Socialist Mayors

Chicago Has One, LA Does Too, NY Might

The election season for mayor is on in New York City. A lot of people hate NYC. I love NYC. If I had moved there for college or in my early 20s, it is doubtful that I would have left. It’s one of the very, very few cities in the US where you can start with nothing and have a reasonable chance to make millions and millions of dollars, or even billions.

That’s despite the high costs of living and taxes. By the way, when you see a city with very high costs of living, one reason might be the demand to live there. There is a reason for that demand. Of course, NYC has other policies that artificially drive up the cost of living.

Generally, NYC has been a place where people don’t care where you come from. They only care if you can do it. That creates opportunity. It has not been a Paddy Bauler attitude of “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” That might be changing as it is in all parts of America. I would not be surprised if people actively discriminate based on all kinds of evolving preferences. White males need not try.

The election in NYC is an illustration of the double standards both the media and left-wing people apply to their illogical analysis of situations.

What is amazing to me is that Andrew Cuomo is leading in the polls for mayor. It is name recognition, but he was a total failure as governor. He killed thousands during Covid with his policies. I guess he couldn’t get honest work, so he is just another career politician born in a career politician’s family running for another office. Cuomo even had sex harassment issues as governor. He denies it, but in far-left wing liberal enclaves, when has denial meant a thing? I guess it’s okay when it is a Democrat who toes the line and not a Republican who doesn’t.

Queens Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani is running a distant second. He is an out-of-the-closet socialist/marxist, whatever brand of totalitarianism you want to put on it. Speaker Adrienne Adams is a distant third. She is a Black female. I guess New Yorkers are more racist than I remember, since a white male is polling better.

Conveniently for political power brokers, they have ranked-choice voting, and no one is aligned with a political party, though every candidate is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Cuomo wins a ranked-choice simulation.

Ranked-choice voting and open primaries can invite and contribute to corruption. They centralize power and take liberty away from citizens, putting it into the hands of people in the proverbial smoke-filled room.

On X, a guy I follow AJ Manaseer from Chicago, opined that if the socialist wins in NYC it might be good for Chicago. I don’t know about that. Recall, NYC has already had a Marxist mayor. De Blasio was a Marxist, the same as Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, except one was white and the other is black. I think De Blasio is “educating” students at an Ivy League college now or something. College professorships are where good Marxists go to die.

De Blasio almost killed NYC. NYC is so resilient that it never actually dies. David Dinkins couldn’t do it, and it would take a superhuman effort to do it. But, De Blasio wounded it.

Trump hate in NYC is universal. TDS makes people think differently. They foam at the mouth and start to think illogically and irrationally. I see it in people I interface with in person and online. Could TDS propel Mamdani to become mayor of NYC?

I don’t know how the networks and who the true power brokers in NYC politics are, but the current mayor, Eric Adams, caught heat when he simply aligned with Trump on one issue, illegal immigration. In Chicago, what the good people missed in the last election was who the real powerbrokers were. It is the Chicago Teachers’ Union, not the old Democratic Machine.

That’s why the current Marxist is mayor of Chicago, and not Paul Vallas. It’s also why Rahm Emanuel was excommunicated. In addition, Rahm is Jewish, and Jews need not apply in Marxist places.

John Kass has a fantastic piece on Chicago today at his site, worth reading. I am a subscriber. I don’t know if NYC works this way or not, but John writes:

The saga begins with the racism always flowing from the mouth of Mayor Panic Attacks, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who used the Memorial Day weekend to herald Africa Day.

Why? He’s a crafty Marxist who I sometimes refer to as Mayor Black Lenin. And he wants the dim witted among his critics to attack his push for Africa Day, so he can generate black support for himself.

Los Angeles clearly has a mayor cut from the socialist jib. Two homes under construction in the Palisades. Two. San Francisco did but got rid of “it”. Garry Tan is admirably trying to reform SF, but it’s going to be very hard because he is doing it inside the Democratic Party. He will have to perform a William Buckley Republican “kick out the John Birchers” move to be successful.

Our traditional cities in the US are a mess. Decades and decades of one-party rule have done that, but with the hard leftward push of the Democratic Party, it has become far worse.

The networks and economic engines of those cities can rearrange themselves in other American cities, but that takes a lot of time. It is not that different than a manufacturing ecosystem leaving one place and re-establishing itself in another. People wonder why automakers don’t leave Detroit, or why the movie industry doesn’t leave LA, or why high-frequency traders don’t leave Chicago. The cost to leave isn’t just dollars and cents, but the cost to move the network and re-establish it so it functions well. There are high risks in moves that can’t be calculated with accounting metrics.

The socialism that permeates our society in our major cities undermines progress for all of the US. It extends to states when considering California, New York, and Illinois. It is trendy for Democratic spinmeisters to say that California is “giving” so much while getting nothing back. Then they use a straw man comparison to states like Mississippi and say they are “taking”. I don’t think that is true, especially when considering how socialism is flourishing in a state like California. California is one of the largest takers. So is NYC.

Given the tableau of choices in the NY mayor race, I don’t think any of them are particularly great for America. I don’t think any are great for NYC either. Giuliani isn’t on the ballot.