer women feel good, but they might feel less aglow with solidarity when they can’t take the bus because their dreamboat mayor has made them free, turning them into mobile homeless encampments populated with dangerous and drug-addled men. Nor will fourth-wave feminists thank him when he makes social workers, rather than police, the first port of call for victims of domestic abuse — shunting battered women into a sluggish, bureaucratic nightmare instead of putting their partners in handcuffs. Nor will liberated “digital sex workers” selling nudes to supplement their income feel extra-empowered if Mamdani ultimately decriminalizes prostitution, putting trafficked women entirely at the mercy of their pimps. Actually, scrap that last one — privileged feet-pic sellers never gave a toss about actual prostitutes.

New York’s next first lady will preside over the center of the capitalist world, overseen by a husband whose objective is to diminish it. These are young globalists: Mamdani may have won on a campaign of local affordability (memorably including bringing down the cost of halal meals), but his politics revolve around other places, other battles, far from the five boroughs. Nobody better represents this unrootedness — from New York as a place and from the priorities of its residents — than Duwaji and her fan club. These are people stuck in perpetual protest, obsessively documenting their urge to “rage at the state of the world”, as she puts it. Because that protest is so tightly bound in their self-image as a little radical in an evil system, nuance doesn’t come easy; older or more moderate voters find this offputting. When you’re an angry young creative whose job is to draw pictures of other angry people for The New Yorker, you never face ideological compromise or challenges; when the messy reality of political office unfurls next year, we can expect to see this couple grow up fast. It will be fascinating to watch the Zoomer’s champion being, I suspect for the first time, around people with vast experience and complex views.

Back in 2024, the President’s gains in neighborhoods like Corona were widely taken as evidence of a new Republican coalition: multi-racial, working-class and culturally conservative. But with Mamdani’s victory, that coalition appears to be under threat. For not only did these voters abandon the Republicans, they spurned the moderate choice, Andrew Cuomo, too. In fact, Mamdani made significant inroads with the very electorate that propelled Trump to victory just 12 months ago. 

There were an estimated 60,000 New Yorkers who voted for Trump and Mamdani. In a city of eight million, that may not seem like much, but they exemplify a broader trend across the country. As this month’s special elections showed, America’s non-white population is becoming ideologically promiscuous, flitting between both major parties, and shedding long-standing partisan loyalties in the process. When I visited some of the neighborhoods where the Trump-Mamdani swing was most pronounced, the overall message was clear: the status quo was not working. With next year’s midterms looming, this restless, unpredictable bloc could prove decisive in shaping the balance of power in Washington.

Here in New York, sandwiched between La Guardia airport and the Mets’ baseball ground, Citi Field, is Corona, one of the most Hispanic corners of the city. Next to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the streets are lined with vendors selling roasted corn, fresh tamales, mangoes, and empanadas. The residents, mostly first- or second-generation immigrants from Latin America, are blue-collar, Catholic and entrepreneurial, with many working two jobs, or sometimes three. 

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In 2024, Trump won six election districts here (up from zero), and made double-digit percentage point gains in dozens of others nearby. It was the best performance of any Republican nominee in Gotham since 1988, fueled by anger over rising grocery prices, the cost of living, and declining public safety. But within a year, voters turned away from the 79-year-old, two-term president and voted for the 34-year-old newcomer Mamdani instead.

“Trump brought too much chaos, man,” says Ramon*, whom I met outside the Guatemalteca Deli on Roosevelt Avenue. “My bills are still high and my wife can’t afford no groceries.” A part-time car mechanic by day and cleaner at the new JP Morgan office by night, Ramon says that he voted for Trump in 2024 because he thought he’d bring down the price of gas and groceries, but “that ain’t happened”. “I don’t know if Mamdani’s going to make things better or worse,” he said, “but we need something different from this.”

The despair felt by Ramon wasn’t confined to Roosevelt Avenue. Ten minutes north of Corona lies East Elmhurst, another Queens neighborhood that saw a similar Trump-to-Mamdani swing. Unlike Corona, there is no subway line here, and the Manhattan skyline barely pokes out in the distance. At the local park, I spoke with Carlos de Cruz, who told me that he didn’t vote this month, but said that many of his friends followed Ramon’s lead. “They wanted something different with Trump,” he said. “Now they’re angry with him because the prices are still high. The ICE stuff is scary. Now they think Mamdani will bring something different.”

Mamdani certainly is bringing something different. He has promised free buses, free universal childcare, public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and a rent freeze for roughly one million rent-stabilized units in the city. It’s a platform that jives well with New York’s “commie corridor”, which stretches from northwest Queens down through Brooklyn, but it took longer for the city’s outer boroughs to warm up to it. When Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, he did so without much support from the city’s immigrant and working-class communities. But by the mayoral election this month, he built a rainbow coalition of Muslim, black, and Hispanic voters as well as renters and progressives. 

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Bronx local Yahay Obeid is a new member of this rainbow coalition. A two-time Trump voter, the air traffic controller was so “disgusted” by the racism he saw on the Right that he ended up voting for him. “There are a lot of people like me who are not socialists,” he said. “They are moderates who found the racial slurs and racist bigotry so disgusting and disturbing that they decided to vote for Mamdani.” Then why, I ask, not vote for Cuomo? “Cuomo shut down houses of worship during Covid and I’ll never forgive him for that.”

Obeid, the director of the Bronx Muslim Center, is a practicing Muslim. He admitted that many in his community had reservations about Mamdani, particularly over his liberal positions on prostitution and public safety. Previous statements including “defund the police” and describing the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” had unnerved his members. That was, until, Mamdani met with them on several occasions to assuage their concerns. “We were getting backlash that he wanted to legalize prostitution,” Obeid said. “But he told us that was DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) policy, not his. We also asked him about defunding the police, but he said that he’s not looking to cut down on police and that he’s keeping the same police commissioner, so that changed the mood in the room.”

In 2024, Trump claimed roughly 30% of the Muslim vote nationally. But in this month’s election, Mamdani secured around nine out of every 10 of New York’s Muslim votes. He did this by leaning into his Islamic identity, producing campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla, and fusing it with an economically populist message. In one of his earliest (and most popular) campaign videos, for example, he railed against “Halalflation”, a nod to rising street‑food prices, which quickly spread through WhatsApp groups and local mosque networks. 

“Mamdani understands the difference between ethnic politics and identity politics,” said Renu Mukherjee, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “There was no grievance — he just immersed himself in various local cultures, which Cuomo completely failed to do.” That was evident when Mamdani took the unusual step, for a non-Latino candidate, of releasing a full Spanish-language ad. And it was evident when I visited Jamaica Hill, central Queens, where stray Mamdani flyers in Bangla fluttered past bridal shops selling affordable saris and sherwanis.

Last year, Jamaica Hill swung nearly 25 points toward the GOP last year, only to flip to Mamdani by an even larger margin. In several districts, he captured more than 70% of the vote, highlighting the success of his outreach campaign. But there was also something simpler at work: many voters saw him as one of their own, a sense that only deepened as Right-wing attacks intensified. In one notorious case, Mamdani was attacked online for eating rice with his hands, with one GOP Congressman telling him to “go back to the Third World”. Except when I stopped for lunch at Khalil Biriyani House, at least half of the customers were doing the same. 

Clearly, he was more in step with the neighborhood than his critics were. New York has long had a large foreign-born population, but unlike other multicultural cities such as London, it is far less assimilationist. Here, many immigrant communities remain distinct, as evidenced by the 40+ ethnic enclaves across the city. Harlem has “Le Petit Senegal”; Queens has “Little Manila”; and in the Bronx, where Obeid lives, there is a little Yemen. In recent years, however, assimilation has slowed further, driven in part by the arrival of new immigrant groups, such as Bangladeshis. In the Jamaica district, where the South Asian population has exploded, new arrivals have brought cultural habits from their countries of origin — such as eating rice with hands — which Mamdani himself mirrored.

The interesting question this all poses is whether Mamdani’s brand of ethnic politics can lay a template for Democrats elsewhere. Despite his campaign’s strengths, it was also clear that a strong anti-incumbent feeling drove many New Yorkers to “vote blue no matter who”. Fear and fury over high grocery prices, a needlessly showy deportations campaign, and cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have turned voters against Trump. “There was definitely an anti-Trump backlash in some of these neighborhoods,” said Michael Lange, author of the Narrative Wars Substack. “If Kamala Harris and Trump reran this year, Trump isn’t winning neighborhoods like North Corona or others in Queens.”

But Democrats have also found limited success running as the perma-scandalized anti-Trump party, a strategy that minority communities, as 2024 demonstrated, do not respond well to. As a result, these voters — who are more pragmatic than ideological — remain up for grabs, which helps explain why some of the biggest shifts in these special elections occurred among the country’s non-white population. For example, New Jersey’s two counties with the biggest moves towards Democrats had the largest concentrations of Hispanics. Meanwhile in Virginia, Hispanic and Asian voters swung 20 and 42 points, respectively, towards the Democratic governor’s candidate compared with the 2024 presidential election. Taken together, these results show that non-white voters are far from a captive electorate.

This presents a problem — and opportunity — for both parties. Over the past decade, Democrats have become whiter, wealthier, and more college-educated, increasingly oriented toward suburban and professional constituencies. That shift has alienated the non-white, working-class voters who once formed the backbone of the party’s coalition. But as shown by the election successes of Mamdani, Mikie Sherill (New Jersey’s governor-elect) and Abigail Spanberger (Virginia’s governor-elect), a renewed focus on affordability can at least work some way towards restoring some of that lost trust.

Mamdani’s focus on economic, rather than cultural, grievances was a vindication of this strategy. In the early 2020s, the then Queens assemblyman’s views were a grab-bag of BLM politics: Covid maximalism, defunding the police, ending capitalism, and promoting racial identitarianism. By contrast, his campaign focused on New York’s cost of living crisis and extending an olive branch to Trump voters. Similarly in Virginia, more than half of all the GOP’s political ads were about trans issues, which did not strike a chord with voters struggling to pay their electricity bills.

For Trump and the Republicans, the warning is just as stark. The same results show that they do not have as strong a grip on these voters as once thought. With the midterms less than a year away, any overreliance on Trump’s prior popularity risks undoing the gains Republicans made with Latino and Asian communities. In states such as Texas, where Republican gerrymandering relied heavily on Trump-era support among Latino voters, at least two seats may now be in jeopardy. Given that Latino voters are more likely than any other ethnic group to cite the economy as their top concern, improving the health of the economy has to become a central focus of the Trump administration.

