It has always been strange to me that the history of the left matters so little to leftists.
Socialism historically has required propaganda, the instillment of fear, and the persecution of dissent, among other things, to retain its grip on power. Communism—think of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge—has required worse totalitarianism and bloodshed. Given its own history of ineptitude, ranging from the practical to the world-historical, the willful ignorance of the American left in these matters is baffling; for the American activist caste, real socialism has never failed because it has never really been tried.
For the American activist caste, real socialism has never failed because it has never really been tried.
This issue matters to me acutely because I live in New York City, which is now subject to a quasi-socialist, communist mayoral regime under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It has gotten off to a bungling, fitful start, with many promises of worse to come.
What interests me is that the New York media apparatus, which I am a part of, has showed so little actual curiosity about how state and city politics works, or about Mamdani’s background and ideology. The new mayor’s many appearances in, and on the cover of, New York Magazine, as well as his wife’s, for instance—not to mention enthusiastic coverage in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vox or Wired, among others—suggest either a willfully ignorant assumption about collectivism in the upward arc of human history, or a meek obsequiousness to trends and to raw power.
We ought to question contemporary journalism’s addiction to leftism (and by extension to self-deception). Six weeks into the Mamdani administration, in its practical exercise of power, it has shown none of the grace, dexterity, or cleverness of Mamdani’s own electoral campaign, or rather public relations campaign. This suggests that a selfish and self-absorbed media class did not ask enough questions of the man who would be king.
A selfish and self-absorbed media class did not ask enough questions of the man who would be king.
The Mamdani administration has brought with it an immediate, if anecdotal, decline in city services, and the return of homeless encampments. It has not battled bad winter weather or garbage with organized determination (though its viral campaign to hire shovelers for the second blizzard produced the phenomenon of people all shoveling the same portion of street to qualify for the cash, while many blocks remained unshoveled and icy). Mamdani has also promised to cancel planned police recruitment and threatened to raise property taxes. Conversely, the mayor appears to have little appetite for cutting city bureaucracy. But he has shown an embarrassing, theater-kid tendency to comment on foreign affairs as if he were the shadow Secretary of State and not mayor of New York City. New Yorkers, it seems, must be willing to pay more for less, and worse, they must like it. The best case scenario for Mamdani seems to be that he is a middling technocrat with rhetorical flourish; the worst is that he will find a way to enact what he has presented as his favored policies.
Mamdani has shown an embarrassing, theater-kid tendency to comment on foreign affairs as if he were the shadow Secretary of State and not mayor of New York City.
Both New Yorkers and outside observers should ask how the practical consequences—the functional reality—of an election could so quickly fail to meet the pitch and direction of campaign rhetoric. Did everyone secretly know that Mamdani would be so blasé, if not yet disastrous? And if so, why did people who write about politics for a living, or participate in cultural industries which make claim to political wisdom, fail so badly to make reasonable predictions? Was no one with liberal politics willing to admit that the Get Free Stuff and Soak the Rich and Police Are Bad campaign might hit some practical impediments upon implementation? Was it really that impossible to have that conversation in elite media and academic circles? It seems so: Mamdani was a political fantasy created by a minority of journalists and influencers whose disregard for history and reality went largely unchecked except by conservative critics irrelevant to city elections.
Was no one with liberal politics willing to admit that the Get Free Stuff and Soak the Rich and Police Are Bad campaign might hit some practical impediments upon implementation?
The breathtaking vapidity of Mamdani’s rise demonstrates that leftism is the implicit religion of coastal universities where the media class is minted, and that the bias towards left eschatology is so strong that, to retain in-group status, one must validate highly ideological politicians at all costs. In short, power in this media class requires either believing or pretending to believe in a certain political theology. As a bonus, narcissistic identification with downwardly mobile younger socialists is gratifying to the ego. And proximity to power is flattering. Ambitious New York City and coastal-adjacent journalists have perverse incentives to treat highly ideological candidates as above criticism.
The consequences, whether in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland or Chicago, are the same (and the conditions of the patients far advanced). The story has played out, albeit more or less dramatically, and the result is that cities get worse. The persistent indifference to this result among educated urban voters suggests a generational, collective, narcissistic attachment to ideology.
And while it would be salutary if Mamdani turned towards the unpretentious pragmatism of his predecessor Eric Adams, who focused on garbage, policing, and housing, it’s unclear if the pragmatists among Mamdani’s staffers will win out over the Jacobins. One would like to imagine that a new strain of urban politics could emerge that is grounded both in left critiques of Moses-style technocratic government and Laschian critiques of feckless, politically inflected chattering-class narcissism. Free Stuff socialism is less democratic than nepotistic. It should be possible to say so without being accused of being a reactionary—just as it should be possible that journalists with progressive priors report things as they are, not as they wish they would be.
