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Tag: american affairs

  • The Cold Has Been Mamdani’s First Serious Test. The Results Have Been Mixed.

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    Photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

    Six weeks into his tenure, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been confronted with controversies both grave and frivolous. He wisely stood by a top appointee who was facing down a media circus for tweets that were more than a half-decade old. He grappled with the fallout from several police-involved shootings and navigated how, as a democratic socialist who must partner with a much more conservative NYPD commissioner, he should respond.

    And he faced down, like just about every mayor before him, the weather. The results were mixed. They offered both encouraging signs for a 34-year-old politician who is going to endure more scrutiny than all of his recent predecessors and warnings for an administration that promised sweeping change but still finds itself struggling with the balky machinery of government. With such high expectations placed upon him, it might grow more difficult for Mamdani to survive, unscathed, crises like the 19 New Yorkers who died outside during a historic cold snap. (An additional seven city residents died in their own homes.)

    Before a large snowstorm barreled into New York City at the end of January, the great political question for Mamdani was how quickly his Sanitation Department could get the roadways clear and how well he could communicate the meteorological threat. On that front, Mamdani was plainly successful. He was on television and social media constantly, and he projected the energy and verve he was known for on the campaign trail. This was nothing like Michael Bloomberg ducking a snowstorm for Bermuda or John Lindsay, more than a half-century ago, failing to anticipate a massive snowfall that would kill 42 New Yorkers and paralyze the outer boroughs. Mamdani didn’t even have to beat back criticism that certain neighborhoods were wholly neglected, like de Blasio with the Upper East Side in 2014.

    Had the weather been merely seasonal after the snow fell, Mamdani would have received his kudos and skipped along to February. Instead, New York and much of the Northeast endured the most brutal cold in decades. For nine consecutive days, the temperature didn’t climb above freezing. Though this did not technically break a record — in 2018, New York temperatures remained at or below freezing for 14 consecutive days — the lows were in the single digits with horrifying windchill. Large portions of the city waterways iced over completely.

    To an extent, the obvious challenge of the cold has insulated Mamdani from greater backlash. The New York Post has hammered him repeatedly, and Julie Menin, the Speaker of the City Council and a possible future mayoral candidate, recently said the New Yorkers who died from the cold “should be alive today,” but there isn’t much evidence — yet — that Mamdani is paying a tremendous political price for the climbing death toll. The Post has tried to blame the cold deaths on Mamdani’s decision to end the sweeps of homeless encampments, but there’s scant evidence most of the New Yorkers who died outside were living in any of these camps. What is helping Mamdani is that two of the city officials who were charged with overseeing the response to the cold snap were Eric Adams holdovers who are about to leave the new administration. Both Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, and Zach Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner, are set to resign, making way for Mamdani’s own appointees.

    What could have been done differently? A clear answer hasn’t yet emerged. At a recent City Council hearing, Park said the outdoor deaths fall outside historical norms; in a typical year, an average of ten to 20 homeless people die in the city from hypothermia. It’s actually not known exactly how many of the 19 people who died were homeless. (At least a quarter may have had permanent housing.) Questions have emerged over whether the city was forceful enough when it came to removing people, even against their will, from the streets as the deadly cold descended. The police testified that they have made, since January 19, at least 52 involuntary removals. The city hasn’t revealed how many people have been left on the streets after an interaction with a clinician or police officer instead of being involuntarily committed.

    It does appear, at the very minimum, the Mamdani administration was caught somewhat flatfooted. Warming buses were introduced but signage was initially missing. One city councilman said the 311 call he made for a distressed homeless person was never returned. Mamdani said, in the future, he might encourage more New Yorkers in such a situation to call 911 instead of 311. “New Yorkers have been told to cast blame in different places, but I am the mayor,” Mamdani said last week.

    At least one administration spokesperson, though, attempted to deflect blame entirely, contra Mamdani. When the Post pressed City Hall for more information about the New Yorkers who had died of the cold indoors, Dora Pekec, the Mamdani spokesperson, said they wouldn’t be releasing additional information because they did not die on city property. “People die in their homes all the time,” Pekec said, which is, if technically true, also callous.

    We do not know if other mayors — Bloomberg, de Blasio, Adams, or anyone else — would have handled the response to the cold differently. It’s hard, still, to discern how much of the death was inevitable and how much a result of sclerotic city systems Mamdani has yet to overhaul, letting down the most vulnerable New Yorkers. As a new mayor, Mamdani can claim, credibly, he is still grappling with inefficiencies created by Adams and others. New Yorkers will offer him leeway. How long that leeway lasts is one of the operative questions of his administration.