Next year’s elections, then, could shape up to be the most unpredictable yet. With a strong anti-incumbent sentiment spreading across the country, Democrats are well placed to capitalize on this voter disaffection. But if there’s one thing this party excels at, it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Should Mamdani fail to deliver on any of his ambitious promises, it could tarnish the Democratic brand for years. If public safety deteriorates or cost-of-living pressures rise, New York’s new mayor will become the embodiment of Democratic urban failure, a cautionary symbol for voters nationwide.

More broadly, the Trump-Mamdani overlap illustrates a wider trend: that American politics is becoming increasingly volatile, localized, and issue-driven, rather than strictly tribal. This shift is especially evident among immigrant populations, who lack the same kind of tribal loyalty to parties often found among white voters. The constant cycling between Democrats and Republicans suggests that there is now a widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a fertile political terrain for insurgent candidates like Mamdani. 

Crucially, Mamdani represents the beginning, not the end, of this insurgency. In other blue cities, progressives and socialists are gaining ground, with New York’s mayor-elect serving as a blueprint for their campaigns. But the lessons of the early 2020s should not be forgotten: veer too far into cultural politics and you risk alienating the very voters who put you in office. It was, after all, the former cop and moderate Eric Adams who replaced the progressive mayor Bill de Blasio in New York’s last mayoral election.

At a state and federal level, voters have shown they are willing to buck party allegiances if there is something new on the table. Paradoxically, they are voting for change in the hope of returning to some semblance of normality. As Ramon succinctly put it: “The world is crazy right now… I just want to get on with my life.”

*Ramon’s name was changed 

This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, would thrive. Buildings rarely exceed three stories, and the streets are lined with repair garages, laundromats, and mid-price food stores. It’s more blue-collar, Catholic, and Trumpy than the rest of the city, where Latino immigrants mix with older white-ethnic families with surnames like Temkin and Kowalski. 

In his trademark red beret and a crisp blue suit, Sliwa looks rather tame compared to those standing next to him: a KFC chicken, two baby dinosaurs, one ghost, and several Minions. In some ways, though, the scene is the perfect encapsulation of his campaign: comical, attention-grabbing, even endearing, — but fundamentally unserious. Even so, to dismiss his bid as a sideshow ignores the very real effect he has had on this race. 

Crucially, he has thrust issues like subway safety and public order into the spotlight, giving voice to outer-borough New Yorkers disillusioned by the choice between a socialist newcomer and a disgraced former governor. And by rebuffing former mayors, hedge-fund billionaires, and establishment Democrats who have been calling on him to step aside, he’s also exposed the anti-democratic maneuverings of the city’s elites, winning him respect on both sides of the aisle. 

Critics argue that by refusing to drop out, Sliwa has paved the way for New York’s first socialist mayor. But as I trailed Sliwa last weekend — from the GOP’s HQ in deep Staten Island to Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and then Astoria, Queens — many of the people I spoke with had no intention of backing either Cuomo or Mamdani, regardless of whether Sliwa remained on the ticket. Few said that they could bring themselves to vote for a governor who supported cashless bail, took away qualified immunity for cops, and undercounted nursing-home deaths during the pandemic. For them, it’s Sliwa or nothing.

“I have the same net favorability as Barack Obama,” Sliwa tells me after the Halloween parade. “Obama was loved by Democrats — and I’m loved in New York.” At six feet, the square-jawed 71-year-old still cuts an imposing figure, even if the costumed children playing nearby somewhat undermine that image.

“I’ve been shot, stabbed, and beaten on these streets, but the people love me,” he adds. “It’s like the TV program Everybody Loves Raymond, except it’s called Everybody Loves Curtis.” 

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A lot of people do love Curtis — and have done for many decades. Sliwa first caught the public eye in 1970, when, as a 16-year-old paperboy delivering the Daily News to his neighbors in Brooklyn, he spotted a building on fire. Without hesitation, he rushed inside and rescued several people, a feat that earned him an “International Newspaperboy” award — and even a visit to the White House. 

That early brush with heroism gave Sliwa his first taste of public adoration and a lasting commitment to civic engagement, which eventually led him to establish the Guardian Angels at age 23. The group, originally known as the “Magnificent 13,” was formed in response to New York City’s soaring murder and crime rates in the 1970s. They would patrol the subways to promote public safety, acting as unarmed civilian watchdogs to prevent crime.

They didn’t have much of an impact on the city’s crime levels, but their distinctive red berets and bomber jackets provided a sense of security to New Yorkers. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo was a fan, remarking at the time that the Guardian Angels were a “better expression of morality than our city deserves” — a comment his son may not appreciate today.  

Members of the group, mostly Latino and African-American, were unarmed but trained in karate. Sometimes, however, the bigger threat came not from would-be criminals, but the police. NYPD officers didn’t take kindly to these wannabe-cops patrolling their streets, and often there were clashes between the two groups. In 1981, a police officer fatally shot a Guardian Angel after mistakenly seeing a threat in him unzipping his jacket to show the group’s emblem. 

Yet nothing did quite as much to damage the group’s credibility as when the founder, Sliwa, confessed that many of the Guardians’ tales of heroism proved to be untrue. “I was wrong, but we were in a sprint for survival,” Sliwa claimed in 1992. “We were just little people trying to get recognition for doing good work. In a sense it was like being Don Quixote.” The Guardian Angels are still around, but their visibility has waned since those reputational hits.

Sliwa’s supporters remember those days fondly. It’s the reason so many of them support him now. “He protected the people when the city wouldn’t do anything,” said one Glendale resident. “His heart has always been in the right place.” Even in deep-blue Manhattan, Sliwa was treated more like a beloved court jester than a political enemy. “I don’t support Sliwa or any of his policies,” said one resident. “But he is entertaining.”

Sliwa acknowledges that the “love” he gets hasn’t yet turned into votes. The latest RealClearPolitics poll of polls has him at 17% — the lowest vote share of any Republican mayoral nominee in 40 years — and nearly 20 points behind Mamdani in first place. “There is fear and fright hanging over this election,” he says in his gruff Brooklyn accent. “This is the most dystopian election I’ve ever seen. … Cuomo’s an angry curmudgeon predicting the end of the world, which guilts people into voting for him.” 

This race is Sliwa’s second bite at the cherry. In 2021, Eric Adams, a former cop and a Democrat, trounced him by nearly half a million votes. Dogged by corruption allegations, Adams has dropped out and endorsed Cuomo. Pressure on Sliwa to follow suit has come from the soon-to-be-former-mayor, billionaires like Bill Ackman and John Katsimatides, several local newspapers, and Cuomo himself.

Sliwa has — thus far — refused to back down, saying that he would only exit the race if “they figure out a way to put me in a pine box and bury me six feet under.” In Sliwa’s mind, he is a Republican standing on the Republican ticket. If anyone should drop out, it should be Cuomo, who, after all, lost the Democratic primary to Mamdani and chose to run as an independent. “Cuomo would put the last nail in the coffin of New York City like he did in destroying New York state,” he tells me. “Then he fled, fearing impeachment from his own Democrats, and then hung out with his billionaire friends in the Hamptons until he decided to somehow revive his career by trying to be mayor.”

Nevertheless, if Sliwa were to drop out, his chunk of votes might put Cuomo within striking distance of Mamdani, who is running a campaign far to the Left of either candidate. Public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, universal childcare, and free public buses make Mamdani’s proposals more radical than either Cuomo’s or Sliwa’s — but the need to save Cuomo doesn’t seem to trouble the Republican’s supporters. “He’s a lifelong New Yorker; he lives, breathes, and loves New York,” says Richard Huber, a Queens local. “Choosing between Cuomo and Mamdani is like choosing between cyanide and death by hanging.”

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To his detractors, though, this stubbornness is vintage Sliwa, a character streak (or flaw) that has stuck with him since high school. Even then, he clashed with authority: he was expelled from Brooklyn Prep, a Jesuit school, for refusing to fulfill the school’s jacket-and-tie requirement. He then dropped out of his next school, Canarsie High School, because all the kids were “doing acid and smoking reefer.”  

In adult life, this intractability has led to more serious, nearly lethal, consequences. During his career as a popular New York radio host in the 1980s and ’90s, Sliwa regularly attacked mobsters like John Gotti, who went to trial for charges including racketeering and murder in 1992. After Gotti’s conviction, three men jumped Sliwa outside his apartment, breaking his wrist and elbow. The next morning, he was back on air, adding Gotti’s son to his list of polemical targets. 

But that meant the next punishment was more severe: two months later, he climbed into a cab near his home — only for a gunman to spring from the front seat and shoot him in the groin and legs. Sliwa hurled himself out the window of the moving car, later recalling the sting of “pebbles shooting into my face off the tires.” Compared to that, Sliwa tells me, “a mayoral race ain’t so bad.”

When the cameras are off, Sliwa seems frail. His head swivels like a restless figurine, and his hands tremble. A sharp tan line from his beret cuts across his forehead, lending it a weathered, sun-beaten look. All this was on view moments before Sliwa appeared on stage at the GOP Staten Island rally. But once the show started, the radio persona emerged. “Cuomo’s like the grim reaper — he’s so cold-hearted,” he warned. “He’s a dirtbag.” 

Sliwa clearly relishes his time in the limelight. Over the course of the campaign, he’s delivered some of the most memorable lines — Cuomo “slapping fannies and killing grannies,” in reference to the nursing-homes scandal and sexual-abuse allegations — and telling Mamdani, in Gen Z-speak, to stop “glazing him.” This is why Sliwa has won himself a cult following online, some of it driven by Mamdani’s supporters. 

But on a deeper level, Sliwa’s attacks on the Democratic establishment and the donor class have tapped into a very real anger that many New Yorkers feel toward the city’s elites. Amid record inequality and a persistent affordability crisis, that resentment helped fuel support for President Trump in the 2024 election. It’s a sentiment Mamdani has also capitalized on, despite sharing almost no ideological ground with the former president.

Ironically, Sliwa takes inspiration from Mamdani for his own campaign. Despite struggling to pronounce his first name (Zor-han instead of Zoh-ran), he commends Mamdani for coming from “almost zero” in the Democratic primary to beating Cuomo. “That’s why I say you can’t believe the polls,” he says. Many of his voters seem to agree, as does another well-known Republican, Rudy Giuliani. 

At the Staten Island rally, Giuliani appeared by Zoom to say, “When I first ran for mayor, I lost by 1% when the polls had me down by 12. And the second time, I was down by six and I won,” said Giuliani. “So don’t give up! Curtis is the best candidate by far.” The speech, however, had a slightly tragicomic quality to it, reminiscent of when Giuliani ended up hosting a news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping instead of the hotel after Trump’s 2020 loss. A combination of patchy connection and poor audio forced Sliwa’s handlers to hold a laptop up to a microphone so people could hear the former mayor speak.

