Michael Powell | The Atlantic

Where Mamdani Has Refused to Moderate

2026-03-14T11:15:00-04:00

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, played host this past week to another young married couple, who came to Gracie Mansion to break their Ramadan fast. A photograph taken of the dinner was softly lit and sweet, smiles all around.

The mayor posted the photo on social media the next day, along with a tribute to his guest, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and anti-Israel activist who is fighting a deportation order. “This past year has been marked by profound hardship—and by profound courage,” Mamdani wrote, describing Khalil’s detention by ICE last March. “All of this for exercising his First Amendment rights in protesting the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Mamdani’s decision to speak up for Khalil is certainly consistent with his past support for Palestine. It might register as an act of kindness. Khalil has had a very rough year indeed; ICE separated him from his wife right before she gave birth, and held him for 104 days. The Trump administration accused him of leading demonstrations at Columbia that it deemed anti-Semitic, seemingly targeting him for his speech.

But Mamdani’s publicized dinner party reinforces the extent to which opposition to Israel is central to his worldview—it’s not just another item on his ideological list; it’s at the very top. A few years ago, he said that the struggle for Palestinian liberation lies at “the core” of his politics and that it was the issue that drew him to the Democratic Socialists of America, which describes Israel as an apartheid, settler-colonialist state with fascist aspirations. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, saying that he supports its right to exist “as a state with equal rights,” which would end Israel’s role as a refuge for Jews worldwide. “I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” he told a local Fox television affiliate. He has supported a boycott of Israel and promised to honor an international warrant to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York City. Evidently, he will soft-pedal none of those views as mayor.

In his first months in office, Mamdani has moderated or compromised on several issues: He has praised the New York Police Department, chatted with Donald Trump, and persuaded the DSA not to endorse a challenger for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s seat. But the question of Israel and Palestine appears to be different.

[Michael Powell: The question-mark mayoralty]

New York City’s history is filled with mayors who voiced strong opinions on all manner of international issues and rarely hesitated to give voice to them. John Lindsay opposed the Vietnam War; Ed Koch heaped abuse on the Palestine Liberation Organization; David Dinkins spoke out in favor of dismantling South African apartheid; Rudy Giuliani ejected Yasser Arafat from a concert at Lincoln Center. For decades, New York mayors made a point to visit what were called the Three I’s—Ireland, Italy, and Israel—with a nod to three of the city’s dominant ethnic groups.

But those mayors were taking politically popular stances. Mamdani presides over a city that has both the largest Jewish and the largest Muslim population of any city in America. And although he has drawn significant support from liberal and leftist Jews, many Jewish New Yorkers, not least some prominent rabbis, remain leery of him, particularly at a time of rising anti-Semitism. His own police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, represents three things that the mayor claims not to care for: She is a Zionist, a political centrist, and a billionaire. The extent to which Mamdani can balance those tensions is very much an open question.

Mamdani didn’t just champion Khalil’s right to speak; he chose to lionize the man and his cause. For the mayor of New York to unequivocally use the term genocide to describe Israel’s counterattack was notable; Israel faces credible charges of war crimes, but no international court has ruled that it committed genocide. (Hamas itself broke a cease-fire agreement when its fighters attacked Israel.) And saluting Khalil for “exercising his First Amendment rights” was a rather anodyne way of talking about an activist who served as a spokesperson for a group of protesters, some of whom handed out leaflets celebrating the Al-Aqsa Flood—the name that Hamas gave to the October 7, 2023, attacks, in which its militants killed 1,200 people in Israel. (Mamdani himself has called October 7 a “horrific war crime.”)

In a podcast interview with The New York Times in August, Khalil danced around the precise degree of his sympathy for Hamas. The killing of civilians is never right, he said. But then: “We cannot ask Palestinians to be perfect victims.” He called October 7 Hamas’s “desperate attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here.” Asked about the allegations of anti-Semitism at Columbia, he replied that much of that was “manufactured hysteria.” A task force at Columbia came to a sharply different conclusion, finding evidence that Jewish and Israeli members of the campus had “been the object of racist epithets and graffiti, antisemitic tropes, and confrontational and unwelcome questions.”

[Charlie Warzel: The opposite of slop politics]

Another intriguing data point emerged last week when Jewish Insider reported that Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, had “liked” Instagram posts that celebrated October 7. One of the posts showed a bulldozer tearing a hole in a fence between Gaza and Israel, a move that allowed Hamas fighters to attack; another showed an Israeli-army jeep filled with Palestinian fighters, the soldiers presumably dead or taken captive. She also liked a post about an October 8 rally in Times Square that celebrated the Hamas attacks as a necessary resistance. The Times’ account of these posts stood out as painfully demure; it described them as “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” (Duwaji and Mamdani were in a relationship at the time but not yet married.)

More recently, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Duwaji, an artist, had drawn the illustration for an essay by the writer Susan Abulhawa in the magazine Everything Is Political. Abulhawa has previously expressed repellent views, describing Israeli Jews as “rootless, soulless ghouls” and October 7 as a “spectacular moment.” (A Mamdani spokesperson told the Free Beacon that Duwaji “has never engaged with or met” Abulhawa, who is a well-known Palestinian American novelist and activist, “nor had she seen the tweets in question.”)

Add to this another event. Earlier this month, Mamdani attended a Ramadan prayer service at the Muslim American Society Staten Island Center. The imam who welcomed him that night, Abdullah Akl, is an activist for Palestine who in 2024 led crowds in chants of “Strike, strike Tel Aviv!” At a rally last fall, Akl led a crowd in chanting: “We will show up stronger than we did the first October 7!”

Caveats are warranted here. Mamdani has denounced overt acts of anti-Semitism, before and after his election, and he has reached out to Jewish leaders. Duwaji, who has not commented publicly about her social-media posts, is entitled to her own political expression, however objectionable, and people should not assume that her every “like” is representative of the views of her husband. In a city as fractious as New York, mayors not infrequently find themselves standing shoulder to shoulder with men and women with whom they disagree on a large number of topics. Yet because Mamdani has said that Palestinian liberation defines him, it strains credulity that his views are much different from his wife’s. Asked by the press about the posts, he said that he loves Duwaji deeply and that she is a private citizen, and left it at that.

That the mayor has chosen to turn Gracie Mansion into a stage upon which to project his views about Israel and Palestine is perhaps not surprising. In 2023, Mamdani told a DSA convention that, before joining the organization, he had “struggled to find a home in New York City” where he could marry his views on Palestinian liberation with his socialist politics. His membership in DSA, and now his mayoralty, have given him a way to do so.

