Recipe for Urban Misery

Socialism has appeal among those who have no idea how it really works.

America awoke on Wednesday morning to official news. Zohran Mandamii won. Mandami, the socialist dynamo, is the newly elected mayor of the world’s richest city. New York City has its first Islamo-Communist mayor.

It starts with happy talk about free things, observes the WSJ’s Bull McGurn. Before it morphs into the nuts and bolts:

• taking wealth from those who have earned it
• giving it to those who haven’t
• forcing people to spend their money in ways they don’t want

Zohran Mamdani, notes Roger Kimball in American Greatness, is the latest avatar of the AOC-Ilhan Omar wing of the Democratic Party.

He loves talking about (re)distributing the wealth of others, defunding the police, arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, and penalizing “landlords,” which is just one of his many code words for Jews.

Blame the tough night for the GOP, notes President Donald Trump, on his not being on the ballot.

Clearly, that is an element of the problem. What other Republican can turn out his voters the way Trump can?

Trump, however, left out the other part of the equation: The unrelenting Democratic message linking every Republican on the ballot to him clearly worked.

The vote share of Earle-Sears and Ciattarelli about matched Trump’s low-40s approval rating in their states.

All things being equal, these are bad signs for next year’s congressional midterms.

Zohran Mamdani comfortably won a three-way race for New York City mayor. Mamdani is fresh, new, and left, which allowed him to vanquish the stale, unlikable, and less left Andrew Cuomo in both the primary and general. But Mamdani’s ideas are radical and unworkable. His attitude seems to be that socialism has never failed; it just has never been tried by Zohran Mamdani.

Did Ed Koch not put it perfectly? The voters have spoken… and now they must be punished.

Mamdani and his progressive supporters are bold and upfront about their aims and the scope of their ambition. Engineering a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party, supplanting what they regard as the corporatist, lethargic, and capitulatory class of establishmentarians presently at its helm. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today, the Democratic Party is seeking to contain the fallout from Mamdani’s election and ensuring the rest of the party is sufficiently insulated against the charge that he and his socialist politics are ascendant.

Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki warns, “It would be a grave mistake to think you could run somebody with these policy positions anywhere outside of America’s most liberal city.”

Third Way executive vice president Matt Bennett agrees, “The [Democratic Socialists of America] platform — which Mamdani has not repudiated — hands a potent set of weapons to Republican ad makers eager to tie Mamdani-style politics to Democrats running in much tougher places than deep blue New York.”

The Assembly in Albany already is a progressive funhouse. Mr. Mamdani’s victory poses challenges to national Democrats:

• Will Mamdani’s victory inspire more leftist candidates to challenge incumbent Democrats in primaries? Incumbents may be less able to win swing districts.
• If Mr. Mamdani begins to define the Democratic Party in the public mind. President Trump will try to drive that impression through messaging and imaging

The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party before it, is at risk of being eaten alive by fringe actors.

To allow it is both morally unjustifiable and politically obtuse. Americans reject this garbage.  If Republicans cower before Nazi apologists and their popularizers, the GOP will lose—and deserve to.

Roger Kimball gives his prediction in American Greatness: Mamdani will, in short order, drive New York into the slough of economic and social immiseration that always follows the institution of socialist policies.

His “eat the rich” attitude will precipitate an aggressive flight of wealthy taxpayers, making the city’s economic prospects even more dire. Crime will soar, and in place of the broken-windows policing, the city will have an abundance of broken windows. As the anomie expands, Mamdani will need to find someone to blame.  Whites in general will attract his notice, but Mamdani’s ill-concealed anti-Semitism will soon fix upon the Jews.

How Discouraging

Is America forced to sit through this rerun?