Giuliani, along with former New York Gov. George Pataki, is Sliwa’s role model. As mayor, Giuliani revitalized the city and presided over a significant drop in crime. He was also fairly liberal on social issues like gay marriage and gun rights. Sliwa, for his part, has run a conventional conservative campaign focused on public safety and promising more police officers on the streets. The only difference is that he’s also running on an anti-animal-cruelty platform, which includes a ban on kill shelters. 

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I ask Sliwa whether he should be following in Giuliani’s footsteps to broaden his appeal to New York’s liberals. “I am very liberal!” he exclaims. “Well, not a liberal, but I’m liberal in some things, like gay marriage and gun rights. I also don’t like Medicaid and food stamps being cut back. There are poor people who will be hurt by this.”

Sliwa has also criticized his own party for vilifying Muslims. With the likes of Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and even the president himself fretting about the Islamization of New York (Mamdani is a Shiite Muslim), Sliwa defends the city’s almost million-strong Muslim community. “I condemned the national Republicans early on,” he says. “I told them: you’re attacking the Muslim religion and the way the culture is, like, eating with your fingers. I told them to back off, because Muslims are very conservative. They’re even way too conservative for me!”

Labeling himself a “populist but not MAGA,” Sliwa believes that one of the reasons Trump has not endorsed him is because he can’t be put in a “cookie-cutter box.” “You never know the position I’m going to take because I’m open-minded,” he says. I ask him what, if any, issue he has changed his mind on. He takes a long pause. “Well, there’s still some issues I haven’t quite come to grips with. Obviously, I don’t want sex-change surgery for teenagers,” he says. “But for adults, I haven’t come to a conclusion yet. I’m not opposed to it, but I really think it’s really more of a private concern.” 

A large number of New Yorkers may never forgive Sliwa for staying in the race. But as the Republican nominee, why should he? It isn’t his responsibility to champion a Democrat, let alone one accused of sexual abuse by multiple women. And unlike Cuomo, Sliwa actually won his party’s primary.

There is also something oddly endearing about this aging street tough. He is a classic New York eccentric, the last of a dying breed of why-I-outta fighters with a surprisingly big heart (at one point, he was fostering 16 cats). He’s shown a willingness to buck the Republican line on a range of issues and cares a great deal about the city he’s spent his whole life in. After Tuesday’s election, the Everybody Loves Curtis show will be over, and with it, an older New York will fade away — for good and ill. 

Not since Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign has there been this much excitement on the American Left. And for good reason: Mamdani, a Ugandan-born democratic socialist, launched his longshot bid for Gracie Mansion a year ago, before soon achieving AOC-level fame and leapfrogging past his conventional Democratic opponents, past incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and past Cuomo, a scion of one of the most powerful liberal dynasties in the country. A victorious Mamdani would set the tone for Left-wing urban governance to a degree not seen in decades.

Yet Mamdani and his inner circle would be wise to temper their jubilation. The untested Mamdani could singly determine the course of American progressivism and its odds of countering the MAGA realignment: failure would carry an exorbitant cost. While the champion of affordability has promised to restore integrity to City Hall, there are worrisome indicators that Mamdani hasn’t grappled with the other causes of blue-city blues: namely, that crime and disorder appear to be festering once more following the historic lows reached early last decade.

It is hard to overstate the pressure on him. In a party largely bereft of compelling leaders, Mamdani has been heralded as the next great hope of progressive politics. But his opponents predict disaster as confidently as his supporters expect change. Mamdani, his foes charge, is an unabashed creature of the “woke” #DefundthePolice Left, animated by theories of criminal justice that are opposed to the common sense of ordinary New Yorkers. Mamdani and his allies have tried to parry these claims as slander, the fever dream of reactionaries who see a “loony” sectarian agenda in every  progressive cause.

Mamdani’s ground game and the media war suggest he has mostly deflected the blows. Still, his biggest challenge is not to convince ambivalent New Yorkers outside his base that his detractors are delusional. It is to demonstrate he understands unequivocally that ambitious reform and strong social trust must go hand-in-hand.

Since the June primary Mamdani has made a few efforts to telegraph as much. He has apologized for past remarks broadly condemning the NYPD, promised to “discourage” the phrase “globalize the intifada”, and met extensively with rabbis and other Jewish leaders. He has signaled that if elected, he would retain Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, one of Adams’s more respected appointees, who has combined a tough approach to crime with encouraging efforts to root out corruption in the force. 

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To be sure, some of the attackers exude noxious hysteria (about “Trotskyite” experiments and the rise of American-style “Islamo-gauchisme.” They traffic in sensationalist and bigoted rhetoric that makes Tea Party-era rumors about Barack Obama’s “foreign birth certificate” seem tame by comparison. Desperate and resentful, Cuomo himself has resorted to exploiting unease over Mamdani’s Muslim identity in a city whose Muslim population only modestly trails its Jewish one.

Even so, it would be unwise of Mamdani to dismiss more sober doubts about his ability to manage the city well and ensure public safety — two preconditions of lasting social-democratic reform. Millions of working- and middle-class New Yorkers are hungry for greater economic security and laws that reset the balance of power between the asset-rich and asset-poor. These same New Yorkers, however, also want a city that is safe and hospitable to families with children.

Such concerns aren’t rooted in bad faith. Since Covid, Gotham has been in limbo. It’s hardly the caricature painted by those who say the “bad old days” of the Seventies and Eighties are back, but the city nevertheless radiates an increasingly antisocial ambiance. While the pandemic-era surge in violent crime has mostly ebbed, felony assaults on public transit are up. A number of sadistic murders have frightened the public. Despite a recent decline, fatal drug overdoses are above pre-2020 levels. The city’s homelessness crisis — already severe under Adams’s Left-leaning predecessor, Bill de Blasio — hit new records in the last two years. Rough sleeping and panhandling are ubiquitous.

There is a more general sense that the city has grown indifferent to its own commons. The sight of feces and urine on buses and subways is a regular occurrence, even during school hours. Migrant children hawk candies and other goods in the subway and parks instead of attending school. The odor of synthetic drugs hangs in the air, while poorly regulated marijuana shops pop up close to school zones. Working-class and heavily immigrant neighborhoods have struggled with an explosion in prostitution and shoplifting. Vision Zero — a plan to eliminate traffic fatalities that was introduced in 2014 — backslid for most of Adams’s term.

It is easy to misinterpret distressing incidents and random violence as reflecting a broader trend. It is likewise easy to dismiss patterns that steadily erode the city’s quality of life. Amid President Trump’s threats to deploy more national guard troops to US cities, progressives are at pains to play down any and all worries about public order. Yet the decades-long effort to build a more cohesive and optimistic city seems to have plateaued, and may be unraveling. That may be an indictment of the city’s current administration and the establishment. But it doesn’t nullify the questions dogging Mamdani. Does he register what working families see with increasing frustration and alarm? And does he have the judgment to avert the dysfunction which threatens to pervade the city?

For all his thoughtfulness, Mamdani has not always conveyed that he does possess such sensitivity. He argues passionately that “New Yorkers have been betrayed by the politics of our city” – in which a corrupt and obsequious establishment has sold-out to the kinds of billionaires now racing to defeat him. And he is mostly right. Three decades of cowardly deference to the city’s wealthiest residents has favored the extravagance of the few over the common good. Preventing crime and low-level disorder requires greater poverty reduction, affordable housing, high-wage jobs, policies to reduce youth unemployment, investment in mental-health services, and intelligent programs to curb recidivism. Only through such efforts can the city fulfill its true potential as a beacon of pluralism and opportunity.

Mamdani has stressed this long overdue reform-minded agenda as the basis of his candidacy. His model, he insists, is New York’s legendary three-term mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a progressive Republican who championed workers, fought corruption and organized crime, and partnered with FDR to alleviate the Great Depression. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani has spoken eloquently of making sure “affordability” means genuine financial freedom for the 50% of New Yorkers who are rent-burdened. It’s an appeal to a greater freedom — to enjoy more family time, recreation, and community activities — that also draws inspiration from Northern Europe’s postwar social contract. As Mamdani allowed in a cozy interview on The View, he is like a Scandinavian politician, but “a little more brown.”

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Still, there is the occasional sign that Mamdani the reformer does not grasp the issues as working-class New Yorkers might see them. A case in point is his opaque stance on prostitution. When asked about his past support for decriminalizing sex work in a recent interview on Good Day New York, Mamdani emphasized there should be “no tolerance for [sex] trafficking” and violence against women, but that decriminalization is consistent with the recommendations of the World Health Organization and other international agencies. It was an answer that no doubt impressed the advanced degree-holders and NGO workers. But as during the mayoral debates, he missed a simple opportunity to reassure New Yorkers troubled by open-air prostitution and all that it signals. I’ll do everything within my power to get the girls off the street is what a strong leader who understood the ramifications of the problem should have said.

As final polls show Mamdani’s lead tightening, his team is naturally keen to keep the focus on bread-and-butter issues. His converts, moreover, would say that the notion that he, a practicing Muslim, is out-of-step with New Yorkers’ views of crime and public morality is baseless. His hyperbolic critics, they protest, are holding him to an absurdly different standard than Cuomo, who has been disgraced by far worse controversies and abuses of power. To look askance at some of his approaches to social justice and “harm reduction” is to miss the big picture and fall prey to the manipulations of vested interests who don’t want their dominance of the city challenged.

If he is to succeed, Mamdani’s allies must confront his weaknesses. His main mistake in the last days of the race has been to show he still bears the influence of the fringier elements of the Democratic Socialists of America at the very moment he ought to be assuming the mantle of La Guardia. By now he should know well enough the stakes are about more than him. Powerful organized interests want him to fail, for reasons beyond the enmity his campaign has sparked; indeed, a pall over a Mamdani administration would inevitably spread to progressive insurgents in other, more Trump-friendly parts of the country.

On the cusp of power, Mamdani’s greatest test awaits. His election would mark a sea change in city politics whose rumblings began 14 years ago, when Occupy Wall Street mobilized tens of thousands of New Yorkers fed up with what they saw as an insular and bankrupt liberal establishment. What he does with the excitement and good will he’s generated will reverberate long after his first months in office. There is little room for error.

But just because urban crime is a real problem doesn’t mean that Trump can fix it by decree. Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in attempting to circumvent the frustratingly iterative process of federalist democracy, which rarely offers political or practical shortcuts.

As with many things Trump, we are here because of abject Democratic failures. During the pandemic, much of America endured a rupture in personal safety and order. Reported homicides rose by a third between 2019 and 2022. Cities that seemed to have vanquished the bad old decades disintegrated in full national view: New York City’s murder level spiked 53 percent from near-record lows between 2019 and 2021, the sharpest increase in recorded history.