The Left Shouldn’t Demonize Homeowners

2026-03-09T07:00:00-04:00

Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City as a relentless champion of tenants, promising to freeze rents and attack bad landlords. For his fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America, advocating for tenants means something more radical: maligning homeownership as capitalistic and inherently inequitable. Cea Weaver, the new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, once declared it “a weapon of white supremacy.” (She apologized, sort of. That’s not “how I would say things today,” she said after getting appointed.)

Mamdani has pointedly distanced himself from such statements. He has noted that he once worked as a foreclosure-prevention counselor at a nonprofit, where “my job each and every day was to keep low-to-middle-income homeowners in Queens in their homes,” he said, adding that homeownership is a “critical pathway” to financial stability. The question is what policies he will pursue. In a move that seems intended as a bargaining chip with the state legislature, he recently floated a property-tax increase that would fall heavily on homeowners.

What seems to elude Weaver and the DSA—and what one hopes Mamdani understands—is a simple idea: that there is a transformative, even progressive, power in owning a home, especially for working-class people. Few better examples of this exist than the construction of thousands of houses in East Brooklyn decades ago—a project that changed many lives, revitalized a struggling neighborhood, and entailed precisely the sort of hard-nosed organizing that the mayor appreciates.

[Read: The question-mark mayoralty]

In the early 1980s, when I was a tenant organizer in Brooklyn’s predominantly Black East Flatbush neighborhood, a local minister told me about a plan to build single-family homes in nearby Brownsville. I stifled my disbelief. Only a few weeks earlier, a tenant leader and I had stood on the roof of her building and looked eastward toward Brownsville, watching as a fire consumed an apartment building—an arsonist had set it alight.

Brownsville at that time was synonymous with desolation, a poor Black and Latino neighborhood afflicted by murder and policed by corrupt cops. It had many acres of abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots with waist-high weeds that had become an informal dumping ground for dead dogs and cats. Brownsville had lost nearly 40 percent of its population in the preceding decade. Trying to build private homes, I thought, sounded preposterous.

Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1972 (Winston Vargas / Flickr)

I was too pessimistic. A few years earlier, a group of ministers had met in a church basement in Brownsville with Edward Chambers, an organizer from the Industrial Areas Foundation. Based in Chicago, the IAF had been started in the 1940s by the tough-talking activist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s approach to organizing became axiomatic for IAF branches around the country: Teach people to wield power, and never do for others what they could do for themselves.

The Brownsville ministers had seen their congregations shrivel. When I recently interviewed Bishop David Benke, a now-retired Lutheran minister, he recalled Chambers’s unsparing assessment: “He told us our neighborhood looked terrible and that it was burning to the ground. He also told us there’s a way out, and it’s a matter of life and death.” Chambers challenged the ministers to band together and try to save Brownsville. The first step was to line up several dozen churches and raise at least $200,000 from the headquarters of their various denominations. The ministers did so, and together formed East Brooklyn Congregations. The IAF kicked in a grant from the United Church of Christ so that the group could hire staff, and Chambers worked shoulder to shoulder with them to launch organizing campaigns.

The first of these targeted the basics. Vandals had pulled down nearly every street sign in Brownsville. The signs went back up. Then the group focused on local supermarkets by threatening boycotts. “The meat was green, and the lettuce was brown,” Benke told me. “Owners were short-weighting and overpricing. We changed that.”

Next the ministers turned to the ambitious campaign that would make their name nationally and internationally. The largely Black and Latino members of EBC, mostly congregants of the churches, desperately wanted to own their homes at a time when banks refused to lend in many poor neighborhoods. In an unprecedented move, EBC set out to build 1,100 affordable, owner-occupied attached homes that collectively would be named after Nehemiah, the Old Testament leader who helped rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. The churches turned to their national, regional, and borough headquarters and raised millions of dollars, enough to set up a revolving loan fund for construction and mortgages.

The land in Brownsville that they desired had been abandoned and taken over by the city. When EBC leaders met with Mayor Edward Koch and pushed to obtain the land for free, along with a city subsidy for mortgages, Koch was intrigued. But some of his advisers and planners were skeptical of this upstart group, whose preachers and members were not known to city officials.

The ministers and their congregants encountered more opposition from the Brooklyn Democratic Party, a powerful political machine with thousands of patronage jobs and an insistent what’s-in-it-for-us ethos. Benke recalled that one of the party’s sour-faced dukes, a Brooklyn borough president, dismissed the EBC leaders as “tinhorn preachers with impossible dreams.”

“It was that racial crap—they saw us as sharecroppers and tenants,” Benke said.

The IAF had taught the ministers to be cold-blooded in their analysis of power. The leaders invited that borough president to meet in a room crowded with their members—the politician’s aides were told to wait outside—and they remained until he agreed to support the project.

There was another hurdle to clear with the city. EBC was insistent on building single-family homes of 1,000 to 1,200 square feet with a basement, a carpeted living room, tiled bathrooms, double-glazed windows, and two or three bedrooms. Each house would also come with a parking pad. City officials wondered why EBC did not seek to put up rental housing instead, but the ministers’ reply was direct: Their working-class congregants—postal clerks, nurses, teachers’ aides—wanted to build equity. And the organizers hoped that density—1,100 homes in 16 square blocks—would ensure that residents could transform the surrounding neighborhood through both activism and home values.

Koch eventually signed off, delivering the land for $1 a lot, as well as the mortgage subsidies. EBC kept costs down by using economies of scale and eschewing expensive consultants. By 1982, construction was ready to begin. Koch came to the ground-breaking in Brownsville that October, and gloried in the cheers. The feeling that day among those in attendance was that they had witnessed a miracle. As Nehemiah proclaims in the Bible, “Therefore we His servants will arise and build.”

Matilda Dyer was among the first prospective buyers to ride a bus out to visit the Nehemiah site in the early 1980s. A nurse, she had grown up in a home on the island of Dominica in the West Indies and, after coming to New York, rented an apartment in Flatbush for herself and her young sons. Her first thought when she saw Brownsville was: It’s a wasteland. But she read the plans, studied the schematics, and talked with the church leaders. She put in an application, as did several of her friends, and purchased a home. The prices were staggeringly low: about $40,000 a house. As required by the EBC for all residents of the development, Dyer joined the homeowner association, whose members formed their own security patrols.

She is 73 now and still lives in that house. “I love my home, I love my neighbors, and I’m grateful,” she told me. “Homeownership allows you to think about your future and developing generational wealth.”

