Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood morning, USPG2, and welcome to a very special post-off-year-election edition of Whitepill Wednesday with your host, Diana Moon Glampers!
Lot of doomposting last night and this morning about Mr. Mamdani being elected the mayor of New York City in the year of our Lord 2025.
To this doomposting, I can only ask:
Do you actually think socialism works?
No, I mean, sit with that for a minute. Do you, Mr. "I'm a Republican and I believe in conservative values," actually somewhere on the inside think socialism is actually the best system, one that will make life better for others? Are you only against it because you're greedy and don't want everyone to be prosperous, only you?
Probably fucking not, right? You probably think, because you haven't totally ignored the lessons of the 20th and 21st centuries, that socialism doesn't work very well at all! You probably think that it is a bullshit system that lends itself to corruption on a massive scale, raises crime rates, makes things more unaffordable, and in many other ways is just a bad idea.
It's not 2027 right now. It's 2025. This election means Mr. Mamdani has several years to fuck up New York City before the Democrats can hold their next primary. Do you think he's capable of being an effective mayor for that long? Do you think he'll be able to avoid illegal corruption in that time (or that the current feds have any interest in covering it up if he does)?
But Diana, you say, that's accelerationism. Accelerationism
never works!
Dummy, I'm not talking about the fucking presidential election. New York City is the best possible place for this to occur. It's too large for a socialist platform to effectively manage even for a short time. It's full of finance guys and large corporations and Very High Net Worth Individuals who can make a huge part of the city's tax base disappear even with only a 1-2% pullback in population. Oh yeah, and the vast majority of companies with a location there either have one somewhere else, too, or could afford to have one somewhere else.
It's also just a municipality. It's not a state, or a country. If Mamdani says it's time for sharia law or appropriating the houses of the rich, the Supreme Court will shut him down instantly. He is under a microscope. If he steps one toe outside the bounds of constitutionality, he will get a rapid judicial slapdown.
All regular Americans also know that New York City's residents aren't...exactly like us. But what's about to happen will be wild: New York gets worse, while New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani loudly proclaim that it's getting better. People will be getting knifed on the subway every week and when it drives down prices of the housing near the stations where it happens most, they'll celebrate affordability. And because New York is uniquely full of journalists and has a spotlight on it at all times, it'll all be broadcast live to all of regular America. Everyone will see the bloom come off the rose.
By the time the 2028 primaries come around, one of two things will have happened: Mamdani will have disastrously implemented socialist policies and the whole country will have gotten to see socialism in action...or he will be a normal politician who brings no change and represents the status quo.
Either way, it's hard to see a socialist candidate prevailing at the primaries almost exactly two years after Mamdani takes office: they'd be seen as either all talk and no action, or as a dangerous and irresponsible expansion of policies already failing in the largest US city.
The only way you can believe that the outcome will be anything else is if you think socialism is actually kind of good, might actually work, might be just the thing NYC really needs. As long as you don't live in the NYC metro (sorry,
@Catch The Rainbow ), the fact that this happened three years out from the next presidential election is a gift. It's enough time to let socialism work some of its magic...the same kind of magic that made Yugoslavia and Angola prosperous and peaceful.
Meanwhile, it looks like the Somalian pirate isn't going to win in Minneapolis (I noticed that the liberal media took this election out of the news cycle when it became apparent it wouldn't result in another progressive victory to tout, which makes me wonder how many other progressives got shut out and we didn't even hear about it because the "story" was already prewritten: whichever "socialist progressive" looked most likely to win would get coverage so the media can talk about how this means people are fed up with Trump, while the rest would go quiet). That would have been worse, because Minneapolis has a lot of decent people and doesn't have enough local reporters on the ground (or with enough national connections) to actually ensure the results of such an election in the coming years would have been visible nationwide.
Anyway, if you see someone doompilling about Mamdani today, you have every right to ask them if they're really a pinko on the inside. We all know 2-3 years is plenty to disillusion people about an ideology, that's literally why midterms are almost always a swing toward whatever party isn't in power. Mamdani is positioning himself as the bastion of socialism at a time when the "midterm" evaluation of his administration (which, again, is almost always negative for every party!) will be happening right as Democrats duke it out over who will be the party nominee in 2028.
If you actually do live in NYC...maybe consider some alternative options. I hear the Poconos are lovely, with a commutable radius for a hybrid job.
Anyway, this has been Diana Moon Glampers with a Whitepill Wednesday. Chin up, and don't let the commies grind ya down.
MEANWHILE ON THE FOOD STAMPS