    Mamdani stormed into City Hall like no other mayor before him on a wave of unprecedented voter enthusiasm and global celebrity. The stakes are dramatically raised. He has promised a new era for the city, and he’s now tasked with delivering it. What will be most damaging to his project is disillusionment and cynicism. If it seems like the city still doesn’t work as it should — or like the problems of past administrations, now matter how daunting, aren’t being addressed — the bloom might come off the Mamdani rose.

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    Ross Barkan

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  • Trump vs. America’s Allies

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    Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

    It might seem obvious enough, one year into Donald Trump’s second term, that he will leave behind an enormously destructive—and plenty durable—domestic legacy. He is the president who urged on a violent insurrection, transformed a major political party into his personal cult, and yanked America in a far more nativist direction. The old free-trading Republicans are now full converts to Trump’s manic tariff regime. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary are stacked with Trump appointees, validating his right-wing policy.

    Yet it is hard to know, in the next decades, what America will look like and how much a former president can bend a party to his will—especially if that president is no longer alive. With Trump gone from the scene, Republicans could lose their appetite for tariffs or deranged Minneapolis-style immigration enforcement which carries so little upside. Given how unpopular DOGE was, a future Republican president might attempt more traditional austerity rather than the wanton layoffs prized by Elon Musk. The jury on Trump’s ultimate legacy is still out. We’ll know, in the next decade, how much of this can stand without one man. That’s the strength and weakness of cult leadership.

    Journey out of the country, however, and it’s clear enough that Trump is doing lasting damage to the United States that won’t be immediately fixed by a successor Democratic administration. The foreign nations that, for so many decades, either believed in the promise of America or were content to operate in our shadow are now restive and seeking to permanently alter how they relate to the U.S. This, in turn, might drive them closer to China, a technofascist nation that is, for them, a more predictable world power. Historians might chart the moment when this rupture occurred to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos earlier this month. It was a shot heard round the world, and one Americans should take seriously.

    Trump’s attempts to seize Greenland, as ludicrous as they were, seemed to trigger the final break.

    “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

    “This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”

    “This bargain,” he added, “no longer works.”

    More damning, perhaps, for Trump’s America was Carney’s call for “middle powers” like Canada and the European nations to “act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

    “Great powers” like the United States, he said, “can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.”

    “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

    The old order is not coming back. In Europe, Carney’s speech was received extremely well, with most national leaders treating it as a necessary corrective, a way to say out loud what they all had been, for the last year, contemplating. “Europe is back,” proclaimed The New Statesman, one of the leading British magazines. The Greenland threat, from Denmark to France to the U.K., triggered a round of collective revulsion unlike any ever witnessed in the Trump age. Far-right European leaders who had drawn close to Trump began to beat a retreat, as they made clear they valued their own national sovereignty over America First. Until now, European and Canadian politicians were content to flatter and mollify Trump, bartering with him like they would a schoolyard bully who could, at any moment, bash their teeth in. No matter what Trump said or did, the presidents and prime ministers would still strain for photo-ops and contemplate how they might, through elaborate and quasi-absurd diplomacy, win over the mercurial American strongman.

    Carney has made it clear that era is over. Trump did succeed in forcing the European countries to pay more for their own defense. He has, as intended, nudged America away from NATO. If Trump had a strategy for a workable “America First” paradigm that treated allies with respect while massively reinvesting in the homefront—imposing reasonable and select tariffs, investing billions in new domestic manufacturing—there could be a world where MAGA enjoyed the best of all worlds, maintaining useful ties abroad while powering an American industrial renaissance. We know that isn’t happening. Trump is too venal, too maladjusted, and far too shortsighted to pursue such a path. He will lose Europe without getting much in return.

    Carney, of course, isn’t wrong. The postwar international order was always somewhat illusionary, with the United States lording over much of the West. What Trump hasn’t grasped is that the old status quo served American interests just fine. And that, in a new world where Europe and Canada seek out further cooperation with China, America will have little to gain. Already, the Chinese electric carmaker BYD is outcompeting Tesla abroad, and may well dominate the European market in the next decade. Xi might menace Taiwan but is wise enough to understand it would never make sense for China to threaten territory like Greenland that belongs to a European power.