The IAF has seeded fraternal organizations in other boroughs that have helped build 2,800 more Nehemiah homes in New York, along with schools. In each residential development, prospective homeowners are required to have good credit and must be able to make a down payment. During the foreclosure crisis brought on by the 2008 recession, Black and Latino neighborhoods in the city were particularly affected, and deed theft was rife. But little of that sadness was visited upon Nehemiah homes. Their foreclosure rate remained below 1 percent.

Over more than four decades, residents of the various Nehemiah developments have acquired something precious—an estimated $2 billion worth of personal equity that has vaulted them into the middle class. Alberto Hernandez, a postal worker, moved with his wife from the housing projects to a Nehemiah home in Brownsville in 1984 for $41,000. The low cost of their house allowed them to afford college for their son and to take ski vacations and go on cruises. On a recent day in January, Hernandez stood in his living room and swept his hands at the house he owned. “This has afforded me to have a freaking great life,” he told me.

[From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream]

The IAF’s success over the years owes in part to its refusal to draw partisan lines. No alliance is permanent. Koch, a Democrat, was a master politician and understood this implicitly. (As he explained years ago to a PBS documentary crew: “You came to a big open meeting; they would bring in 500 people. They would cheer you. They would boo you.”) In the late 1980s, a politically ambitious Republican U.S. attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, wanted to learn more about the crime that plagued Brownsville and East New York. Michael Gecan, an EBC organizer, served as his guide, pointing out crack houses and introducing him to residents living behind triple-locked apartment doors. “He was trying to learn, in a very linear way, the way that poor people live,” Gecan told me years ago. When Giuliani became mayor, in 1994, he instructed precinct commanders to work with EBC and to tear down drug houses. He eventually agreed to clear the way for more homes to be built in East New York, an adjacent and no less desolate neighborhood.

Mamdani now faces his own test. During last year’s mayoral campaign, the IAF invited candidates to an assembly with a few thousand people. Mamdani, who was himself a renter until moving to the mayor’s mansion, pledged to support the building of tens of thousands of units of housing, both rental and ownership. “I am a man of my word, and I am a man who is looking to come to this stage, not in the language of abracadabra, but of the things that I can actually deliver,” he said. “I think that’s the least of what we deserve here in this city for the next four years.”

The new mayor rarely lacks for fine words, but he will discover that the IAF takes seriously the business of marrying words to deeds. As a candidate, Mamdani met several times with IAF leaders. Since taking office, he has, as promised, had his deputy mayor for housing talk with the IAF, an administration spokesperson told me; the police commissioner also has met with the group. These organizers hope to build more homes in Queens, at a now-defunct racetrack. “We’ve got a plan and an initial response, and that’s very positive,” an IAF leader who asked for anonymity to speak about still-private discussions told me. “Now we need production.”

Mamdani’s challenge is to find the money to pursue such developments without hurting working- and middle-class homeowners. The new mayor faces a budget deficit of more than $5 billion and had hoped to raise income taxes on millionaires. But that power resides with the state. He has floated a 9.5 percent property-tax hike as an alternative, a proposal that has caused homeowners and politicians to recoil. The mayor has acknowledged that such a tax hike would fall disproportionately on working-class Black and Latino New Yorkers, precisely the sort of people who live in Nehemiah homes and who rebuilt once-lost neighborhoods.

As a foreclosure counselor in Queens, Mamdani surely learned that homeownership is, in many ways, a progressive end. Extending its benefits to more and more New Yorkers will require him to shake off the ideological shackles of Weaver and the DSA.

What Mamdani Doesn’t Know About Tenants

2026-02-11T07:00:00-05:00

On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani completed his inauguration festivities and departed for Brooklyn. In the working-class neighborhood of East Flatbush, the new mayor stepped into the lobby of an old apartment building on Clarkson Avenue and met with tenants on rent strike. Their grievances were many: The building has 201 outstanding housing-code violations, including leaks, roach infestations, black mold, and that most perilous of winter derelictions, a lack of consistent heat and hot water.

The young democratic-socialist mayor had championed working-class tenants throughout his campaign, promising to freeze rents in rent-stabilized apartments for four years and even to seize control of buildings owned by slumlords. This trip could be seen as a down payment on his intent.

Mamdani faced reporters and photographers in the lobby. “Landlords have been allowed to mistreat their tenants with impunity,” he declared. “That ends today.” Cea Weaver, the new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and, like Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, stood at his side. Her disdain for private-market landlords is no less fierce than Mamdani’s; she has argued that no tenant should be evicted for not paying rent. A few days later, the mayor would announce “rental ripoff hearings” at which tenants could excoriate bad landlords. (A social-media promotion reads like a movie poster: “Mayor Mamdani & the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants Present New Yorkers vs Bad Landlords.”)

[Michael Powell: The question-mark mayoralty]

As it happens, in the early 1980s, I worked as a tenant organizer in the same neighborhood, including at a building a few doors down from the one where Mamdani spoke. I empathize with the mayor’s fury and recall my own outrage as I spoke with hardworking tenants who ran their ovens with the doors open to stay warm and watched mice scamper across their floors. We confronted bad landlords and ventured into the chaos of housing court in search of justice that often proved elusive.

But over time the problems we were trying to address, and the solutions, began to look more complicated. Rage, I learned, was not enough. In my three years as an organizer, I received a bracing education in the economics of rent-stabilized apartments, the terrible cost that crime wreaks on struggling neighborhoods, and the delicate ecology of low-income housing. All of which shapes my view of Mamdani’s promises: Rent freezes and promises for the city to take over neglected apartment buildings make for good, visceral politics but poor public policy.

I was born and raised in New York City, and grew up in a rent-controlled apartment. My family’s sometimes-straitened finances meant that we would remain renters. I became a tenant organizer in my early 20s, working for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, an offshoot of the city’s Commission on Human Rights. My plan was to change the world, or at least my corner of it.

New York at the time was far more desolate and dilapidated than the expensive, albeit deeply unequal, financial capital it is today. In East Flatbush in the early 1980s, I found blocks of attached brick homes and boulevards with once-grand apartment buildings. But Church Avenue, the commercial spine of the neighborhood, offered a dreary run of boarded-up storefronts, interrupted here and there by diners, real-estate offices, discount shops, and bodegas, where you could score a nickel bag of weed along with your quart of milk. Farther east lay blocks with burnt-out apartment buildings, ghostly at night, and lots strewn with bricks and old bathtubs, mattresses, and cribs. To reach one tenant association I worked with, I had to navigate an open-air heroin market. (I was safe enough; dealers assumed I was just another white boy in need of a fix.)

