The End of My Era

Well, I suppose it’s symbolic and fitting that Sanity Goddess and I ceased being residents of New York—that is, we sold our house—on the day the Democratic Socialists romped in Congressional elections in the city. We were leaving anyway. The kids were gone. The house, in New Rochelle, was too big. We’ll definitely miss our neighbors. I’ll miss the Chinese fast food place downtown and Saccone’s fabulous Italian soups. And I will remain an obsessed Mets, Jets and Knicks—Knicks!—fan for the rest of my days.

But New York City and its environs, my lifelong home, had become easy to leave. It had become inhospitable, too noisy, the din ramifying down the canyons. Dinner and theater tickets in Manhattan existed in a stratosphere unaffordable to all but hedge-fund managers. Times Square, no longer naughty or fun, had become a banal theme park; Brooklyn, a left-wing playground where Dan Goldman—an excellent member of Congress who lost his primary to a socialist ninny on Tuesday—was refused a cup of coffee at a cafe because he supported the state of Israel. Zohran Mamdani won all the races in which he endorsed candidates. All his candidates called themselves socialists. One of them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, in Harlem, refused to condemn the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023—she attended a rally celebrating the terrorists the next day…and later said this in defense of her support for the killers:

"The premise of that question, to me, ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that folks were living under before this genocide began."

Ed Koch, the ultimate New Yorker, is spinning in his grave. Indeed, Mamdani wants to take Koch’s name off the 59th Street Bridge. He might as well take the NY insignia off the Yankees’ pinstripes. And what next? Will the Statue of Liberty be renamed the Statue of Bernie?

I spent a decade covering the city for New York Magazine. It was a time of larger than life politicians..There was Koch and the governor was Mario Cuomo. Our local villains like Donald Trump and Al Sharpton came plus-sized. They dressed and coiffed like Gotham City cartoon miscreants. But the city flourished under two Republican mayors, Rudy Giuliani (before he went crazy) and Michael Bloomberg (who left the Republican Party, as any sane person would during the rise of Trump). It took Republicans to stand up to the city’s union-infested bureaucracy.

New York always was a leftish town. There was a tradition of lovable rogues—Fiorello LaGuardia, Bella Abzug, Adam Clayton Powell—and great statesmen like my personal favorite, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (even though he was born in Tulsa).

The very style of the city was an international commodity: I was in Tehran a few months after 9/11 and asked a woman what her first thought was when the towers came down: “I hoped Woody Allen was still alive,” she said. New York was the buckle on the Borscht Belt. It was home to Katz’s deli and “I’ll have what she’s having.” It was a place where working-class kids with good math brains could make a fortune down in the financial district (as did Melvin Van Peebles before he turned to film). It was the capital of ethnic America—the capital of Irish America (Boston?Fuhgeddsboutit!), Italian, Black and Latino America…and, above all, Jewish America. It was the home of Harlem, a Jewish neighborhood where my grandmother was born, then the apotheosis of black cool, and now gentrifying again. New York was like that, the nabes constantly reinventing themselves. Ozone Park, where Jimmy Breslin roamed, is now home to a fabulous Guyanan community now. We all lived together, cheek by jowl, all fists and elbows. We ate bagels and pizza and egg rolls; we ate street hot dogs—Colin Powell’s favorite—slathered with mustard and cooked onions. We intermarried, and welcomed new waves of immigrants from South Asia, the West Indies and Africa, from the Dominican, from Guyana, from everywhere. For a time I lived in Greenwich Village, the American headquarters of Bohemia. The Fancy Dans lived in some other part of town—Anna Wintour’s world wasn’t ours, but it had its place. We were, I always believed, distillate of America. I loved the place.

And now? My brain tells me this is a phase. Socialism is a conceit. It doesn’t work. The last leftist period in New York, the 1960s and 1970s, almost killed the place. The welfare rolls were padded; crime soared; public housing became slums; the city pretty much went bankrupt. But New York is too wild and free to be bled and suppressed by The Shallow State for very long. The real spirit of the city is in the music—from Tin Pan Alley to Miles to rap to hip-hop, to whatever genius amalgam Lin Manuel Miranda comes up with next. Zohran Mamdani—obviously a talented politician—has captured a part of that spirit of heterogeneity, but only a part. I would bet on bodegas over city-run grocery stores in the long run. I would bet against the housing shortages caused by rent freezes. I would bet on the charter schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone over the public schools repressed by the teachers unions. New York will eventually reemerge as the entrepreneurial life force it has always been. It will not kill the Golden Wall Street goose, though its feathers could stand a clipping.

But what of the larger issue? What does this mean for American politics? Probably not all that much. New York isn’t America. But the Democratic Party remains in a world of hurt. Tuesday was arguably Donald Trump’s best election night of the season. Playbook reported:

“Tonight wasn’t just a bad night for so-called ‘Leader’ Hakeem Jeffries,” said NRCC spokespersonMike Marinella. “It was the night the Democrat establishment officially surrendered to Zohran Mamdani and the socialist wing of their party. Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

I mean, Darializa Avila Chevalier once called Barack Obama “evil.” She once called Joe Biden “a rapist.” She opposes deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes; she is against the very concept of borders, and against prisons, to say nothing of her Hamas-leaning prevarications when it comes to Palestinian terrorism. These are hilariously awful positions—and will be exploited by Republicans from Oshkosh to Okemah. But they are positions. What are the Democratic moderates offering? Mush, mostly. Playbook again:

“The Democratic establishment better wake up — because the left is winning, they are on the outs, and it's time for us to retire a few more members of Congress,” Usamah Andrabi of the progressive group Justice Democrats told Playbook. “I really think it’s time for Democratic leadership to question whether or not they are actually fit to lead this party, and whether they should start listening to the progressive left.”

Yeah, well. I don’t think so. But I also don’t think the moderates will have much success until they start offering clarity to the American people. They must stand for traditional liberalism—free enterprise, free speech, the rule of law. And more, they must offer a full-throated rejection of their Party’s woke fripperies. No boys on girls teams. No racial preferences. No messing with pronouns. They must wave the flag—American, not Palestinian—support immigration enforcement, support the police, support a national program of real government reform: a 10-year sunset provision on every extant federal regulation…and yes, support for higher taxes on those who make their money through speculation not industry. They will not succeed as Luddite opponents Artificial Intelligence. They will have to be optimistic to counteract the dark and unAmerican Trumpist pessimism about the country..

Apart from a few younger outliers—Mass Rep. Jake Auchincloss is one—there is not much creative policy thinking going on in the party. There needs to be. It is not enough to be merely anti-Trump. They have to start imagining what the Republicans will be like post-Trump. They have to start thinking about how to move past the blunt force trauma of populism, left and right. That will take courage. It will take standing up against the cliched and vestigial nostrums of the left. America has succeeded for 250 years because it has managed to avoid extremism, for the most part. We are in a “least part” period now. Trump skates the edge of authoritarianism and sociopathy.. The answer to that isn’t a different sort of extremism. It is traditional free enterprise liberalism.

It’s. sad for me to say goodbye to New York. I’ll still savor the photos of Rockaway Beach on Facebook. I hope this current crop of ideologues don’t wreck the capitalist bustle and creativity they’ve inherited..

And our America’s birthday sale continues: