A Democratic socialist – and a Muslim, no less! – is now the mayor-elect of New York City. Though Zohran Mamdani is a Democrat, he had to overcome the opposition of both major parties to win. And he managed to gather more than 50% of the vote against Republican Curtis Sliwa and defeated-in-the-primary Democrat Andrew Cuomo, so his detractors can’t even claim he won because they split the anti-Mamdani vote.
Those detractors behaved as if Mamdani could summon some combined force of jihadists and the Red Army to destroy the city through the nefarious device of (checks notes) … free bus rides. (It’s interesting, to me at least, that the people most worked up about free bus rides are people who never ride the bus.) They resent giving Those People the slightest break in life, of course, but they’re also afraid it’s just the start. Giving people free stuff is COMMUNISM!
If New York City were a state, it would be the 14th-largest in the country. Charles de Gaulle once said it was impossible to govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese; New York City has an estimated 800 languages, a 25% poverty rate, and few of the resources of a country or even a state. Lots of bad stuff happens there every day, and every single bad thing that happens over the next four years will be blamed on COMMUNISM!
If it’s so destructive, what makes this diabolical political philosophy so appealing? They Might Be Giants attributes it to their music. Of their own song to that effect, released in 2018, John Linnell wrote,
“On the one hand, Fran Lebowitz memorably said of Communism vs. Fascism that one was too dull and the other too exciting. However, our song takes its cue from somebody (I can’t remember who) in our high school, who once compared two bands (I wish I could remember which bands) by declaring that one had the power but the other had the tunes. This enduring metaphor seems to apply to any pair of things we can think of.”