One night, as I hustled along a deserted avenue to the bus, I passed a row of commercial garages and felt momentarily hopeful: Thank God these businesses remain. Then I heard the high-pitched whine of electric saws behind metal gates, and I realized these were chop shops, where men worked through the night to reduce stolen cars to marketable parts.

The city at that point had shed jobs and residents by the hundreds of thousands. Many white residents in East Flatbush had succumbed to racist fearmongering by real-estate speculators and sold their home for a fraction of the assessed value; the speculators sold those homes to Black buyers at exorbitant interest rates. As new arrivals tried to find their footing, a tide of homicides and drug dealing swept in. In 1976, an influential former local official wrote an essay in The New York Times advising that the city should withdraw services from degraded neighborhoods, even razing apartment blocks, closing subway stations, and leaving land to “lie fallow”; he called it “planned shrinkage.” That did not happen, not exactly, but the neglect was real. The working-class West Indians, Haitians, and African Americans who poured into East Flatbush differed not so much economically from earlier white residents, but they had to fight mightily to obtain the most basic services.

Most tenants I worked with in East Flatbush hailed from the West Indies, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada, and nearly all of them lived in rent-stabilized apartments. One building in particular comes to mind, on Cortelyou Road. The tenants lived in a 1920s-era four-floor walk-up with 25 rent-stabilized units. (Under New York’s rent-stabilization laws, an appointed board sets maximum allowable rent increases citywide.) The landlord, a Jamaican-born insurance salesman, was not a bad guy; at best, he was a couple of steps up the income ladder from his struggling tenants. He had sunk his life savings into the building in hopes of turning a profit, and that was proving a very bad bet.

The old boiler wheezed and stalled, the roof sprang leaks, half-century-old pipes cracked, and the lobby intercom was defunct. The building needed intensive care. But the rent roll was puny, and few tenants could have paid more even if rent stabilization had allowed for it. One evening, the landlord told us that he could not afford to run the building.

Tenant leaders were sympathetic, but this was about survival. They persuaded a housing-court judge to push the landlord aside and appoint an administrator who was empowered to spend rent monies only on heat and emergency repairs. Tougher decisions followed. A young mother of two was well liked but fell months behind on rent; when the city welfare department gave her an emergency cash grant, she declined to use it to pay the rent. A mother of three was romantically entangled with a man who had commandeered a third-floor landing for his drug business and whose clientele sometimes broke into apartments. The tenant association voted to move to evict these women, their decision no less necessary for being sad.

The landlord walked away without a penny. There were no proletarian hearings to denounce a slumlord, who in this case did not really exist. Just deeply painful decisions. But the tenants managed to assure that the building would remain what it is to this day: rent stabilized, still of somewhat-precarious finances. I remember asking a tenant leader what she had prayed for during those tough times. “A good super who understands boilers,” she replied.

East Flatbush is a much healthier place today. New, handsome apartment buildings have gone up, and you can see signs of that mixed blessing known as gentrification. Church Avenue is revived, nearly every storefront occupied, jazz clubs mixing with Haitian bistros, home-loan shops, day-care centers, and Jamaican fish shacks. But the neighborhood still feels fragile, acutely sensitive to any uptick in crime and any drop-off in city services.

The multifamily-housing stock in East Flatbush remains particularly vulnerable, as it does in all but the wealthiest of the city’s neighborhoods. (New York has 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.) Today, even many well-run rent-stabilized buildings are still only marginally profitable. That is in part because of rent-law changes pushed through the state legislature in 2019, and advocated by Weaver. These changes include laudable protections for tenants, but the economic effects are more uncertain. Previously, when a tenant moved out of a stabilized apartment, the landlord could raise the rent by 20 percent. Landlords were also allowed to substantially increase rents if they rehabilitated an apartment or made major improvements to a building. Under the new law, they can raise rents by only minuscule amounts to cover rehabilitation costs. One need not weep for landlords—some of whom have prospered mightily—to note they no longer have much incentive to fix up apartments.

[Rogé Karma: Mamdani has a point about rent control]

Stefano Ukmar / The New York Times / Redux

A pair of single-family homes surrounded by condo buildings on Lenox Road in East Flatbush, pictured in 2019.

Meanwhile, operating costs are rising faster than rental revenues, according to the NYU Furman Center, which recently examined rent-stabilized housing. And rent collections in many working-class buildings in New York never fully rebounded after COVID. The result, predictably, is disinvestment: As managers have cut back on maintenance, the number of code violations has spiked—a 47 percent increase in the past five years in the rent-stabilized buildings that NYU examined. A study by Enterprise Community Partners, an organization that supports affordable housing, found that costs for affordable-housing operators—including insurance, maintenance, and administrative expenses—jumped 40 percent from 2017 to 2024; six of every 10 projects the group has financed are losing money. All of this is risky business for those who operate buildings that are 80 to 100 years old. These problems extend as well to rent-stabilized buildings run by respected nonprofits.

Even the Mamdani administration has acknowledged the near-impossible economics of rent-stabilized housing. After the mayor visited the building on Clarkson Avenue, the city’s law department sued to delay the sale of the building and 92 others owned by the same landlord in a bankruptcy auction; the landlord, the Pinnacle Group, owed the city $12.7 million in arrears and fines. The city wanted to sideline the leading bidder, and was trying to buy time, likely so it could steer the portfolio to a more tenant-friendly buyer, or even the city itself.

I have no quibble with targeting the Pinnacle Group, which is in bankruptcy proceedings on 93 buildings with 5,150 apartments, most of which are rent stabilized; these buildings have a cumulative 5,000 code violations and 14,000 complaints. But in court documents, the city’s lawyers pointed out that rents in Pinnacle’s portfolio are “very low averaging” and that those revenues are too low to constitute a “supportable business.” That is surely an obstacle to clearing up code violations. A federal bankruptcy judge denied the city’s motion, ruling that the new proposed buyer had submitted a “reasonable-sounding plan” to manage the buildings—potentially saving the city from a very expensive rehabilitation project.

All of this underlines why fixing the problem of affordable housing in New York City is not so simple as freezing rents. Mamdani’s deputy mayor for housing and planning recently said that the administration wants to lower costs for landlords—for example, through property-tax reform, tax breaks for renovating apartments, and attempts to slow the steep rise in building-insurance costs. The mayor’s primary focus, however, is on what tenants pay to live in this terrifically expensive city and the quality of their housing. That’s far from irrelevant. But the question of how to get landlords to deliver this housing without bankrupting their buildings matters just as much.

