Once considered a “melting pot,” my hometown, the City of New York, is now more of a test tube, and a harbinger of where – for better or worse – the nation is heading. With a smart, young, democratic socialist, Uganda-born Muslim (oh my!) angling to become our next mayor, the multiple questions facing the city include: If elected, will he be able to govern? Would his administration drive a fatal wedge through the Democratic Party, dividing its progressive and establishment wings, or would it indicate the contours of a new coalition? And what if anything will Zohran Mamdani be able to accomplish in the face of a border wall of opposition to his every initiative on the part of the city’s Establishment, including the business community, the real estate titans, the city’s bureaucracy, and the more conservative labor unions, to say nothing of the scandalmongering, personality-driven, extreme-exaggerating popular media, a.k.a. the New York Post?
In other words: who, besides the voters, will be on Mamdani’s side? That’s the paradox of democracy New York-style: an acid political culture despite an overwhelming (six-to-one) democratic majority, a good portion of whom have been driven to the left by the failures of centrist municipal policies; and the centrist if not conservative (or in some cases reactionary) institutions that largely control the city.
All this speculation makes for good sport – but only if one ignores more significant concerns. One is the fact that New York, like all American cities, has very real problems. One is affordability – including housing, food, childcare and public transportation. (Mamdani want’s free buses and city-owned grocery stores. Neither idea sounds outlandish.) Improving mass transit and overall livability are among the other big questions – and reining in the greed of developers. Another is homelessness – a problem most of all for the unhoused and those who care about them, but also for all those who don’t want to have to step over homeless people on the streets and subway stairs.
Only slightly lower down on my rage agenda is the problem of navigating the city as a pedestrian amid unlawful drivers and delivery bikes. And my solution for the latter is a relatively simple one in two parts: first, regulate the bikes so they are lighted, stay off the sidewalks, and obey all traffic rules; second, ensure that delivery personnel are paid a living wage, funded by a surcharge – whatever it takes – on the people, like me, who order food for delivery.
The other morality play that is moving from the hinterlands (as we like to call them) to Broadway is the fierce national battle between progressive cities like New York and a far right, if not downright fascist, presidential administration. Trump, who inhabits the Queens of the 1950s, has already identified Mamdani as a “communist lunatic”; more vicious names await to further degrade, if that is even possible, our shared discourse.
I’m not an inveterate city-watcher. But I’m a proud partisan and a biased New Yorker, prejudiced in favor of quality-of-life for the many over luxury for the relative few. Yes, I was born, raised, and live in New York, and I care about it. Yet I find living here a high-cost-high-reward proposition, a choice that in my case was prompted mostly by the forces of accident and inertia, and the homegrown snobbery that is hard to escape once one has spent a few decades in the Big Apple. Nearly all of my friends are from Elsewhere. And while I can afford many of the city’s treasures (and find others contemptible) I’m acutely aware of the psychic cost, a kind of smog layer of neurosis that we natives, more than adoptive New Yorkers, are prone to. (Many of us like to delude ourselves about how great New York is and talk it up as if we’re trying to convince ourselves. But I know from a few authentic cases that is possible to truly love the place.)
The city is indeed much cleaner and safer than when I grew up here. It may also be crueler, more irrational, and in general harder to live in. We’ve had our share of thuggish leaders, as well as brilliant, entitled princelings with problematic zippers. (Mamdani is neither.)
But don’t kid yourself: what happens in New York affects the entire country. Its destiny is America’s. Out of the political savagery about to descend upon our five boroughs will come either a better nation, or one very much degraded and diminished. (Oops, that’s already happened.)
Maybe I should run for mayor on the slogan “Regulate Delivery Bikes and Pay Their Drivers a Fair Wage by Surcharging People Like Me.” On second thought, never mind. I’d miss too many Met games.
