Radio Free New Hampshire: Bright Lights, Big City!

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Editor’s Note: We welcome back Radio Free New Hampshire. Michael Davidow took a few months off from his column to finish his latest novel “Interdiction about a veteran cop in a small New Hampshire town who shoots and kills a college student in a traffic stop gone awry. The ensuing investigation presents a tale of drug dealing, gunplay, and justifiable homicide. The lawyers are in control. The police are waiting and watching. The sole civilian witness to this killing is under indictment herself and silent regarding what she saw. The state’s most powerful politicians line up behind their officer. Only one thing stands between him and exoneration: another cop from another small town who begins to question what happened that night. His past has called him to his own separate truth.” It is awesome and available on Amazon.

As the Democratic party lurches around the landscape searching for ways to matter again, eyes have turned to New York City where a young state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani wants to be mayor. He recently won the Democratic primary for that seat and people are excited.

In that race, he beat Andrew Cuomo, a former governor of New York State who got chased from office for allegedly mistreating numerous females who worked for him. Cuomo is an old-time pol who is friends with the Clintons and Wall Street. I recall him with chagrin whenever I drive south because he renamed the poetically resplendent Tappan Zee Bridge for his father Mario Cuomo, another former New York governor, because nothing says good governance like naming a large public object for your dad. The Democratic center is running pretty thin these days. It features people like Cuomo.

It doesn’t feature people like Mamdani, anyway, who is running from the left. Aside from bearing a name that AI might have hallucinated to trigger our MAGA friends, our candidate talks about food, rent, and the killing fields of Gaza. AOC and Bernie dig him; he belongs to their same soft-serve socialist party.

Thankfully, however, things are not as bad as all that. After getting pressured by middle-aged money-men, Mamdani decided it was unwise to sanction the term “globalize the intifada” and he will now discourage his supporters from its use. One can only imagine the depth of his conversion on this topic. Thankfully, he still describes the Gaza situation as genocide, so the residents of Brooklyn (Aldous Huxley surely had them in mind when he put all the Alphas of “Brave New World” into one camp to see if they could run themselves) (spoiler alert—they couldn’t) can still sleep soundly at night, knowing that the morning will bring them fresh cause for self-righteousness.

If I recall correctly, New York City has actual experience with globalizing the intifada. Muslim terrorists once flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, murdering thousands of people that way, and thereby igniting a series of wars whose repercussions echo to this day. So I don’t know why Mamdani needed to learn that “worldwide intifada” is probably not a great thing to hype around Manhattan. I’m just glad he is willing to grow.

He's young, after all, and young people are expected to make mistakes (for context, his platform also includes explicit promises to tax “whiter”neighborhoods – and that one, he’s sticking to). So if we can’t quite count on his words, because he’ll shift them when he needs to, and his political track record is otherwise one inch deep, and it mainly consists of denigrating Israel (not one of Albany’s typical concerns) perhaps a glimpse of his background will help illuminate what sort of mayor he wants to be.

His father is a professor of settler-colonialism at Columbia University and his mother is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. He describes his childhood as “privileged.” Nothing to see here, folks...

A little more perspective, then. Even being the successful mayor of your state’s biggest city is not exactly a ticket to greater electoral success — ask Joyce Craig. So maybe Mamdani will lose in round two. Maybe he’ll get frustrated by the quotidian tasks of running an administration which is not in the Middle East and doesn’t need its own foreign policy. Maybe he will even keep growing until he becomes an actual as opposed to a virtual leader. Or maybe the progressives are right, and lowering rents by fiat while cheering on Hamas in its call for the liberation of Tel Aviv is our best hope for America’s future.

After all, the last time we had a candidate for important office who grew up wealthy yet slobbered over the poor, who said outlandish things about difficult topics and then either retracted them or claimed he was joking, but whose followers loved him for blurting them out regardless, whose political history was negligible but whose background otherwise gave clues of what we could expect from him if he were elected, who lacked all administrative capacity but made up for that with nerve and bluster, whose followers considered him an avatar of virtue, and in their own boundless self-confidence, lack of humility, and puerile ambition, they all but used him as a substitute for religion: that candidate’s name was Donald Trump. Good job, New York. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

It reminds me of the old joke about the drunken man searching for his car keys under the street lamp at night. His friend asks him if he’s sure that’s where he dropped them. No, comes the reply. But this is where the light is.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.