There was also, for me as an organizer, the issue of crime. Five years ago, Mamdani argued that the New York Police Department was essentially evil and should have its budget deeply slashed. He has softened that view considerably since taking office, but many DSA comrades still hold it. I can speak only to my own experience: Nothing so erodes the stability of neighborhoods and buildings as failing to address crime.

I felt its pernicious effects personally in East Flatbush. Tenants had formed an association at a building on Martense Street, at a then-sketchy corner. The building had many ailments, and the landlord seemed intent on doing as little as possible about them. Tenants identified their greatest need as a working intercom. Absent that, the front door swung ajar, a welcome sign to thieves. One afternoon, I walked downstairs after talking with the tenant leaders and found five adolescent boys jiggering locks to break into an apartment.

Yo, yo, yo, get out of here, I said loudly, waving my hands to scat.

The littlest boy pulled out a strikingly large gun and stuck it in my face. Shoot him, two boys yelled. Nah, leave the motherfucker alone, the other two said. The boy considered his options, then tucked the gun back into his waistband. He told me I was lucky to be alive. I nodded in agreement.

[Henry Grabar: The great crime decline is happening all across the country]

Such episodes threatened civic life in a most elemental fashion. A homeowner block leader who risked catching a stray bullet was far less likely to walk to an evening meeting at a local church. Tenants told me they worried that if they talked openly in their lobby about crime, snitches for local drug dealers might overhear and report them. Other tenants sometimes insisted on walking me to the subway after a meeting, placing themselves in harm’s way.

I never once heard a tenant leader or block leader argue for less policing. They wanted a respectful partnership with law enforcement. At great risk, they monitored dangerous streets and rowhouses, took notes on dealers and gangs, and passed this information along to the local precincts and to the mayor’s office. Some cops and city officials were unresponsive, even corrupt. But the best listened carefully and used that information to clear notorious corners and round up gang leaders.

I once stood watch with tenants every night for a week after we heard that their landlord had hired an arsonist—known as a “torch”—to burn down their building, so the landlord could collect the insurance money. The city’s Arson Strike Force got involved, and the building stands to this day.

The new mayor is fond of his On the Waterfront rhetoric, and tends to suggest that, before the socialists came to power, city government was dismissive of the poor and working class. He means well, but this is nonsense. Thankfully, city officials—prodded by tenants and small-business owners, clergy and homeowners, and, yes, some landlords—rejected advice to consign neighborhoods such as East Flatbush to history’s dustbin. Beginning in the 1980s, successive mayors, Democrats and Republicans, invested first hundreds of millions and then billions of dollars in what became the greatest urban-rebuilding program in American history. The city and nonprofits rehabilitated abandoned buildings and constructed new ones, along with day cares and schools. The rubble-strewn lots I once walked through are now smart-looking apartment buildings. Banks and supermarkets sit on corners where drug dealers held sway. Citywide, many fewer children are in foster care, fewer men are in prison, and far fewer New Yorkers are murdered each year.

I took a walk recently through East Flatbush, alongside the snow-laden Holy Cross Cemetery, down Church Avenue, and along a couple of boulevards of prewar apartment buildings, as achingly beautiful and, in some cases, as tattered as when I first arrived there. The city still faces many challenges, but its recent history gives me hope that a new mayor and administration committed to improving affordable housing can make a profound mark. To do that, Mamdani will need to toss aside easy moral binaries—noble tenants versus capitalist landlords, frozen rents versus runaway profits—and recognize the painful trade-offs that will come with restoring rent-stabilized housing, one of New York’s great resources.

The Question-Mark Mayoralty

2026-01-01T07:00:00-05:00

In the months before the election of the young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, panic seized members of New York’s elite business community. Real-estate moguls, hedge-fund princes, and a well-known supermarket-chain magnate forecast disaster. Several of them vowed to move to Texas or Florida, or at least Hoboken, if Mamdani was elected. So far, however, the city hasn’t seen an exodus of its richest residents, and their alarm has lapsed into glum acceptance.

I recently asked Kathryn Wylde, the soon-to-be-retired president of the Partnership for New York City—a sort of chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and tech barons—how her members now view Mamdani. Has anything changed? Wylde, who voted for the new mayor, paused. “I would not say it’s positive,” she said. “But those who are at all open to him recognize that he’s smart, and they know that their kids voted for him. Now they are waiting to find out who he is.”

Mamdani, who took office shortly after midnight, remains the question-mark mayor. He ran an unabashedly progressive campaign. But he has made a point of talking with potential adversaries; some Partnership for New York City members have met with Mamdani, for example, and he had a surprisingly warm audience with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in November. How this charismatic 34-year-old will govern the largest city in America is something of a mystery, with three great uncertainties: How will Mamdani manage his relationship with the rich? How will he approach the Israel-Palestine issue? And how will he respond to the influence of his old friends, the Democratic Socialists of America?

Mamdani called his election a “mandate for change,” a claim somewhat belied by the fact that he won with a narrow 50.8 percent of the vote. And he has not backed away from an ambitious and costly economic agenda: He wants to make day care universal and buses free. He also campaigned on shifting the property-tax burden from working-class, outer-borough homeowners to “richer and whiter” neighborhoods. He has promised to accomplish this agenda by taxing the rich and their corporations and townhouses.

[Joseph Heath: The populist revolt against cognitive elites]

But Mamdani can’t afford to alienate the wealthy. Millionaires accounted for $34 billion worth of city and state personal-income-tax revenue as of 2022, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, an influential business-backed nonprofit. The commission found that New York’s share of the nation’s millionaires shrank from 12.7 percent in 2010 to 8.7 percent in 2022. Had that share stayed steady, the city and state would have collected an additional $13 billion in income taxes.

Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at NYU, told me that moves against the business community could also turn off people who were drawn to New York by the lure of economic opportunity. “Capitalism is built into the fabric of this city,” Moss said. “Why do you think all the immigrants come here?”

But New York’s business community might not turn out to be quite as oppositional as some expect. Its members are reasonably civic-minded. Wylde said her flock of CEOs are aware that their companies will suffer if talented people cannot afford to live in the city. And some of them don’t take a dire view of all high taxes. Almost two decades ago, the Partnership for New York City endorsed a payroll-tax increase to support mass transit; more recently, it supported a congestion-pricing fee for cars entering New York’s central business district.