The summer 2020 riots, too, heightened voter fears. People who remember plywood Manhattan (stores boarded up against another night of window smashing), or who saw Minneapolis burn, can hold two perfectly compatible thoughts in their heads: just because there were peaceful protests in 2020 doesn’t mean there weren’t violent disturbances.

In much of the country, if not New York, rising violence in 2020 and 2021 was a sharp acceleration of existing trends; killings had been rising for a half decade. Moreover, even people who didn’t acutely fear being murdered had already noticed the gradual increase in pettier transgressions, with stores locking the toothpaste behind Plexiglass and drivers with fake plates blowing more red lights.

Crime and disorder, not coincidentally, exploded as high-profile cities, including San Francisco and New York, embraced new state and local policies to soften or altogether eliminate the consequences of committing many crimes — including, yes, reducing the use of cash bail to incarcerate suspects.

Democrats and their media allies and social-media surrogates for years ignored or minimized these failures and gaslighted the growing public anxiety. “Crime is much lower than it was in 1990,” we heard repeatedly, as if a 30-year-old, out-of-context benchmark could be a substitute for continued steady progress (never mind that no Democrat would ever argue that 1990 should serve as the singular barometer to track other ills).

“Crime is higher in red states,” we heard (and still hear). Democrats ignored a big reason for this disparity. People living in areas with higher population density have long demanded, and gotten, a lower crime rate, partly because they are more aware of crime’s impact. A person screaming threats on the subway can unnerve dozens of witnesses; scream on a rural road, and nobody will hear you.

 “Crime happens for a lot of reasons,” we heard, “you can’t just blame bail reform.” Sure, but those other factors were unwitting arguments for far more careful reform of criminal-justice laws, not for throwing out decades of practice and hoping for the best. For example, serious mental illness is proliferating, perhaps because of growing pot use. So it isn’t a good idea to discard one imperfect tool of incapacitating the violently mentally ill — keeping them in jail before a trial — without creating another, better tool: boosting the capacity for long-term, in-patient mental-health treatment. Likewise, organized retail theft, abetted by Facebook, has spread, which means that it isn’t a good idea to diminish the consequences for stealing stuff from stores to feed this new market. 

 The latest Democratic argument is that crime is now falling, not rising. Good news, yes, but this line of reasoning ignores the impact of years of preventable trauma. This “mission-accomplished” take also ignores the fact that crime isn’t falling uniformly. Overall felonies in New York City, for example, as of mid-August, remain 29 percent higher than in 2019. 

Into this void of Democratic leadership slides Trump. As on immigration, tariffs, and federal budget efficiencies, the president wants quick results. One of his twin executive orders on Monday decreed that “federal policies and resources should not be used to support jurisdictions with cashless bail policies,” and directed the attorney general to compile a list of states and cities with such policies governing crimes that “pose a clear threat to public safety and order,” so that federal agencies can “suspend or terminate” their grants. The other order directed the Pentagon to “designate an appropriate number of each state’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization” for “quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order.”  

 But there’s a major difference between the president’s actions on immigration and trade and his actions on state and local disorder. Whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s tariffs and immigration measures, there’s no question that the federal government has substantial authority, under both the Constitution and statutory law, to govern these areas.

 By contrast, state and local governments, not Washington, govern most crime and disorder. (The main exceptions are crimes that cross state or international borders.) The constitutional basis is clear. Article IV requires that states respect the “judicial proceedings of every other state,” thus implying that such proceedings will differ from state to state. A person who flees one state to escape prosecution for a serious crime is to be extradited “to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” further solidifying state, not national, control. Moreover, Trump has no authority to revoke existing federal grants or restrict future federal funding based on a state’s criminal-justice laws. Congress, not the White House, sets conditions on federal grants. 

 The Founding Fathers had a practical basis for reserving most criminal-justice powers at the state and local level. States differ from one another, in everything from culture to geography to population density. The circumstances in which a person charged with homicide can make a self-defense claim, for example, can and should differ between a predominantly rural state, in which citizens know they are largely on their own, and an urban state, in which citizens know the police are stationed on the next block. Voters in a state with a well-funded public-health system may feel more comfortable releasing a chronic thief provided he attend rehab, and voters in a state with a sophisticated mental-health system may think someone arrested for punching a stranger may be better rehabilitated in a hospital rather than in a jail.  

 Enforcement, too, is better left to state and local officials. National Guard troops have a role in protecting people and property during real emergencies — after a hurricane, say, when a neighborhood is entirely depopulated and needs protection from looting. But Guardsmen and women can’t make the subtle daily distinctions that police officers must make.

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A police officer regularly stationed at a Bronx subway stop may develop a knack for knowing which fare-beater to let off with a warning — a day laborer he knows, who has just forgotten his wallet — and which fare-beater to serve with a fine. A police officer patrolling a gang-plagued Brooklyn street may arrest one person for swigging from an open bottle of vodka, because he knows that that person was just released from prison for a violent crime. He may walk by another individual engaged in the same behavior, because he knows that that person is walking home from his father’s funeral.  

 That’s not to say that governors and state legislators always, or usually, get it right on creating and maintaining criminal-justice systems, or that city police get it right on enforcement. But the past few years have shown that state and local democracy is working, albeit slowly and imperfectly. In New York, for example, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature have tightened the criminal-justice laws several times, in part because the governor was threatened by a close Republican challenger in 2022 and will likely face a similarly close opponent next year. San Francisco voters threw out their progressive district attorney. 

 The democratic process at the state and local level is annoying, difficult, takes too long, and isn’t guaranteed to have a perfect or even a good result, but this doesn’t mean that the process is irrevocably broken. As with all issues of democratic governance, the question is: compared to what? 

Trump isn’t powerless in nudging states in the right direction. The president could ask Congress to enact a bill similar to the Clinton-era “Cops on the Beat” program, which offered $8.8 billion in grants ($19.4 billion in today’s inflated dollars) to hire police officers. Congress could attach certain conditions to these grants, including requirements to report better data. The federal government could require state and local jurisdictions, for example, to report on what percentage of suspects arrested for nonviolent crimes and released on no or low bail go on to face re-arrest for similar and more serious crimes. New funding for in-patient and intensive outpatient mental-health treatment could require states and cities to report on the share of patients who are arrested for criminal behavior after release.

Trump has tapped into a problem, which is more than national Democrats have done. But acknowledging a problem, though critical, isn’t the same as fixing it.

This is the state of the Democrats in 2025. Bereft of ideas and riven by internal division, the party is no longer in control of itself. That has left it open to challenges from the ideological fringes, with a new wave of socialists and progressives emerging in America’s cities, from New York to Minneapolis to Albuquerque. Led by a new generation of young primary challengers, a broader realignment may be taking shape in the party — one that is more progressive, economically populist, and unapologetically pro-Palestine.

The forceful return of the Left has exposed the fecklessness of centrist Democrats, whose efforts to reclaim the party after President Trump’s victory last year have utterly failed. Back in November, moderates promised a sober reset: a return to pragmatism, competence, and electability. But they have since been out-organized, out-communicated, and increasingly out of step with a base that no longer sees triangulation as a virtue. With the midterms looming, it’s clear that the center isn’t holding, and the Left is on the march.

Over the last two months, a pair of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates, Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, have surfaced as contenders for mayor in two blue cities. In June, Mamdani — a democratic socialist who campaigned on city-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses — won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. His victory was followed by that of Fateh, who received a major boost when the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state’s version of the Democrats) endorsed him over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. It was the Minneapolis DFL’s first endorsement in 16 years.

Like Mamdani, Fateh’s pitch to voters focused almost exclusively on cost-of-living issues. He promised to implement widespread rent control, raise the city minimum wage to $20, and implement free transit. He is now well-positioned to win the general election later this year — even if Gov. Tim Walz has endorsed his rival Frey.

Progressives elsewhere are taking note. In Seattle, Katie Wilson looks set to defeat Mayor Bruce Harrell in a Democratic primary by promising affordable housing and better public transit. In a written statement, Wilson sounded almost like a MAGA Republican with her promise to take on “career politicians backed by corporate interests,” who have “presided for years over skyrocketing costs of living and out-of-control homelessness.” Similarly, in Albuquerque, NM, Alex Uballez is challenging Democratic Mayor Tim Keller on a progressive platform to combat income and housing inequality.

“Cost of living has for several years in a row now been top of mind for voters at all levels of elections,” says Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot newsletter. “For better or worse, this new contingent of socialist and progressive candidates has a message on this stuff. They are speaking about things — whether they’re workable ideas or not — that people really care about.”

Many remain skeptical. Citing Mamdani’s plan to tax “whiter” neighborhoods harder or Fateh’s pledge to expand city funding for progressive causes (including a “Trans Equity Summit”), they claim that these figures merely represent a “new phase” of wokeness — not a rejection of it. To them, the populist gloss is just that. “When I hear a politician being described as economically populist, I want to see if the working class is actually voting for them or not,” says the political economist and UnHerd contributor Michael Lind. “The public grocery store idea does not come from the working class — it comes from the nonprofit sector. It’s a classic case of ‘pity charity liberalism.’”

Given that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat Mamdani by a wide margin among lower-income and black voters — the only two groups he won — it is difficult to cast Mamdani as a tribune of the working class. Still, there are signs he is trying to address that weakness. After the Midtown Manhattan shooting, for example, the Democratic nominee went directly from the airport after his wedding trip to Uganda to visit the family of a slain police officer. Later that day, he walked back past posts calling to defund the police, which he admitted were “out of step.” This may not sound entirely convincing, but it is a significant, if cautious, course correction.

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Cuomo, for his part, tried to run a conventional campaign focused on public safety in the primary. But Mamdani, despite starting with almost no name recognition, succeeded in shifting the conversation. He reframed the race around housing, affordability, and the cost of living, which proved so effective that Cuomo, in his campaign relaunch, mimicked both Mamdani’s visual style and his economic focus. What was meant to be a law-and-order referendum has since become a debate on rent, wages, and whom the city is for.

The fact that Mamdani remains a viable candidate speaks to a deeper shift in the Democratic Party. Ten or even five years ago, it is doubtful that figures like him or Fateh would have emerged as serious contenders for office. In any other Democratic leadership contest, a candidate who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or who declined to support then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary — over his stance on Israel — would have been dead on arrival.

