Conservative New York City residents (yes, they do exist), contemplating the ascension of 33-year-old, never-held-a-private-sector-job, intifada-globalizing red diaper baby socialist Zohran Mamdani to the mayoralty of one of the world’s great, and some may say greatest, cities may be wondering whether the Big Apple’s prospects could get any worse.

Let me assure you: They can.  And, very likely, will.

Some personal biographical info as evidence that this writer knows whereof he speaks.  Born and raised in Detroit, I moved to NYC in 1977, where I spent the next 40-plus years before moving to Tennessee in 2019.  During those years, I experienced seven mayoral administrations: Abe Beame, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Bill de Blasio, Eric Adams, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg.

Of the seven mayors who governed (or should that be tried to govern) through my New York years, Rudy Giuliani was the best by far.  Armed with a strong law enforcement background; a great police commissioner, William Bratton; and a novel Broken Windows Theory, Giuliani worked a virtual miracle in transforming New York City from decrepit to dynamic.  In Times Square, gone were the topless bars, the three-card-monte con men, the peep shows, the porno theaters.  In their place, some of the nation’s major restaurant and retailers.  Aging subways cars festooned with graffiti were replaced with shiny graffiti-less modern ones.  The squeegee men were banished.  Mentally disturbed and violent vagrants were taken off the streets and taken to facilities where they could get the help they needed.

One would think that after the transformation Giuliani achieved and Bloomberg continued, it would be a long time before New Yorkers would elect a liberal Democrat mayor.  Sadly, one would be wrong.  The voters of New York “reverted to type” and elected not just another Democrat, but the most left-wing Democrat ever: Bill de Blasio.  Twice.

This is why, in this writer’s view, Nicole Russell could not be more wrong when she writes,

I want New Yorkers to vote for Mamdani to be the dummy test for socialism because he's already captured the mainstream media, even though he has a résumé thinner than a Broadway playbill. ...

He should win so voters can see if the policies he advocates play out in real life as well as they expect. ...

His plans will fail.  Of all Americans, New Yorkers perhaps can own up to this mistake, dust themselves off and vote differently next time.

In your dreams, Ingrid.  For if the election — and re-election — of Bill de Blasio on the heels of Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg demonstrates anything, it’s that liberals never learn, nor do they surrender their worldview.  This is bad news for New York City and, by extension, every city governed by Democrats.

Now, that’s not to say, if the dystopian horror show to which Democrat governance all too often leads gets bad enough, if Atlas shrugs violently enough, that liberals won’t vote for a Republican to clean up the mess.  The elections of Giuliani and Bloomberg demonstrate that they will.  But as soon as the mess is cleaned up, as soon as tranquility and order are restored...well, maybe “this time will be different.”  If New York foolishly elects Zohran Mamdani, they will not, if Mamdani’s term is as disastrous as everything he says and does portends it to be, make the same mistake twice.

But that’s not the way to bet.

The New York that came to its senses after Dinkins and elected Giuliani is gone.  NYC’s electorate today, like those of blue cities across the nation, has moved left since the Giuliani-Bloomberg era and is still moving.  The number of liberals willing to vote for a Giuliani 2.0 will go down, even as the degree of dysfunction that would compel them to do so goes up.

To understand why this is so, one needs to understand how the left views socialism, an economic system born in Karl Marx’s mind that never existed in the real world, as many socialists all but openly admit with their fallback position after every failed experiment, that “real communism/socialism hasn’t been tried.”  We are talking about experiments, social experiments, with you and me as the guinea pigs.

To understand the liberal mindset vis-à-vis socialism, consider two other concepts that began as ideas in men’s minds: a commercially practical light bulb and manned flight.  Neither one existed in the real world until Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers set out to transform their dreams into reality.  They succeeded, but only after years of trial and error, failed experiments, and dead ends.  Edison, for example, tried over 3,000 filament materials (Edison himself did not know the exact number) until settling, finally, on a thread of carbonized bamboo.

Now imagine if, after the two thousandth failed experiment, someone had told Edison that a practical incandescent light bulb was a fantasy “that has never worked in the real world.”  Well, given that I am not typing this article by candlelight, we can confidently assume that if someone did said that to Edison, Edison didn’t listen.  After each failure, he picked himself up and tried again, spurred on by his firm belief that (1) the world needed a practical incandescent lamp and (2) the concept was sound and, given enough attempts, he would eventually succeed in creating one.

Liberals view socialism the same way Edison and the Wright brothers viewed their inventions.  The goal of creating a socialist society is worthy, and each failed attempt to create such a society is not proof of the unworkability of a socialist society; it is just the latest failed experiment, another milestone, like Edison’s 2,999th filament, on the road to Utopia.

Socialists consider socialism the best economic system, far superior to capitalism, and therefore a goal worth pursuing regardless of the number of lives ruined — and lost — in the process.

If one wants to make an omelet, one has to break a few eggs.  Or heads.  To the socialist true believer, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao — all the people who have tried to impose socialism on their people — are not ancient alchemists trying to turn lead into gold; they are Thomas Edison testing his two thousandth filament on the way to discovering the one that will work.

So what does all of the above have to do with Zohran Mamdani and the New York City mayoral race?  It means this: If New York elects Zohran Mamdani, unless the quality of life over the next four years becomes very, very bad, worse-than-pre-Giuliani bad, Zohran Mamdani will be re-elected, and it won’t even be close.

As for this 41-year (former) NYC resident, let me say: It couldn’t happen to a nicer city.

Gene Schwimmer is the proprietor of Gene Rants on YouTube.

Image: Zohran Mamdani.  Credit: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.