Mamdani has left the door ajar to negotiation—and compromise—with business leaders and with Governor Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat. Of late, he has talked of balancing a rent freeze for tenants with insurance and tax cuts for landlords in working-class neighborhoods. In such moments, he sounds less like Rosa Luxemburg than a more familiar New York type, the liberal social Democrat—not far off from former Mayor David Dinkins or even Michael Bloomberg.

A more fraught question for Mamdani is how he will handle Palestine and Israel. Mamdani has declared that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his politics. He founded his college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and has said he opposes Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. To have a mayor who speaks with antipathy toward Israel and some Jewish Zionist organizations is an unprecedented turn in a city with an estimated 960,000 Jewish residents and three Jewish former mayors.

Mamdani has pledged to order the police to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York. He recently criticized a prominent synagogue for hosting an event for a nonprofit that encourages immigration to Israel, including to settlements in the West Bank. Under pressure from Jewish leaders, this summer he said he would “discourage” use of the phrase globalize the intifada, though he has said that many people use the phrase simply to show support for Palestinians. Talk of a global intifada took on a chilling resonance this month after two gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Hanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach, killing 15 people.

“Jews have been comfortable in New York City for a long time,” Moss told me. “For the first time, they sense that they are not automatically safe here.”

A liberal financier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he doesn’t want to alienate the new mayor, told me that he attended a Mamdani event recently and appreciated that Mamdani listened carefully and took notes. The financier supports Mamdani’s commitment to addressing the city’s gross inequities. “Personally, I find it difficult to believe that an ambitious man like him is going to die on the hill of the Palestinian struggle,” this person said. “But I have lots and lots of Jewish friends who are freaked out.”

Mamdani’s relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America presents the third big question mark. A movement brimming with activist energy and ideological certitude, DSA gave birth to Mamdani’s political career, providing the vigor and street organizing that made him such a formidable candidate. He has promised to remain a loyal DSA cadre. Yet that loyalty will be tested when he departs his rent-stabilized apartment in Queens for the two-century-old mayoral mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Already, Mamdani has angered influential DSA members with some of his early decisions.

[Derek Thompson: The affordability curse]

Five years ago, Mamdani wrote that the city’s police department was “wicked” and should be dismantled; this past June, he told Meet the Press that billionaires should not exist. But in November, Mamdani reappointed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a centrist technocrat who hails from a family with a fortune valued at $10 billion. Then he pressured DSA not to put up a candidate to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, whom leftists view as guilty of the sin of moderation.

DSA comrades were not amused. In December, the two national co-chairs of the organization, Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer, appeared on the Dispatches podcast; the episode was titled “Can DSA Hold Mamdani Accountable?” Rania Khalek, the host, asked Siddique’s and Romer’s view of Tisch, whom Khalek described as coming from “this very billionaire Zionist family.” (Tisch is Jewish.) Neither co-chair challenged Khalek’s description of Tisch. “I don’t think either of us are happy about keeping somebody like that on,” Siddique said. Romer, a member of a Marxist-Leninst faction within DSA, described Mamdani’s decision as “really disappointing.”

In the lead-up to Mamdani’s inauguration, some wealthy New Yorkers sounded, if not accommodating, at least resigned to their fate. This past summer, Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global equity firm, wrote to his fellow oligarchs warning of the “dire consequences” of a Mamdani victory. But the day after Mamdani’s election, Sandler proclaimed himself ready to tough out the new socialist administration. “NYC will be worse for yesterday’s outcome. Potentially a lot worse,” he wrote. But “I am not planning to move Eminence Capital to another city or state.”

One imagines that such moments of ruling-class resignation could be a minor relief for Mamdani. As for DSA, it has not hesitated to break with prominent progressive politicians, including its most famous member, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; the national DSA withdrew its endorsement of her, at least in part because she took the heretical step of signing a press release supporting a missile-defense system to protect Israeli civilians. Which leaves the strange possibility that New York’s first socialist mayor might find himself more threatened by his left flank than by the occasional alienated hedge funder.

When Donald Trump Fired David Rubenstein

2025-12-01T08:00:00-05:00

Updated at 2:25 p.m. ET on December 2, 2025

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David Rubenstein, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, sat at a handsome marble table in a handsome conference room in one of the many handsome offices of the Carlyle Group, the global investment firm he co-founded, discussing a bit of personal unpleasantness.

Several weeks earlier, Donald Trump had fired him as the chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Rubenstein chairs many elite institutions, but the Kennedy Center might be seen as the capstone of his résumé. Explaining his decision, Trump had posted on Truth Social that Rubenstein did not “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” The president announced that the “amazing” new chair of the center would instead be one “DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Rubenstein, who is not accustomed to being fired, at first deflected my questions with gin-dry self-deprecation: “I’m the first person to be fired by a president and succeeded by one.” But the firing stung. Rubenstein has, for decades, converted his extraordinary wealth into soft power, cultivating an ostensibly apolitical brand. He calls himself a practitioner of “patriotic philanthropy,” with a stated mission to remind Americans of their heritage and history in service of a strengthened democracy. As part of that mission, Rubenstein has given away more than $1 billion. His name is stamped all over the Washington region.

The homestead of Thomas Jefferson has a David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center; George Washington’s estate benefited from a $10 million donation to its library. Rubenstein gave the National Museum of African American History and Culture $10 million, along with a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that is displayed in the David M. Rubenstein History Galleries. He donated in excess of $100 million to the Kennedy Center, where he oversaw construction of a large annex. When the giant pandas Bao Li and Qing Bao arrived at the National Zoo last autumn by airplane from Chengdu, China, they set out to explore their new digs: the David M. Rubenstein Family Giant Panda Habitat. When an earthquake damaged the Washington Monument in 2011, Rubenstein kicked in $10 million to help pay for repairs.

I first interviewed Rubenstein months before the 2024 presidential election. Back then, he was confident that he could manage his relationship with Trump if he were to win, as Rubenstein had after Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men regarded each other as friends—sort of. In 2014, he interviewed Trump onstage at the Economic Club of Washington (“When David calls, I say yes,” Trump told the crowd). The Trump of 2025, however, is a different fellow than the Trump of 2017. Institutions and norms at least tolerated by previous Republican presidents exert no hold on him, nor do the genteel mechanisms of soft power that have run Washington for years. The mere existence of a complex of arts, history, and the old Washington establishment itself, all sitting somewhere just outside the official D.C. bureaucracy, seems to rankle Trump—especially when the leaders of those organizations decline to declare fealty to him. All of this set Rubenstein on an unintended collision course with Trump.