But these are different times. Democratic voters have undergone a dramatic shift on Israel — so much so that even former senior Barack Obama advisers are now calling for a re-evaluation of the party’s position. Chris Van Hollen, a US senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen UN aid, while 24 Democratic senators supported blocking the sale of more than $675 million in arms sales to Israel. Meanwhile, in the House, 13 progressive lawmakers have signed onto a letter urging the Trump administration to recognize a Palestinian state, and at least one plans to introduce a pro-statehood resolution.

It would be a stretch to credit Mamdani and his fellow progressives for this shift, but their refusal to tone down criticism of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has forced once-taboo positions into the mainstream. This dynamic was in full display during a mayoral debate, at which the candidates were asked to name the first foreign country they’d visit upon being elected mayor. Nearly all the other candidates named Israel, offering effusive praise for the Jewish state. Mamdani, however, indicated that he would stay put in the Big Apple, visiting local synagogues to connect with Jewish New Yorkers. The stance won him applause from the Left — and even many on the MAGA Right.

In fact, Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza has twisted centrist Democrats into knots, with fears spreading that the war in the Middle East could become a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries. In the face of mass starvation and an IDF push to take over the entire Gaza strip, the only consensus the party’s moderate wing has managed to reach is this: criticize the Netanyahu government, but not the Jewish state.

This stance has produced some painfully tin-eared moments online. Challenged on a popular YouTube show on why she wasn’t taking a stronger position on Gaza, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan deflected, insisting, “I would offer that Democrats own nothing in Washington,” before shifting the conversation to the difference between sending offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. Even on that point, she struggled. Asked whether she would support a ban on offensive arms to Israel, she meekly responded: “That, to me, would certainly be a place to look.” In the end, she skipped the vote on the offensive-weapons resolution for an appearance on the Stephen Colbert talkshow.

The center, then, is no longer setting the terms of the debate; it’s struggling to keep up.

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The upheaval is playing out at the ballot box, too. In safe blue districts across the country, a new generation of candidates — almost all under 40 — is mounting primary challenges against long-serving Democratic incumbents. In New York, a 26-year-old Jewish democratic socialist is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman, drawing inspiration from Mamdani’s high-profile run. In California, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a challenge from a onetime aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Illinois, a progressive content creator is running to unseat a 14-term congressman. And in a pair of open Senate races, Gen X and Millennial Democrats have launched bids to fill seats vacated by retiring Boomers in New Hampshire and Michigan. As Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician endorsed by Bernie Sanders who is running in Michigan, told Politico, his position on Gaza is a “symbol for something greater. Gaza, unfortunately, has become a Rorschach test for values. Do your morals apply anywhere and everywhere?”

What these races show is that the anti-establishment feeling that fueled Trump’s return is moving in both directions. As polling analysis by the election-data site Split Ticket illustrates, Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans viewed theirs from 2009 to 2015, when Bush-Romney neoliberal dogma ruled the GOP. That insurgency reshaped the GOP from the ground up, dragging the party toward populism. A similar dynamic may now be unfolding on the Left. Polling in June found that roughly half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” with 62% calling for the “party leaders to be replaced” — a level of disaffection that suggests something bigger is stirring inside the party.

The Democrats have yet to find their own answer to Trump. But the most obvious contender is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has successfully straddled both wings of the party, serving as a bridge between the establishment and progressives. She has the highest net approval out of any Democrat not running for president, and she is still young enough to position herself as an outsider candidate.

Unlike most of her colleagues, AOC has also cultivated a political identity that operates largely independent of the Democratic Party’s institutional machinery. But the real test will be whether she can break through beyond the progressive base and win over moderates and independents — the very voters needed to beat Trump’s successor.

She is also exactly who, like Mamdani, Republicans want front and center in the Democratic Party. Just as Trump painted her and The Squad as the face of the party during his first term, the president is now targeting Mamdani in a similar fashion. This could have a deleterious effect on Democratic efforts to win back independents and moderates ahead of next year’s midterms. As Karl Rove aptly put it on Fox News last weekend, “the more that we get people like this representing the face of the Democratic Party, the harder it is [for them] to win back voters in the middle of American politics.”

For that to happen — to win back a national majority — these progressive challengers actually need to win their races first. Beyond that, a lot will also depend on the progressives’ ability to stay singularly focused on issues like the cost of living and Republicans’ attacks on hugely popular entitlements, while eschewing “peak woke” slogans like police abolition and “queer liberation.”

Still, their success so far signals a deeper shift underway in the party. What once looked like fringe discontent is beginning to coalesce into a coherent, organized revolt. Far from being isolated local phenomena, their victories would legitimize a new template for Left-wing politics: one rooted in economic populism with a deep skepticism of the party establishment. In a few years’ time, it may not be Mamdani, Fateh, and others who seem like outliers — but the party leadership, scrambling to catch up.

Mamdani was a rising organizer whom I wanted to hire for my bid for the state Senate. In the New York City neighborhoods where I was campaigning, Mamdani had been the canvassing director on the City Council bid of a Palestinian pastor who nearly pulled off a stunning upset. The pastor, known as Father K, had thrilled the local youth, and canvassers constantly swarmed my apartment building. Many belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America. The concept of an openly socialist campaign winning office had always seemed far-fetched. But here was Father K, storming the ramparts. I wanted to know immediately who was working for him.

When I met Mamdani, he was intrigued by my campaign. I was a progressive Democrat unafraid of calling myself a socialist or criticizing Israel, even though I was Jewish. We immediately bonded over a shared political vision, as well as a wicked sense of humor. But hiring Mamdani couldn’t happen automatically — not because I was waffling, but because he wanted to know whether I was serious.

He needed to know if I was going to raise a decent amount of money and make my run viable. He wasn’t interested in vanity campaigns or lost causes. I respected that. I was motivated to go out and raise money, proving my mettle to my supporters and to Mamdani. In early 2018, he signed on as my field director, and he rapidly rose to become my full-fledged campaign manager.

These days, Mamdani faces a far tougher challenge than helming a state legislative campaign. He’s got to win a general election against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (again), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Then he has to decide how to govern Gotham’s vast bureaucracies. Winning in November, by contrast, will be relatively easy. Some of his campaign promises, like freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, are quite doable. Others, like raising corporate taxes or funding a $5 billion childcare expansion, will need the cooperation of a state government that may not be hospitable to a young socialist mayor. Business leaders are threatening to leave the city.

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Mamdani will also have to decide how he would govern America’s largest police force — as a Leftist who once backed defunding the police but no longer advocates for this goal. Will he retain the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a well-regarded, Harvard-educated technocrat who is also critical of many of the criminal-justice reforms that he backs? And what would he do if President Trump keeps flooding New York streets with ICE agents?

There is a cliché, which is mostly true, that being mayor of New York is America’s toughest job after the presidency. City Hall has a way of wearing down the titans who swagger inside. Every local ill is laid at the mayor’s feet. A DC lawmaker doesn’t have to rush to the site of a gas explosion or a train derailment, but a mayor is expected to — immediately. If a police officer is killed, he must comfort the family.

Is Mamdani up for all of this? If he beats back Adams and Cuomo, as expected — neither man is very popular — we are going to find out. He would have less experience than any incoming mayor in modern times. There’s great promise there. And peril, too.

I can think back to my own campaign, when I saw how Mamdani moved through rooms and thrilled our volunteers. He was supremely good with people, in the way you still hear folk tales told about a young Bill Clinton. His charm and gravitas, for someone of his age, was striking even then. Though Mamdani worked for me — my campaign funds paid his salary — I very much worked for Mamdani and felt driven to give every ounce of myself to the cause. This was his superpower. I would stand at a subway station in the middle of summer to pass out campaign materials at six in the morning. I would knock on doors to talk to voters seven days a week, often until nine at night. The volunteers and paid canvassers were no less driven. Everyone wanted to give themselves — to him.

A surreal moment for me came just a short while ago when Mamdani appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the eve of the Democratic primary. Colbert pressed Mamdani on Israel and concerns about antisemitism. Mamdani is an unabashed critic of the Jewish state, a backer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and someone who, until not very long ago, could be called an anti-Zionist. I’m sympathetic to much of what Mamdani believes and, as an American Jew, I am weary of a nation many thousands of miles away defining how I should worship or how I am viewed by the world. When Colbert asked Mamdani how he could bring together Jews and Muslims, Mamdani, who is Muslim, replied, “Many years ago, I was the campaign manager of a Jewish candidate for state Senate, and I took him to a mosque in Bay Ridge, and after he gave his speech at Friday prayers, an older Palestinian man came over to him, and he looked at him, and he said, ‘cousins’.”

That candidate, of course, was me. Indeed, Mamdani and I went to many mosques — too many to count. I was, in many instances, one of the very first candidates for office who had ever spoken with these Muslim men. (Since the prayers were segregated by gender, I also spoke with Muslim women’s groups.) At one Eid prayer, I took the microphone and spoke to thousands of Muslims arrayed on a vast field. I went to churches and synagogues, too, of course, because the district, in all its New York diversity, demanded it. Mamdani believed, urgently, that a candidate should go everywhere possible. Unlike many other Leftists, he relished the art of persuasion: knocking on the door, finding a Donald Trump sympathizer, and convincing him to take another look at a Left-wing candidate like me.

I didn’t win. We ran competitively — an uphill, underdog campaign — and came up short. I was momentarily crushed but glad, in the end, to return to my writing career, which I valued more. I knew Mamdani would get his own chance to run soon. It was merely a question of where and when. He had learned several vital lessons from our defeat. One was that building a large field operation was incredibly important. We had an army of volunteers and paid canvassers, many of them in their twenties. But other traditional tactics, like sending campaign mail, mattered, too. Since we were running out of money by the end of the race, we didn’t have the budget to dispatch those glossy mailers, which are never terribly creative but do alert voters to your presence.

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I invoked Clinton before, but there are uncanny parallels between Mamdani and Barack Obama: two young men with foreign-sounding names and African roots who upended the political establishment and won in such a fashion that few actually believed was possible. America had never had a black president, or even one who had spent less than one term in the US Senate before successfully vaulting to the White House. Obama was assailed relentlessly for his relative youth and inexperience in 2007 and 2008, especially in his bitter primary against Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, Mamdani embodies much of what Obama’s feverish Right-wing critics accused him, falsely, of being: a Muslim socialist born in Africa. Mamdani, born to a Ugandan-Indian father in Kampala, can never legally serve as president. In some form, this inoculates him from attacks from the Right, since he is hiding nothing and is rarely on the defensive. The same is true of his parentage: his mother a renowned filmmaker, his father a celebrated scholar of the Middle East. Other Leftists might run from such a background, but Mamdani never fails to acknowledge his own privilege. He is always quite direct.