    If the next president is a Democrat, could relations between the U.S. and its postwar allies be reset? Perhaps—but only a degree. The memories of Canadians and Europeans are long. Even if Trumpism is vanquished from America, foreigners will fear the return of another movement like it and plan accordingly for that reality. We are no longer reliable. Trump has blazed a new trail, one we will be stuck on in the years after he’s faded into political oblivion.

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    Ross Barkan

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  • A New Era of Political Violence

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    Photo: Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

    The assassination of Charlie Kirk was, at once, horrifically modern and yoked to tradition. For as long as there has been a politics here, there have been assassinations, and virtually every generation since the nation’s founding has had to look on as a great leader or famed political figure was, without warning, shot dead. Kirk, for all his dynamism and influence, was never a force on the scale of Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, and since he was not an American president — merely the appendage of one — he will be no more than a historical footnote a half-century from now.

    But Americans of the past decades, if coming of age in far more violent and terrorized eras, did not have to reckon with such a blood-drenched visual spectacle as the videos of Kirk’s shooting that have circulated widely on social media; technology did not permit them, minutes after the deed, to consume all of it in full, to drown in unmediated horror. Imaginations, or grainy photographs and film, had to suffice. John F. Kennedy’s brains were blown out in the Zapruder film, but it was not broadcast publicly until 1975, 12 years after Lee Harvey Oswald aimed and fired in Dallas. And even then, this was 8-mm. film, shot with a Bell and Howell home-movie camera.

    Kirk’s death was everywhere, all at once, and his death could be experienced like it had happened right in front of you, on that sun-blasted day in Utah.

    We have entered, indisputably, a new age. It’s an old one, too, because it harkens back to how the restless, mentally unstable, and politically ambitious used to settle their scores. We do not yet know who killed Kirk or why; given the Turning Point USA founder’s stature, though, and positioning in the broader culture, we can assume the assassin was thinking, in some sense, symbolically. This is not about left versus right, or Republican versus Democrat — if Republicans, as the party of the gun, will always have more blood on their hands, they have no monopoly on political violence. The radical left and the radical right, throughout American history, have sought to bend and break the system through bloodshed, and many others, operating more enigmatically, have plotted with a politics never so easily defined. Oswald was emblematic of this American tendency; he was a Communist, or a tool of the right-wing CIA, or a patsy of the mafia, or a shadow figure wholly alone, inserting himself, irreversibly, into the slipstream of history.

    With Thomas Crooks’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of the UnitedHealth CEO, and now the slaying of Kirk, we have a triptych of violence to be overlaid over other recent politicized killings, including the fatal shooting of two young employees at the Israeli Embassy and, in June, the home invasion and murder of Melissa Hortman, the Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Some have argued this portends a civil war or a certain kind of volatility that will, in due time, unravel America’s functioning political machinery. This seems less likely, if only because America, in the 2020s, is still more stable — far wealthier, and more durable — than it was at the dawn of the 1860s.

    This doesn’t mean, however, the violence is going to stop. Or, at the very minimum, this sort of targeted violence that is aimed at those who hold power or are representative of an elite that must be, in the febrile and diseased mind of the killer, brought to justice. As assassination attempts surge anew, the mass shooting, as a reality of American life, begins to fade. There are still such shootings, as seen at a Minnesota Catholic school last month, but they were, to a disconcerting degree, far more common in the 2010s and early 2020s. All one needs to do is recite the place names: Sandy Hook, Aurora, Isla Vista, Charleston, Las Vegas, Parkland, and Uvalde. There have been so many that an American can begin to conflate them and the killers themselves, over time, lose notoriety. Columbine, in 1999, inaugurated this heinous era, and there was a long, dark period when alienated young men could dream of the infamy bestowed upon Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Other mass murderers, like James Holmes, Adam Lanza, and Elliot Rodger — best remembered for his incel manifesto — became, for a brief period, pop-culture figures, and the media wrestled with its role in publicizing the identities of these men and the sinister screeds they left behind. Mass shootings proliferated with the wide availability of firearms, assault rifles in particular, and the realization, on the part of the killers, that slaughtering unarmed people who are not famous is far less challenging than plotting the death of an American president. Ronald Reagan was wounded and not killed. Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts within 17 days in 1975.

    The mimetic theory of desire, pioneered by French historian and philosopher René Girard, posits that humans look to others, rather than themselves, to determine what it is they want to do. They long for what others long for, and sculpt themselves accordingly. Violence itself may follow a similar current. One mass shooting begets another, which begets another. Would-be killers aim to imitate their dark idols.