Besides, Rubenstein told me, only half joking, having “a billion dollars is not what it used to be.” Rubenstein did not, in the fashion of Bill Gates, build a paradigm-shifting computer-operating system. He did not, as Steve Jobs did, create an artful, culture-shifting technology firm. Nor did he, like Jeff Bezos, construct a consumer behemoth. The lifework of private-equity barons offers less social utility. They accelerate the financialization of the world economy, boost the performance of public pension funds and college endowments, and produce fabled wealth for themselves and the exceedingly comfortable. Along the way, their work can sometimes make life measurably more painful for families on the lower end of the income scale.

Rubenstein, who is 76, has studied the actuarial tables and knows his end is an approaching train. He remains a co-chair of Carlyle and still travels the world raising money and speaking at lavish investor conferences. He drinks neither alcohol nor coffee, plays no golf, and harbors no desire to retire and work on a meditative memoir.

Trump has signaled—much as Vladimir Putin did to his own oligarchs—that even the wealthiest would be wise to bend a knee. He’s given the comfortable class a clear look at what he can do to those who refuse to do his bidding. Trump has batted around Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—a former Carlyle partner and a friend of Rubenstein—like a piñata for refusing to cut interest rates. Trump has ended federal contributions to PBS—Rubenstein is one of its largest individual donors, and has hosted two shows on the network. Trump has similarly attacked the Smithsonian, complaining that it’s out of control and overly focused on “how bad Slavery was.” He has demanded a “comprehensive internal review” of its exhibitions.

If there was a single way to describe Trump’s institutional targets in the first year of his second term, it might be “David Rubenstein’s Rolodex.” What had long been Rubenstein’s instrument of immense power and influence is now a liability.

[From the June 2025 issue: Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer on Donald Trump’s return to power]

Rubenstein grew up in what he calls a “Jewish ghetto” in deeply segregated 1950s Baltimore. He recalls thinking as a child that everyone in the world was Jewish; he told me he was 13 when he realized that there were far more goyim. His grandfather had come to the United States in the early 20th century at the age of 10, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine. His father served in World War II and worked as a postal clerk, and his mother worked in a dress shop.

I asked if Rubenstein discerned an arc to his life, some hint or premonition of great riches and influence to come. He wagged his head no. He was not a good athlete; he peaked in Little League. He insisted to me that he wasn’t intellectually gifted, despite having skipped eighth grade and graduated from high school at 16 years old. And socially, well, “I wouldn’t say that the girls in the Baltimore Jewish community were just saying … ‘This guy is so handsome, charming. He’s wealthy. He’s going to be famous.’ No, there was none of that.” He gave me a palms-up shrug and made rare eye contact: “It was a tortoise-and-the-hare thing.”

Rubenstein did, however, feel a skin-afire urgency for a life that was more than the post office. He wanted to break out, though how and to what end was a mystery. He attended Duke University, where he studied political science, followed by law school on full scholarship at the University of Chicago. Rubenstein landed at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he worked for two years in the ’70s. There he befriended Ted Sorensen, a former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, who became his mentor.

Being a lawyer was not, he came to realize, his calling. He told Sorensen several times that he yearned to work in politics and public policy. His ambition was not workaday; Rubenstein said that he had the White House in his sights. Sorensen made a few phone calls, and at age 25, Rubenstein became chief counsel to the charismatic senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana. Bayh entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary with high hopes but flamed out, laid low in part by his support for abortion rights. Rubenstein dialed Sorensen again. “Well, do you have any more candidates that I might work for?” he asked. Sorensen put Rubenstein in touch with a powerful lobbyist, who in turn connected him with a southern Democratic presidential candidate who needed staff. Rubenstein signed on. “I didn’t know Carter from a hole in the wall,” he told me. “I can’t say I had a compelling desire to work for Jimmy Carter.”

Yet he would serve as a top deputy to Carter’s domestic-policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat. He described himself as “not qualified, not experienced, but eager,” and he grew accustomed to walking into the Oval Office and talking with Carter. (He recalled that the president was “very smart,” a taskmaster who hated split infinitives. “No one would say he had a great sense of humor,” he said.) Rubenstein was a bundle of nervous energy. He ate out of White House vending machines and walked about hollow-eyed from lack of sleep.

There is an oddity here. One can talk with Rubenstein for hours without hearing him express sharp-edged political beliefs. He worked for Democrats, but even today he rarely mentions the issues that moved him.

Mary Anne Fackelman / Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum / NARA

President Jimmy Carter and Rubenstein in the Oval Office, January 1981

Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Rubenstein was a lonely Democrat in a world turned conservative Republican. Power brokers stopped returning his phone calls. He joined a midsize law firm and became a partner doing what Washington lawyers do: selling access. At this point he was making, “by normal human standards, a fairly good income,” he told me. He would soon marry his wife and have three children. He saw the shape of his future: Perhaps former Vice President Walter Mondale would win the presidency in 1984 and he’d get back into government. Maybe by the time I’m 70 years old, he recalled thinking, I will be deputy secretary of transportation or something.

That reverie held no kick for him. Rubenstein had tired of playing the mercenary. And, he told me, “nobody thought I was a great lawyer.” It was the Roaring ’80s on Wall Street; he saw peers from the political world, men lacking anything like his IQ, getting wealthy. One morning, he read that former Treasury Secretary William Simon had invested $330,000 in a greeting-card company and made nearly $70 million in 18 months. Why not hang out a shingle, he said to himself, and try my hand in this world? Rubenstein quit his law firm and, with three partners and fundraising help from the financier Edward Mathias, obtained $5 million in seed capital to launch Carlyle in 1987; the founders named the company after the historic New York hotel to confer a touch of class. The game to which these men sought entry was known as private equity. Most major private-equity funds sat in financial capitals: New York, London, and Hong Kong. Carlyle’s headquarters faced Pennsylvania Avenue, in between the White House and the Capitol. “If I had moved to New York to do it, nobody would have taken me seriously,” Rubenstein told me. “I didn’t have investment-banking experience, and all the other private-equity firms have been started by investment bankers.”

The sector was taking flight, and its pioneers made no pretense of high-minded pursuit. The goal was to get rich and richer still, and their theory of the hunt was straightforward: Find companies that had grown fat, put up the most modest of stakes—sometimes as little as 1 percent equity and no more than 5 percent of the asking price was ideal—and borrow the remainder against the value of the company. In other words, the prey would finance its own kill. Conduct a hostile takeover, fire leaders and institute layoffs, and streamline the newly debt-burdened companies before selling them. Should these efforts fail and a company collapse, sell the assets.