One political strength and saving grace for Mamdani, ultimately, may be his fan base. No local politician has captured so many imaginations. Mayoral races don’t normally attract tens of thousands of volunteers; in the case of Mamdani, the internet became real life, with his Instagram and TikTok virality morphing into a flesh-and-blood campaign apparatus that blew away the competition. As with Trump, Mamdani’s fans are bound to stick with him, and they’ll battle for him as he slogs onward as mayor. If he does win in November, it will herald a new political era for New York and perhaps the United States. All of it, at the very least, will be fascinating to watch.

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Yet as dark as Gotham could be in those gritty days memorialized in film classics like Taxi Driver, there was always a ray of light: namely, a healthy respect for the police. Any disturbance would stop as soon as an officer stepped into the train, for example. Many of these cops were Vietnam veterans, and you could see the command and experience in their eyes. I remember noticing one officer’s medal above his NYPD shield: “sharpshooter”, it read.

It’s the crucial element missing today, as disorder grips the Big Apple once more. Law-breakers don’t respect law enforcement — and for good reason: they know that, thanks to misguided criminal-justice “reform”, they can re-offend over and over with utter impunity.

I didn’t aspire to be a police officer when I joined the force in 1989. My career choice was born of necessity. I had to provide for my young family, so college had to wait. But there was also the calling to serve communities racked by poverty, lack of opportunity, and lousy infrastructure — a state of affairs embodied by abandoned and burnt-down tenement blocks; buildings spray-painted “X” by the Fire Department were unsafe for first responders to enter.

These buildings became havens for drug dealers and shooting galleries for addicts. As rookie police officers, we were tasked with cleaning up areas like that. To combat the visible signs of a decaying city with high crime rates, we were deployed to the busiest precincts, called “shitholes” by the cops. These were the worst of the worst. We were assigned to crack patrols to tackle the emerging epidemic head-on.

Numerous overtime details were created to address crime spikes, one of which was “Operation Takeback,” to which I was assigned. It included tackling minor violations — vandalism, urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like — that could foster an atmosphere of lawlessness. Little did we know then that this was the so-called broken-windows theory of policing in practice.

As a result, New York City experienced a renaissance beginning in the mid-1990s and early aughts. Formerly depressed communities thrived. Times Square, once dotted with peep shows and porn shops, was transfigured into a family-friendly destination. The hipster culture emerged in Williamsburg, marking a significant cultural moment — a “vibe shift,” to use today’s lingo.

These and other changes were driven by a police culture of strict enforcement. These officers were no-nonsense and motivated. They took pride in their jobs and had the support of the mayor, the NYPD brass, the media, and the people they served. Then it all went downhill again.

Although crime rates overall are still low compared to the bad old days, many indicators are flashing red. Since 2019, there has been a 31% increase in major crimes. The murder rate is almost 20% higher than it was five years ago; robbery is up by a quarter; and felony assault by nearly half. As former Queens district attorney Jim Quinn summed it up recently, “there were almost 29,000 more crime victims in 2024 than there were in 2019.”

Behind each of these statistics are real lives permanently scarred or snuffed out altogether by crime. Some of these cases — such as the woman burned to death on a Brooklyn train, or the man shoved onto subway tracks at Manhattan’s 18^th Street — receive national and even international media attention. But many other victims and their families suffer and mourn in silence.

So what happened?

Partly, it’s because the NYPD became a victim of its own success. We failed to adapt proven formulas to changing conditions. Front-line officers were encouraged to conduct “stop-and-frisk” procedures, and higher-ups demanded it during CompStat meetings (at which leaders review neighborhood crime data). “How many touches do your officers have?” was a frequent question from chiefs who were likely excellent academic test-takers but had limited street experience.

The pressure at times translated into needlessly gruff, insensitive treatment. Several high-profile use-of-force incidents drew sharp criticism from communities of color. Fast-forward to the rise of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd “reckoning”, and law enforcers in New York and across the country faced unprecedented pressure. With Covid in the mix, it felt like an all-out war on police and law and order.

In the year 2020, under Mayor de Blasio, these trends reached a terrifying crescendo. That was when the state legislature in Albany launched its disastrous experiment with bail “reform,” eliminating cash bail and removing judges’ discretion in detaining criminal suspects. As if that weren’t enough to hinder law enforcers, the activist chorus to #Defund police grew louder.

De Blasio and his police executives didn’t know how to handle it. Even at the height of the Floyd reckoning, overwhelming majorities of African-Americans indicated they wanted the same or even higher levels of policing in their neighborhoods. But instead of taking a holistic view of what the public wanted and balancing competing demands, the de Blasio administration folded to the loudest activists. Hizzoner permitted rioting, property destruction, and assaults on police officers. Mass police retirements occurred nationwide and in Gotham. Police morale sank — and remains low: applicants to the NYPD sank to 8,000 this year, down from 18,000 in 2017.

Mayor Eric Adams, the former NYPD captain who took over from De Blasio in 2022, inherited his predecessor’s crises — and failed to overcome them. Adams appeared to appoint friends rather than qualified executives. Four police commissioners have served under him, formerly unheard of. And on the streets, a climate of criminality continued to fester.

The criminal element felt empowered by the revolving door of the criminal-justice system. Nearly 20% of offenders break the law again, according to data released this week by the New York Department of Corrections. Offenders are often released on the same day they are arrested, and many go on to do more harm even as earlier cases against them are still pending. Yet district attorneys like Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg remain committed to so-called restorative justice and diversion programs that keep criminals on the streets.

All this sends the wrong message to offenders. Criminals have come to believe that crime pays, and there are no consequences; law-abiding New Yorkers live in fear, especially in the confined spaces of the subway system.

Political leaders assert that the public perception of crime, especially in the subway system, is not aligned with actual crime statistics. Things aren’t that bad, they insist, and it’s only sensational media coverage that makes us feel unsafe. It’s true that overall crime rates have decreased — marginally, compared to the worst of the pandemic years. But compared to the renaissance of the 1990s and aughts, things are unquestionably and dramatically worse.

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As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch recently noted, despite the marginal decline in crime numbers, the department must work to enhance the sense of safety. To tackle crime in the city, especially in the subway system, we need a stronger uniformed presence, particularly at the turnstiles. By preventing ne’er-do-wells from entering the subway in the first place, we can likely win half the battle. And we need officers on the trains. We need undercover cops, both underground and aboveground. Although tough anti-crime units have recently been controversial, they remain a valuable tool for policing.

Today’s cops act as therapists, social workers, racial reconcilers, and peace officers — all rolled into one — as other institutions of social care have eroded. But police officers aren’t a panacea for all social woes. Tackling the root causes of criminal behavior requires ensuring that individuals in crisis have access to mental health and social services. This approach can help reduce recent violent incidents linked to homelessness and mental health issues. Agencies responsible for assisting this segment of the population should also be held as accountable as the police department is. Otherwise, we might well fall back into the state of affairs when I was a boy.

The bad old days are better kept confined to old movies.

Two months ago, I would have dismissed this as mere paranoia. To be a visibly Jewish is to live with a constant, low-grade fear that people are judging you, but more often than not, in my experience, that fear turned out to be unfounded. But these days, I believe any Jew who says they feel scared.

In recent weeks, thousands of people have marched through the streets of New York City chanting “from the river to the sea”; posters of those kidnapped in Israel — including babies and the elderly — have been torn down from city lampposts. At a university in downtown Manhattan, pro-Palestine demonstrators beat on the locked doors of a library where Jewish students were holed up. Over the past few days, stickers have appeared on mailboxes in my neighbourhood that read: “Resist the occupation by any means necessary.” What is meant by this, I can only surmise, is that killing children like mine is justified.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen our places of employment and our alma maters issue mealymouthed statements about the October 7 attacks. A friend of mine runs a small business that often donates proceeds to local causes such as food banks — causes that, despite having nothing to do with the conflict in Israel and Palestine, have felt it necessary to state their allegiance on social media. (No prizes for guessing where that allegiance lies.) “I don’t know what’s more painful,” she told me. “Being sad about the actual attacks, or seeing everyone you thought cared about you just disappear.”

We are on our own, we say repeatedly. The feeling is familiar. “It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that God grew attached to you and chose you — indeed, you are the smallest of peoples,” it says in Deuteronomy. Our vulnerability is part of the package; it has, so far, failed to diminish our indefatigability. “All things are mortal but the Jew,” Mark Twain wrote in his 1899 essay “Concerning the Jews”: “all other forces pass, but he remains.” In these last weeks, Jews have rallied to help one another, cooking meals for families with a parent serving in the Israeli army, bussing visitors to those sitting shiva for victims of the October 7 attacks, sending truckloads of supplies.

My family and I are part of a Modern Orthodox community, which is dedicated to the principle of Torah Umadda, which combines the best of both secular knowledge and Jewish practice. A synonymous label, “social Orthodoxy”, has been proposed, because Modern Orthodox Jews have high levels of civic engagement: while we largely keep kosher and shabbat, we also usually attend university, excel in professional fields, and have more diverse social circles than our brethren in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world. Trying to walk the razor’s edge between tradition and modernity, as a neighbour once put it, is challenging under normal circumstances. But lately it’s become a nightmare. “The way things are now, I would never send my children to college,” the mother of one of my eldest son’s best friends — herself a graduate of a prestigious secular university — whispered to me while our children played in the yard at synagogue.

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Not that this would necessarily make them safe. Our Jewishness is on display, obvious from the clothing we wear and the languages we speak; we gather together frequently in synagogues, send our children to Jewish schools, and often live in clusters. If someone wanted to hurt Jews, they’d aim for maximum impact, and target one of these places. Multiple times a week, while shopping or praying or even just ordering something to be delivered (a mezuzah on my door means anyone can tell that Jews live here), I think to myself: “We’re sitting ducks.” Perhaps I sound paranoid, but these things of course do happen.

This feeling of being at risk isn’t entirely new. It’s been three years since we moved to our fairly Orthodox neighbourhood, and this is not the first time the police have been stationed outside my children’s school since then. They appeared in early 2021, for instance, around the time that a local man was arrested for throwing bricks through the windows of synagogues in the dead of night. But this feels bigger, scarier, more isolating. A kosher restauranteur wonders if he needs to hire formal security for his tiny cafe; a friend who describes herself as a “lifelong anti-gun person” has decided to apply for a permit. I was recently thinking about taking my sons for a day out in the city, but then caught myself: what if someone sees their kippot? What if someone says something to them, or God forbid, worse?

Walking down the street recently in a different area of New York City, my infant son in tow, I watched as two well-dressed 20-somethings ripped the posters of the kidnapped off a building’s scaffolding, and I shrunk into myself. A black man stood next to me with his young family. “What are they doing?” he said, enraged. “They don’t have a right to do that!” I said nothing to him, afraid of calling any attention to myself and my baby, and I’ve regretted it every day since. Maybe it’s safer to stay home.

