GenZ Charm

When watching a Sci Fi movie did you ever notice that what was collapsing all around you in a dystopian World gone wild was the good old US of A?

Maybe it’s the world’s Seas washing life away, an impending Ice Age, lurid beings from another planet in attack mode, or some unknown entity announcing the end of Earth… it’s always us that gets hit really bad.

Such is now the case as New York City must face a startling truth: our two party political system has collapsed right before our eyes and it is about to be replaced by the excessive charm of GenZ’s new leading man…Zohran Mamdani.

And despite the obvious discomfort, it follows the perfect picture nationally – the two party political system with us for 250 years is essentially gone. Everything we see is an endlessly weakened form of what we’ve known and it will go on for years to come.

We focus here on NYC and what it means for the upcoming Mayoral election.

We have three men running for office. One is a former Governor, a long term Democratic office holder who lost the Democratic primary and is running as an independent.

One is a radio talk show host who can talk endlessly about past adventures even if he has never once spent a single moment working in government. Although he has never identified as a Republican, he is running for Mayor on the Republican line for the second time. Last time he received 28% of the vote. New Yorkers like him because he sounds like them. They just don’t vote Republican.

The third candidate is a young man with absolutely no management experience in anything who won the Democratic primary because he got a lot of votes from his generation in three boroughs where they can barely afford to live. He does not identify as a Democrat but as Democratic Socialist.

Democratic Socialists are not a political party but a political organization formed 40 years ago to provide the Democratic Party with a permanent “left wing”.

They have been silent for most of a 40 year history until Bernie Sanders used them in the Senate and they helped elect Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Congress in an essentially uncontested race.

Besides having no management experience of any kind, Zohran Mamdani comes from the ranks of the worst educated generation in America’s history. If he becomes the Mayor of New York he will follow a number of young men and women his age who have been leading Brooklyn, NY into an age of chaos with decisions that clearly indicate they do not know what they do not know – a state of mind which produces an ignorance which in turn can lead to an unmatched stupidity in decision-making of any kind.

Born into an educated family thirty four years ago, his Father is a long-time professor at Columbia University…his Mother a very noted filmmaker from India, he seemed to have no direction professionally until becoming a member of the New York State Assembly six years ago.

He had found his place. Getting it politically was the key. Being able to say things that sounded just right and presenting himself as a new New Yorker with foreign roots, a “just right” beard and a fantastic smile…he is a Hollywood character come to life.

Barack Obama had shown him the way. Coming from nowhere in Chicago but supported by the powerful, rich Pritzker family, Obama ran for President against two men who could never win: John McCain but really against Sarah Palin who took over the race in the last month and then Mitt Romney, a Utah Mormon…a religion that many in the Christian faith could not abide. You need a little luck.

The kind Mamdani has now.

Having easily won the Democratic Party nomination for Mayor in a crowded primary election which featured a sitting Democratic Mayor indicted by the Federal Government and a former Democratic Governor who was ousted by the Democratic leadership before the end of his third term for conduct unbecoming, it seemed like a new breeze blowing through the old haze of a Democratic Party which hardly exists nationally and now locally as well.

With weeks to go before the general election, Zohran Mamdani still leads the race by a comfortable margin.

And how has he done that?

By using his outstanding smile, visiting with powerful business leaders in a “listening campaign” depending upon the enthusiasm of young New Yorkers from places like Brooklyn and focusing his appeal on the extreme cost of living in New York City.

His significant primary vote came from areas in Queens and Brooklyn where so many 30 year old’s rent rooms in apartments because they cannot afford to rent the apartments themselves.

He has ideas about affordability. If you do not know what you do not know, ideas which seem perfect can be anything but…

THE PITCH

Here is a brief summary of Mamdani’s plan.

Free child care. The cost of child care in NYC today can be as much as $22,000 a year. It will take approximately 8 billion dollars a year to produce child care for all those who need it.

There are not enough child care professionals to meet this need. It sounds so good. It just will not happen.

And like the world of universal PreK schooling – no one will ever study the facts to find out if the programs are any good.

Free buses will cost 800 million dollars but there is no indication that those savings matter in terms of daily travel needs and how they are met in NYC.

Opening five city-owned grocery stores…one in each borough. Given the sheer number of people who need to save money on food, opening one store in each borough sounds ridiculous. The cost will be 60 million dollars.

Freeze the rental cost of stabilized apartments –with two million such apartments this sounds like something which can be impactful, but how are landlords going to be able to maintain what exists as costs never stop going up.

Introduction of a $30 minimum wage…a number which will drive hundreds of small businesses out of business.

A Community Safety plan which features the use of social workers to assist police in the dangerous world of family violence. There is no indication that there are enough social workers in New York City to take part in such a difficult task.

New York City has an annual budget of $116 Billion dollars — larger than many nations. It has 330,000 employees. It is about to be run by a young man who has never run a business or even a lemonade stand.

And so, the question becomes who is Mamdani going to hire to actually run the city?

And the answer is no one knows. He has refused to name any names at all for all the key jobs he must fill.

The recent first of two so-called debates indicated that he sticks to his script…continuing to make promises about “affordability” with ideas about public safety that are clearly inappropriate when you consider reality.

But if you do not know what you do not know how can you make intelligent decisions about programs and the people to run them?

And the answer is you cannot even if you “get lucky” with a few.

Sadly the media is going along with the flow instead of telling the public what it should be considering.

Citizens feeling at a loss…feeling that none of these candidates will make a good Mayor much less a great one and feel like they are each voting for the lesser of three evils.

It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last.

With our national political parties broken, purchased or afraid to act, we face a World full of potential problems.

We see how GenZ politicians seem lost when it comes to making decisions: turning a main artery that connects three boroughs into a single lane of traffic and knowing that could happen to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Queens Boulevard in Queens to name but a few and other examples of simplistic stupidity we have noted in previous writings, we have to be determined to act against them because they will be coming fast and furious with a GenZ Mayor.

When there are problems GenZ politicians stand outside of homes and yell at people.

This sounds childish and prefabricated. But it is not.

If the people who run New York, the Real Estate Board, have decided to cooperate with Zohran he will appear to be a stronger Mayor. But that will be a bit of make-believe.

When the Board agreed to work with Bill DeBlasio it was because they had purchased him. He gave $280 million to his wife and some good citizens working with her in an effort to strengthen the way New York worked with its mentally ill. The money was “lost” and never found.

Pencil buildings were built for the first time in history, to not only destroy our skyline (they look like smoke stacks) but to literally chip concrete into our streets as they are doing now.

There is little we can do to change the Mamdani push to run New York. But the millions who care know what we can do together to blunt the force of the ignorance about to flow over us.

All we have to do is care enough.