    Now the political assassination seems to be making an ugly reappearance in America. There may be more men — they are usually men — stewing in the shadows, waiting for their opportunity. Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who was set to debate Kirk later this month, reacted with great sadness and horror to the assassination of his right-wing rival, even as many of his own followers did not feel much sympathy for a conservative who had vilified the LGBTQ+ community, the immigrant community, and many other marginalized groups.

    “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome,” Piker said. He understood, right away, he might be a target too. These are times in which we now live.

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    Ross Barkan

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  • Democrats Will Have to Shift on Israel. But When?

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    Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

    Last week, the Democratic National Committee failed to advance two competing resolutions that would have clarified the party’s stance on Israel’s war in Gaza. One proposal, voted down, called for the suspension of military aid to Israel. A second resolution, advanced by DNC chair Ken Martin, called for “secure and unrestricted delivery of humanitarian assistance” in Gaza, reaffirmed the DNC’s backing of a cease-fire and the release of hostages, and stated the committee supports a two-state solution. Martin, though, withdrew his own resolution, hoping instead to discuss it with the committee further. “There’s divide in our party on this issue,” Martin said. “This is a moment that calls for shared dialog. It calls for shared advocacy.”

    DNC resolutions, on their own, mean little as Israel continues to bombard and starve out Gaza, where the death toll exceeds 60,000. Donald Trump controls the government, not the Democrats, and he has enabled, like his predecessor Joe Biden, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at every turn, pumping the nation with armaments and sanctioning all military action. But the feebleness of the Democratic Party is notable; its leaders truly have no sense of the current moment. Half of Americans now believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll, and 60 percent oppose sending more military aid for its war against Hamas. The numbers are more stark when broken down along party lines: A stunning 75 percent of Democrats in the poll do not want to send more military aid.

    Martin, who took over the beleaguered party this year, can’t shoulder all the blame. He is straining to build consensus among party apparatchiks and a donor class that is badly out of touch. If the war in Gaza does not quite reach the scope of Vietnam — no American troops are deployed, and the protest marches aren’t nearly as large or intense — it is fast becoming a generation-defining issue that is threatening to leave the old-guard Democrats in the dust. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the two Democratic leaders in Congress, wouldn’t dare oppose sending more military aid to Israel even though a full three-quarters of their party, in a nonpartisan poll, now demand this. The Israel hawk constituency is vanishing from the Democratic Party. Netanyahu’s disproportionate response to the October 7 attacks, which killed more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, is deeply alienating to the left, as is the general political orientation of the Jewish state. An American liberal has nothing in common with the right-wing, ethnonationalist parties in the government.

    For now, the bipartisan consensus around blind Israel support will hold because Democratic leaders are comfortable ignoring their constituents. DNC members, who represent a cloistered minority, can’t even bring themselves to back a resolution that would be common sense to most of the American electorate. The question remains how long this status quo can hold. The John Fetterman wing of the Democratic Party, which might just be a constituency of one very soon, will never budge. But other hawks are giving ground. Two Democrats very close to AIPAC, Ritchie Torres and Cory Booker, have acknowledged the starvation in Gaza with Torres going even further, likening the war in Gaza to the “quagmire” of the Iraq War. Even ardent defenders of Israel mostly admit now that Netanyahu’s version of total war — killing civilians indiscriminately, immiserating as many Gazans as possible — isn’t furthering the cause of the Jewish state or even leading to the release of all the hostages. Backers of the two-state solution understand that Netanyahu has no intention of ever granting the Palestinians their own functioning country with land in Gaza and the West Bank. The road ahead is very dark.

    Democratic leaders will eventually shift — it’s more a question of when. Jeffries, in 2027, may be Speaker of the House, and if rank-and-file lawmakers demand that the U.S. gets tougher with Israel, he will have to listen to them if he wants to keep control of his caucus. Barring an unforeseen shock, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, will be the next mayor of New York City. A pro-Palestine Democrat triumphing in the city with America’s largest Jewish population cannot be ignored, especially since plenty of non-Orthodox Jews were willing to vote for him. Before Mamdani, an Israel hawk could argue that pro-Palestine politics wouldn’t play well with a large electorate. Mamdani’s triumph in a primary in which more than 1 million voters put that to rest — and a general election win — would underscore the point even more powerfully. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)

    In the near future, perhaps, the DNC will find the gumption to back a resolution that is in line with the rest of the electorate. The Democrats running for president in 2028 will be forced, in time, to cater to these voters — those who are against a taxpayer-funded slaughter. The old consensus around Israel will die, and it won’t come back.

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    Ross Barkan

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