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I don’t know how to talk to my sons about this. I was born a non-Jew into a non-Jewish family. I knew only a handful of Jews growing up in the WASP strongholds of suburban Connecticut, and they seemed exactly like me, only with bar mitzvahs: what hardships could they really face? Some of my Jewish friends speak of being harangued by grandparents, throughout their childhoods, to remember that antisemitism lurks around every corner, but until my conversion eight years ago, I had no idea what it was like to live as a member of a visible, hated minority. Even now, I worry that I carry less of the burden than other Jews: for professional reasons, I go by my maiden name, which isn’t identifiably Jewish.

It wasn’t even my conversion that woke me up. Back then, I was living in a fun bubble of quirky Orthodoxy in Brooklyn: attending kosher supper clubs, women-only dance parties and Torah-infused yoga classes. I could be Jewish and modern. Instead, my realisation was like a slow-burn horror film: when we moved to London, we attended a synagogue that checked passports upon entry; after we moved back to Brooklyn, swastikas were chalked onto my neighbours’ doors one night. One day, my son’s Jewish preschool director showed me the new door camera they had installed after a shooting at a kosher grocery store in nearby Jersey City. A few years back, so many Orthodox Jews were being randomly beaten up on the street in New York City that a march was organised across the Brooklyn Bridge. None of my non-Jewish friends offered to join us in solidarity.

Some Jews, it seems, are easier to defend than others. On a few occasions, when the war has come up with my non-Jewish friends, they will lament that a liberal Jewish person has, say, been called a name online because she called for peace. I love my fellow Jews and believe we should strive for unity, and I too desperately want peace in the region. But I can’t help but feel that many people seem eager to deflect attention from the Jews actually harmed — “bad” Jews, because they live in Israel or support Zionism — and towards the less material pain of “good” Jews whose views are more politically palatable in America. I respect the rights of Jews, and of people more broadly, to have different opinions. But in moments of rising antisemitism, and this is most definitely one of them, it is not the secularised Jew who is at real risk — but the observant one.

Six years ago, few would have cast the presence of illegal migrants as a crisis. Illegal immigrants came to New York to work; their workforce participation rate was nearly 78%, compared to 63% for legal migrants, and 65% for natural-born citizens. Immigrants made up more than one-third of New York’s construction workers and a quarter of dishwashers, cooks, maids, and housekeepers. The fact that illegal migrants weren’t allowed to work wasn’t an impediment: domestic workers and gardeners could ask the families who hired them to pay in cash, and large parts of the construction and restaurant industry weren’t too troubled about paying workers under the table. For this reason, while all immigrant children could go to school and get healthcare, adult illegal immigrants weren’t a drain on the social safety net: federal law made them ineligible for food stamps, public housing, and non-emergency healthcare.

Between 1980 and 2019, newcomers were fully aware of this, and quickly learned that, to blend in, they had to obey the law. The city wouldn’t ask anyone for their immigration status — but it would arrest and charge people for small crimes, from petty theft to dealing drugs. Nor would New York much put up with lower-level disorder, from smoking marijuana in parks to camping out in a subway station. This crackdown, which began in the early Nineties, resulted in a fall in major crimes from more than half a million incidents annually to fewer than 100,000 by 2019. Immigrants came to a safe city, and they understood their role in abiding by its laws.

Theoretically, newly arrived migrants were eligible for one city-funded benefit: the city’s unique “right to shelter”. In 1979, a lawsuit was brought against the city by advocates for homeless people, who charged that the state constitution, under a provision requiring care for the “needy”, guaranteed a right to adequate housing. The state’s high court never ruled on this “right”; instead, Mayor Edward I. Koch decided to settle it, agreeing that the city would shelter all adult men who were homeless by reason of “physical, mental or social dysfunction”.

Over the decades, further advocacy litigation spurred new city agreements that expanded the right to shelter. Yet no one in city government, the advocacy world, or the media can recall large numbers of newly arrived migrants showing up looking for city shelter. (Until last year, the city didn’t record the immigration status of homeless shelter residents.) Just as immigrants, whether legal or illegal, didn’t come to New York unless they had a job lined up, or the possibility of finding one, nor did they come unless they had housing lined up — usually a room or part of a room in a cut-up apartment building in the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn.

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Today, this is no longer the case. The right-to-shelter safety net is now drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the city — many of whom have little chance of finding a job. New York is treating this new surge of migrants as a crisis, with Mayor Eric Adams repeatedly saying that uncontrolled migration will “destroy New York City”. But is this a fair analysis?

Let’s start with the numbers. It took New York nearly 40 years to absorb 500,000 unauthorised migrants into its private-sector economy. The city estimates that over the past year, 122,700 people, or a quarter of that previous total, have visited a city “intake centre”. (The city government calls these newcomers “asylum seekers”, but most have not applied for asylum, and most will not be eligible.)

And even this figure is likely an undercount. With more than six million “border encounters” between migrants and federal officials during the Biden administration, and with most people “encountered” immediately released into the country, it is highly likely that additional tens of thousands of newcomers have made their way to New York and simply disappeared somewhere.

The crisis began last spring when Texas Governor Greg Abbott, responding to the Biden administration’s open-border policy, bussed recent border-crossers north to highlight his own state’s woes; the aim was to build greater political support for a return to Trump-era restrictions. Adams, instead, tried to prove wrong Abbott’s insistence that the higher numbers were a problem. He began by setting up 17 “welcome centres” near key transit hubs, including the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Grand Central Terminal, to purposely invite new migrants to take advantage of New York’s on-demand shelter. The city also started to convert dozens of hotels, including prime Manhattan properties, into shelters.

Within a few months, a wave of new migrants had doubled the city’s shelter population. As of mid-October 2023, its taxpayers were housing more than 64,000 “asylum seekers”, in City Hall’s terminology, within a total shelter population of 116,700; in just one week in late September, 3,700 “asylum seekers” were registered. The Adams administration expects that sheltering these migrants will cost $12 billion over three years, more than the city spends on fire and sanitation services combined.

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Yet it will be hard for many of these newcomers to find jobs. For the first time in four decades, New York City’s economy is not growing quickly. The city had a bad pandemic, and it is having a bad post-pandemic. New York has less than 1% more jobs than it had in 2019, compared to the nation’s overall 4% growth, the first time since the early Nineties that the city has lagged behind the nation.

There is no evidence that New York is in desperate need of tens of thousands of entry-level workers — despite the fact that certain industries prefer to keep wages as low as possible, so continue to complain about a labour shortage. The city is still missing 4%, or nearly 14,000, of its pre-Covid accommodation and food-service jobs. One sign of the shortage of jobs for new migrants is the huge number of people delivering food — historically a miserable, dangerous job, with pay less than minimum wage. (Higher pay standards only just took effect this month). If better under-the-table jobs in domestic work or restaurants were available, immigrants would not be doing deliveries.

For other reasons, too, New York is a very different city to the one it was before the pandemic. Migrants with no family or friends to help them settle in New York are landing in a city where crime and disorder are the norm, with rates of non-felony larceny already more than a quarter above 2019 figures. Illegal street vending goes unenforced, high-powered mopeds with no licence plates or insurance are driven on the sidewalk, and spending a night sitting on a curb in front of a Times Square migrant shelter blasting music and smoking pot is perfectly acceptable. You can’t blame migrants for noticing that they can get away with a lot of anti-social behaviour here; nobody is telling them to knock it off.

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The result is that, despite the influx of migrants, New York has reversed its decades-long population increase, as its former residents decide to flee. Since 2020, the city has lost close to half a million people, rivalling only San Francisco in percentage loss. And what’s left behind? A city that is unable to absorb hundreds of thousands of ambitious immigrants into a growing economy, as it did between 1980 and 2019. Faced with this crisis, Adams maintains that the city’s “official position” is that “the borders should remain open”. The only thing he wants from Washington, it seems, is more money to fund the city’s shelters. But as residents start to protest, as crime rates continue to soar, Adams may find that, rather than empowering the strong city he is supposed to represent, immigration is only fuelling resentment.

This was where some women, usually but not always older, rolled their eyes. Did an awkward joke, a bad date, or — as one memorable entry in the infamous Shitty Media Men list alleged — a “weird lunch” really constitute a form of harassment, let alone a cancellable offence? But other women, usually but not always younger, clucked their tongues: it was only because women kept putting up with such behaviour that men kept thinking they could get away with it.

At the time, the younger cohort appeared to the older like a bunch of hypersensitive harpies, retreating to the fainting couch at the slightest whiff of insult. The older, according to the younger, were cosying up to the patriarchy, in a desperate attempt to stave off their own irrelevance.

“We’re tough enough to take it,” said the Olds.

“It’s sad you think you have to,” said the Youths.

This early rift in the movement represented a deeper philosophical disagreement, about the nature and importance of resilience. The narrow question is, when does an annoying man becomes an evil harasser? The broader one is, when does a tolerable nuisance cross the line to become an intolerable transgression?

This question has been on my mind this week, for the most tragic of reasons. On 1st May, a 30-year-old man named Jordan Neely was choked to death on a crowded New York City subway train by a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny. Neely, who was homeless and mentally ill, was reportedly screaming and confronting passengers; he was killed after Penny put him in a chokehold, while two other passengers held him down. Penny, in a statement released through his lawyers, said he did not intend to kill Neely.

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This incident was preventable. Long before his death, Neely was known to New York City authorities as a person who could not manage independent living, and who had been spiralling in recent years, desperately in need of help. For him to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.

That Neely slipped through the cracks is not the only sign of institutional failure here. As ridership on the NYC subway has increased in the wake of Covid, so too have instances of violence, including several high-profile incidents in which people have been attacked or killed. New York City mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021 on a campaign that promised to flood the subway system with uniformed police officers, to combat both crime and the perception that the subway has become wildly more dangerous in recent years.

To what extent this campaign could succeed is not clear. There has always been a baseline level of criminality and antisocial behaviour on the subway; sexual harassment and assault is so ubiquitous that brushing up against it is all but inevitable. I was groped, flashed, or masturbated at probably two dozen times during the seven years I spent living in New York. When a friend moved to NYC last year, I told her that she couldn’t truly call herself a New Yorker until she exited a crowded subway car to discover that someone had ejaculated on her coat. (I was only partly kidding.) It’s not that anyone thinks these things are okay; it’s more that they’re expected, a sad fact of life in a city of 8.5 million people, one of those things you cannot change and hence have to find a way to put up with. You look away, you shrug it off, you don’t let it ruin your day because if you did, it would ruin all of your days.

