Localize the Infection

Rank choices indeed! Every election comes down to rotten choices, with potential voters wondering how it came to this and the experts nonetheless continuing to sing the praises of democracy.

The leftists and liberals of New York City—where victory in the Democratic June 24 primary almost guarantees who will be the next mayor—have now backed themselves into a situation in which they probably pick one of two dubious figures, protracted though the rounds of ranked-choice voting may be. (Already, the system meant to spare voters painful all-or-nothing choices is turning into a complex web of collaborative voters’ vows to cross-endorse, not cross-endorse, not rank some candidates at all, etc.)

The Democrats could go with a rising-star thirtysomething socialist Muslim rapper named Zohran Mamdani (son of a Columbia African studies professor and the Monsoon Wedding director) who condemns Israel and wants to “globalize the intifada,” swearing that in context that phrase, meaning “struggle,” needn’t alarm New York’s large—and overwhelmingly Democrat—Jewish population, even at this dicey juncture in history.

I concede that the thoroughly libertarian, Maryland-based Muslim organization Minaret of Freedom has used as a slogan the more startling but basically accurate Thomas Jefferson translation “I have sworn jihad against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Instead of that one jarring word near the beginning, in the original Jefferson wrote “upon the altar of god eternal hostility,” as you can see carved around the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial in D.C., but it amounts to the same thing.

To avoid all those conversations, though—and avoid having to learn economics—the Democrats can do the sleazy, relatively safe thing and pick former governor Andrew Cuomo, repeatedly accused of sexual harassment but now perhaps best known for placing Covid patients in nursing homes alongside the most vulnerable potentially-infected and thereby perhaps contributing more to the Covid death tally than any other single individual on Earth, though the electorate, as is typical, now praises him for making “tough” decisions during the crisis and hopes he’ll make many more, likely while yelling (this is the state that produced Donald Trump, AOC, and Bernie Sanders, after all).

So, odds are, Cuomo will soon preside over what was for a time the most locked-down, masked, germophobic, judgmental city in America—which is to say, likely the one part of New York State stupid enough to still believe in him. The castle occupants in the zombie sequel 28 Years Later do a better job of keeping “the infected” isolated than he did, to my surprise.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that Jewish and pro-Jewish voters here will go for Cuomo and thereby sink Mamdani, though. For starters, they’re not all Israel supporters, of course. But beyond that, some are so enamored of socialism like that which Mamdani is offering that they’d vote for him even if he were consciously, overtly anti-Semitic rather than just critical of Israel. Hell, a traveling reporter for the leftist Partisan Review back in the 1930s incidentally described meeting some Jewish college students in Europe who were so hot for socialism that they backed the Nazi Party in its early days, pooh-poohing its anti-Semitism on the grounds that it nonetheless offered the most viable path to a socialist revolution. (You can find that reporter’s account in the anthology A Partisan Century edited by Edith Kurzweil.)

But speaking of courting very serious buyer’s remorse, if New Yorkers sour on Mamdani or Cuomo after the Democrats pick one of them, they’ll still have five months before the general election to steel themselves for casting a vote for one of the other two most plausible mayoral candidates.

They might stick with fairly moderate incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who’s no longer under federal bribery investigation and who denies the allegations in the recent sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him, or the Republican candidate—since New York City still technically has a Republican Party—Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels vigilante group, who has spent almost all of his time fighting crime in the years since that one little crime he faked in which he was purportedly stuffed in the trunk of a car by assailants. You might say he was launching “false flag” attacks here to justify right-wing reprisals before it was cool. Well, as one is often tempted to say of New York political figures, he isn’t really any stranger than his opponents.

The political differences between all of the figures noted above will seem trivial if we are embroiled in World War III by the time we have a new mayor, though. It seems petty to wonder how that prospect could affect next week’s Democratic mayoral primary, but it just might. As the Jerusalem Post reports, Times Square here has already seen a huge rally that was not just pro-peace but pro-Iran, with protestors chanting, “Iran make us proud, burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” the sort of provocation that can drive people away from radicalism. The paper reports that the Solidarity of Iran rally was organized by the socialist, pro-Palestinian Bronx Anti-War Coalition but accidentally calls it the Bronx Anti-Iran coalition, perhaps a bit of wishful thinking that may yet prove prophetic.

I fear the big debates in New York City a year or two from now won’t be about issues like congestion pricing.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey