Collapse

Change has many faces. That’s true in life and most certainly true in politics. Today we watch America’s two-party political system fade away as our public school system has. While our schools have not experienced a replacement as yet, our political system has. It has been replaced by two organizations which are not political parties. MAGA and the Democratic Socialists now dominate our politics – one nationally and one locally.

The Republican Party sits quietly atop both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each Republican Senator and Congressperson is openly threatened with political extinction unless they follow the MAGA line. The Speaker of the House, looking and acting like an errand boy, timidly awaits his next orders from MAGA and its true leader the Heritage Foundation whose orders are often delivered by Front Man, President Donald J. Trump.

The Democratic Party is essentially all used up: no program, a disappearing constituency, no meaning, no direction and an aging leadership so crippled that it insanely believed a black woman could be the President of the United States – literally gifting the Presidency to Mr. Trump.

The horrific mishandling of Joe Biden’s condition, his sad, stubborn reluctance to step aside fully backed by his selfish family and closest aides and the decision to throw the ball to a woman totally unprepared to run with it were clear signs the Democratic Party leadership itself had collapsed.

As with the Republican Party’s fading – it barely exists any longer in New York State, once a comfortable home for it – a vacuum existed which was easily filled by MAGA nationally, and in New York, by the Democratic Socialists.

The Democrats in New York – first stunned by the election to Congress of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez several years ago and now by Zorhan Mamdani leading a broken field in the election of a new Mayor – have found a sad excuse for their collapse: generational change.

GEN Z IN CHARGE

New York City has had its great Mayors, its poor Mayors and its crooked Mayors.

But rarely has it had a line-up of contenders for the job as weak as the present one. A seemingly solid guy as the present Mayor with lots of governmental experience and volumes of words to explain it … but found corrupt by the nation’s Department of Justice and then freed after a deal with the President; a former three-term Governor driven from office for conduct unbecoming and looking and sounding weak and out of place; a radio talk show host running for the second time on the Republican line who got 28% of the vote the first time; a financial guy no one ever heard of; and a boy from the GenZ population… the most undereducated generation in history… with a great smile, a welcoming personality, program ideas with no chance of becoming real, and a brief, insignificant political background who never ran/managed a thing in his life but is leading the race to run America’s most important city with its billions in the budget, nine million people and 330,000 personnel.

It is like asking a child to do an adult’s job.

Here is where the Democratic Socialists, formed as an organization almost 40 years ago to be the left wing of New York’s Democratic Party, but not socialist, finally broke its silence to find a place in our political system to operate successfully.

And this is the way they are doing it.

Locate a campaign in which an office holder was too busy to bother campaigning or where sitting candidates and other contenders each carry important nooses around their necks so that a candidate who is a total unknown could make promises which sounded wonderful even if they could never be real.

The Democratic Socialists of America has found its legs in a Democratic Party which has lost theirs.

Bernie Sanders never used his affiliation with DSA during his years in Vermont’s political hierarchy, but he did when he was elected a Senator and went to Washington. He used it carefully when he assumed a very independent stance on issues although he always voted with the Democratic Party.

AOC has used it similarly when she wanted her views heard. She has learned enough about government in the House to be ready to encourage talk about her running against Chuck Schumer for his longtime hold as a New York Senator – and even the suggestion she might run for President.

We have written repeatedly of our experience in Brooklyn where GenZ is in charge of government. Decisions made by them are often so damaging as to be unbelievable. We will not repeat them here but for this latest example.

GenZ wants those living in Williamsburg and adjacent Greenpoint to replace cars with bike lanes and to make crossing the many narrow streets there safer.

So they have installed two giant square blocks of concrete on both sides of each corner blocking cars from parking there and making crossing those streets safer—they say.

But the concrete blocks are so massive and so close to the street corners that a pedestrian must step into an Avenue’s traffic to cross the street. The way they have been changing traffic patterns has already produced a pedestrian death and more are sure to come.

They will hear no counter to their ways and as Mayor Adams said recently, they are loud, rude and nasty beyond adulthood into something very childlike.

And it is their votes which have catapulted Mr. Mamdani into a winning position.

FROM DEMOCRACY TO AUTHORITY

MAGA rules. The President is King. The Supreme Court is tightly inline issuing instant opinions favoring the Kingdom without comment or discussion.

Given the deepening weakly state of our political system, there are just a few questions remaining:

If the Democrats vote to close the government now will Trump have an excuse to fire thousands of present employees to keep making the Federal government smaller and less impactful or simply ignore this act of Congress as he has been ignoring its existence all along and proclaim that the government will remain open under Executive Order?

What will the tariff-ridden American economy look like three years from now and what elements of our democracy will remain?

Mr. Trump and the Heritage Foundation were made for each other. The Foundation waited for almost 50 years for a President who needed it and they finally found one.

What will that man be like when he has taken all the revenge he clearly needs to take and has issued tax cuts which will make the rich even richer as he continues to enrich himself in the White House…something he did not do in his first term.

Make no mistake: Donald J. Trump is not making America great. He is President again because he’s the best America can do.