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Here is where the notion of resilience enters in. New York City residents have perhaps a higher tolerance than most for antisocial behaviour in public places, on the subway in particular. Warm and dry, with a captive audience, it attracts all kinds of colourful personalities: panhandlers and performers, pickpockets and preachers, as well as people like Neely who are in the grips of something darker. Until recently, it was standard practice to meet the arrival of one of these people on a crowded carriage with downcast eyes and silence; there was a tacit agreement that you neither react to nor acknowledge the transgressor. That agreement remained in place as crime rose, and as NYC saw a marked increase in behaviour that, even if it started out as merely weird, could — and did — escalate rapidly to violence. In 2022, for instance, a video did the rounds, of a woman begging for help while a deranged man hauls her around a train car by her hair.

But if it was difficult to know exactly where a tolerance for breaches of decorum became apologia for criminal harassment, it was even harder to identify, after Jordan Neely’s death, where the tacit agreement to tolerate becomes a duty to intervene. How do we know when to stand by, when to step in, when to look away, when to be afraid?

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo — the ones who believed that the solution to harassment lay not in teaching women to be assertive, but in teaching men not to abuse — would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit. If you argue that a woman can be traumatised by bawdy humour in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.

But, no: instead, many of the people who once insisted that men who slid into DMs deserved the complete destruction of their professional reputations became passionate advocates for toughening up when it came to dealing with volatile people on public transit. Coverage and commentary from the Left downplayed the possibility that Neely’s behaviour was frightening; instead, he was “acting erratic“, or “houseless and crying for food“. One viral tweet suggested that tragedy could have been averted with “a dollar and granola bar”. The New York Times guide to navigating similar scenarios on public transit took it a step further, imagining someone like Neely as a wild animal it is everyone else’s duty not to provoke: “Don’t make eye contact — especially prolonged eye contact, which might be perceived as threatening.”

Meanwhile, threads proliferated mocking the notion that New York’s subways might be a dangerous place: “I’ve safely ridden the subway for 23 years and my child has never been menaced by a half naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy,” wrote Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker and journalism professor at NYU. This is a remarkable sentiment, and not just because of its stunning reversal of the MeToo-era catechism that allegations should be believed. Less than a year ago, Spiers was among those advocating for the suspension without pay of journalist Dave Weigel after he retweeted what some perceived as a sexist joke, owing to the way this was allegedly received by his female colleagues (“[Every] woman who works with you thinks you’ve telegraphed publicly that you don’t respect women.”)

To sum up: a man who reposts an off-colour joke is advertising his innate misogyny, to the point where women should feel uncomfortable sharing a workplace with him. But an agitated and clearly unstable man announcing to a crowded subway car — as Neely reportedly did — that he’s been pushed to the brink and is ready to die, or go to prison for life: why in the world would you find that menacing?

This sudden rediscovery of the merits of resilience would have been almost refreshing, if not for the whiplash of its promotion by people who up until very recently were arguing that a tweet made them unsafe. There’s even something to it: the ubiquity of certain kinds of boundary-challenging behaviour in big cities makes it not just impractical but impossible to treat every incident of one-off harassment from a stranger as if it’s the end of the world. And of course, once you’ve survived a run-in with the mystery subway ejaculator, sexist microaggressions are unlikely to faze you: cultivating resilience is how we learn to recognise that a situation can be both genuinely alarming but not materially unsafe, or to make peace with the fact that many things which make us uncomfortable should nevertheless be allowed.

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But this mindset was considered anathema during MeToo. With trauma allegedly lurking just around the corner of every heterosexual encounter, distrust became the default. Not just the default, but celebrated — “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter,” intoned Vox‘s Ezra Klein, in a proto-MeToo celebration of this new, terrified paradigm for intimacy. The idea, of course, was that women already felt that fear, living as they did at the eternal precipice of victimisation by the patriarchy; in a truly equal society, everyone would be scared.

Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly. This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behaviour of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinised in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming”, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.

In the end, neither the malicious glee from the Right nor the aggressive minimisation from the Left are treating this case with the sensitivity it deserves. The truth is, eyewitnesses did report that Neely was behaving in a threatening way, and other people on the train were calling 911 well before his confrontation with Penny, suggesting that whatever was happening, it was a cut above the ordinary subway madness that New Yorkers are usually so good at ignoring. But it is also true that the tragic conclusion of this incident seems, at least in part, like the result of a cultivated fragility — the kind that results when you encourage people to view every uncomfortable situation as a trauma in the making, every unpleasant interaction as a precursor to a far worse harm, every upset as an offence for which there must be consequences. That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

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Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

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But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

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For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.

This looks to be how it’s going to end for Andrew Cuomo, the New York state governor who resigned this week after an investigation by New York State Attorney General Letitia James found that he’d sexually harassed eleven women over the course of his political career. The report detailed a pervasive pattern of harassment that included everything from overfamiliar touching to suggestive comments; the most serious allegation was that he’d put his hand up a woman’s shirt and groped her breast.

Cuomo has flatly denied some of the allegations (including the groping charge); others, he’s tried to contextualise as the innocuous byproducts of his affectionate, gregarious nature. The governor argued that he’s always hugged and kissed people, men and women alike; he simply hadn’t realised how much he’d fallen out of step with the norms of a more enlightened age.

“There are generational and cultural shifts that I just didn’t fully appreciate, and I should have,” he said, in a statement that utterly failed to win over his detractors but did launch a cottage industry of I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian T-shirts.

But even as it’s being treated like a bombshell, the 165-page report raises at least as many questions as it answers. Tablet‘s Michael Tracey has pointed out several oddities and inconsistencies, including the fact that some of Cuomo’s behaviour was found offensive by James but not, remarkably, by the women who were subjected to it — and that despite accusing him in a press conference of having violated federal law, James has not brought charges against the governor.

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In this way, the Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment scandal contains echoes of an earlier, hastier takedown: in 2017, at the height of MeToo fervour, Democratic Senator Al Franken stepped down amid multiple allegations of harassment and intense pressure from his peers on the Left. His case followed a similar trajectory to Cuomo’s, beginning with an allegation from a former colleague-turned-political rival. In Franken’s case, conservative talk-radio personality Leeann Tweeden accused the senator of having forced her to repeatedly rehearse a kissing scene against her will during a USO tour in 2006; in Cuomo’s case, the controversy began with allegations from Lindsey Boylan, a former aide who was now running for office herself.

Boylan complained on Twitter about a toxic work environment at Cuomo’s office before upping the ante with a claim of sexual harassment, then famously refused to elaborate or cooperate with journalists who were attempting to report the story. But as with Franken, once the first allegation drew attention, others followed. And as with Franken, it wasn’t the details of any one incident but the sheer volume of women claiming to be harassed that made all the difference.

The most charitable reading of this #MeToo trajectory is that there’s safety, and courage, in numbers — that women are empowered to come forward with allegations once they realise they’re not alone. The cynical one is that #MeToo-ings have a certain glow — one that attracts not just true victims, but also attention-seekers and fabulists, like moths to the flame. Look at these brave and valiant women speaking truth to a powerful, abusive man; who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Anyone over the age of 40 will recognise Andrew Cuomo as the sort of old lecher whose behaviour is grossly inappropriate by the enlightened standards of the current year, but who was quite recently considered tolerable and toothless if not charming (and some people did find him charming, including those now pretending otherwise). He’s also not the first politician with a long history of displaying open affection for constituents and staff to get tripped up by evolving norms; after all, it was only last year that we were still trying to decide if Joe Biden’s handsiness was an encouraging sign of human warmth or something more sinister.

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For Biden, warmth won out. But Cuomo, for reasons of both identity and self-presentation, couldn’t project that same grandfatherly vibe. He was younger, rougher, and unmarried after a notoriously acrimonious split from his wife in the early 2000s. And far from being cautious about how these things might impact his image, he leaned into it: “I’ve always been a soft guy,” he joked with his brother, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, early on in the pandemic. “I am the love gov. I’m a cool dude in a loose mood.”

Of course, until about five minutes ago, people were eating this up — which explains why it took nearly nine months between those first allegations of misconduct and Cuomo’s unhappy ouster from office. It’s not that Andrew Cuomo was a good guy; it’s just that we desperately wanted him to be. New York was one of the first states to be hit hard by the pandemic, and before long, New York’s governor was being hailed as a Covid hero. Andrew Cuomo developed a reputation for taking the virus seriously (unlike those science-denying yokels in, say, Florida, who wouldn’t even wear masks at the beach), and for taking control of a population that refused to control itself. In hindsight, it was all a bit much.

“I love Governor Cuomo, his soothing Queens accent, his stories about his dad Mario (himself a three-time governor of New York) and his 88-year-old mother Matilda,” gushed Molly Jong-Fast at Vogue, while Jezebel’s Rebecca Fishbein swooned over his “measured bullying, his love of circumventing the federal government, his sparring with increasingly incompetent city leadership.” The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah declared himself a proud Cuomosexual. When a photo surfaced that suggested the presence of nipple piercings under Cuomo’s polo shirt, media Twitter lost its mind for three straight days.

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And as long as Andrew Cuomo said all the right things, nobody seemed to care much that he was doing all the wrong ones. This was the man who mandated that Covid-infected patients be admitted to nursing homes without testing, resulting in tens of thousands of fatalities, and then tried to cover up the scandal by undercounting the dead. In the early days of the pandemic, when tests were scarce, he diverted them away from essential workers and gave them to his friends, family, and administration VIPs. This was the man who got a $4 million book deal to write a pandemic memoir about his amazing leadership, then violated the ethics of his office by making state employees work on the manuscript.

And yet, throughout all this, he continued to play moral authority — and the media, including his brother Chris at CNN, colluded to reinforce the message. Without this MeToo moment to interrupt his stride, who knows how long New York’s naked emperor would’ve kept on strolling?

Cuomo has raged that the allegations against him are politically motivated. And in truth, yes, some of them probably are. Just as tax evasion was hardly Al Capone’s worst offence, the imperviousness to scandal of someone like Cuomo begets a prosecutorial, let’s-find-something-to-charge-him-with mentality, which in turn begets the weaponisation of sexual misconduct allegations against a man whose worst crimes are something else entirely.

And yes, this is a trend that threatens to weaken due process and cheapen the legitimate issue of workplace harassment.

But if the opportunistic tarring of Andrew Cuomo as a pervert is bad, so too is corruption, and conspiracy, and nepotism, and finger-wagging at the public over their Thanksgiving travel plans after your egotism and ineptitude just killed off fifteen thousand grandparents. And if the government and media would stop providing partisan cover for political werewolves, maybe desperate citizens wouldn’t feel the need to use MeToo as a silver bullet.