But when the Carlyle boys tried their hand at identifying takeover targets, more experienced heads at other companies scoffed at them. Who were these novices? Rubenstein acknowledged the truth in that. “I thought I’d build a little teeny investment firm,” he told me. “Maybe we’d do a leveraged buyout—as soon as I figured out what a leveraged buyout was.”

They had no real plan. Then they went to Alaska.

Not long ago, I found myself in a coffee shop in Anchorage, listening as an ornery old attorney, Donald Craig Mitchell, talked of impecunious Native tribes, tax-loophole wizardry, and ambitious D.C. influence peddlers on the make.

Alaska is crucial to understanding the Rubenstein origin story. In the early ’70s, Congress and President Richard Nixon created the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which aimed to settle tribal land claims by transferring 44 million acres of land and nearly $1 billion to Alaska Natives. Native-run corporations would own and administer mineral, fishing, and timber rights on a for-profit basis, employing thousands of Natives and lifting entire communities out of poverty. That was the theory, anyway.

The reality was messier, and the plan wildly ambitious. At the time, most Alaska Natives lived deep in the bush. Just 14 percent had completed high school and 1 percent had graduated from college. The act pitched tribes into a crash Westernization. By the mid-’80s, several Native-run corporations teetered near insolvency. Alaska’s powerful Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican, stepped in to help. He created a tax loophole, which he assured the Senate would not prove terribly costly, and attached it to a 1986 tax bill. (Stevens had reeled in so many federal dollars that Alaskans jokingly referred to him as the state’s largest industry.) The loophole allowed Alaska Native corporations to sell losses on lumber, mining, and fishing to large American corporations seeking to reduce their tax liability—a potential lifeline for the Native corporations and a profitable possibility for middlemen who understood tax law. You see where this is going?

Rubenstein and his partners in the fledgling Carlyle firm were struggling to make their way in a financial world they only half understood. But they had a splendid sense of how politics and backdoor decision making worked in D.C. One day, Stephen Norris, a co-founder of Carlyle, told Rubenstein of the Alaska loophole, a situation that was practically tailor-made for the firm’s expertise. Rubenstein, then 38, took notes. This, he figured, might be their break.

The Alaska loophole gave birth to what those in Washington business circles called the “Great Eskimo Tax Scam.” It was akin to sounding a dinner bell for D.C. lawyers. Rubenstein dialed tribal leaders and lobbyists affiliated with the Native corporations and promised that he could make them lots of money—in exchange for a cut of the action. He and Norris recruited corporations in search of tax losses, flying the executives to Washington and lodging them at posh hotels. Many of the Native leaders Rubenstein worked with have passed away, but I found a long-retired Native businessman who shared his recollection on condition of anonymity. Rubenstein, he told me, did not talk of the beauty of Alaska’s forests and fjords. Nor did he make much eye contact. I will make you millions, he said, and I will work seven days a week. It was, this man recalled, a disarmingly effective spiel.

In less than a year, Rubenstein and Norris bundled and sold more than $1 billion worth of tax losses by tribal corporations to American companies. For their service, Rubenstein and Norris charged a 1 percent fee and walked away with at least $10 million. With that, Rubenstein knew that he could compete in the world of finance.

The Alaska sales job clarified something else for him too. He was neither an economics wunderkind nor a hawkeyed stock picker. Improbably, however, this man who so often fixed his eyes on his shoes during conversation discovered he could persuade wealthy people to part with investment capital. Soon he was boarding airplane after airplane, traveling hundreds of days each year, wooing politicians and pension-fund officials, Texas oil barons and Middle Eastern emirs. Painstaking preparation preceded each conversation, whether in corporate offices in Switzerland, a swank restaurant in Singapore, or a mansion overlooking the Persian Gulf. “I made myself into a fundraiser, which was a little incongruous, because I wasn’t an outgoing personality,” Rubenstein told me. “You just have to steel your courage up.”

In 1989, Rubenstein recruited Frank Carlucci to be Carlyle’s managing director. A short and intense charmer, Carlucci had spent more than a decade in the foreign service, then served as deputy CIA director in the Carter administration and defense secretary in the Reagan administration. Finance types at other firms clucked dismissively about Carlucci’s lack of investment experience. Rubenstein waved them off.

The late ’80s were a time of disarray in the armaments sector, and private equity thrives in disarray. As defense secretary, Carlucci had reorganized the Pentagon’s contract armament-procurement system. He knew the right people: the generals, the defense undersecretaries, and staffers who made the gears of the trillion-dollar defense world move. The Cold War was ending, and corporations were putting defense divisions up for sale. Carlyle wanted to avoid the markup associated with auctions run by Wall Street firms; a discreet phone call from Carlucci to a defense-contractor CEO was preferable.

Private-equity firms of the era gloried in excess. Greed was good, and publicity reified status. Rubenstein speaks of that time with the dispassionate and distancing tones of an anthropologist. It “was not, you know, ‘Let’s worry about DEI,’” he told me. Nor was it “‘Let’s make sure we pay all our taxes; we’re very good on environment; and let’s make sure we don’t lose any jobs, because we don’t want people to lose their livelihood.’” He shook his head. “The zeitgeist was ‘What is the highest internal rate of return we could get?’”

In 1993, a reporter slipped behind the Carlyle curtain as the company was growing rapidly. The New Republic writer Michael Lewis, who later wrote the best-sellers Moneyball and The Big Short, talked with Rubenstein and Carlucci at length for an article titled “The Access Capitalists.” Rubenstein came off as an awkward but connected man who understood a world fueled by the currency of access. To call him an old-fashioned entrepreneur was, Lewis wrote, “one of those half-truths that contains even less truth than a lie.” Rubenstein and his partners still talk about how much that New Republic piece stung.

Chad Batka / The New York Times / Redux

Rubenstein at his New York office, September 2015

But Lewis depicted the firm as immensely profitable, and that was catnip for D.C.’s wealthy. “If you’re an investor, you want access,” a Carlyle co-founder who requested anonymity told me. “Suddenly everyone wanted to talk with us.”

The ’90s became a time of explosive growth in Carlyle’s defense spending. Carlyle’s $850 million purchase of United Defense, which manufactured tanks, artillery, naval guns, and missile launchers, was particularly fruitful. United Defense reeled in $5.8 billion in contracts from the Pentagon. When Carlyle fully exited the company, in 2004, it had made more than $1 billion in profit. By 2000, the collective value of defense companies in Carlyle’s portfolio rivaled that of Raytheon and General Dynamics.

Meanwhile, Rubenstein kept hiring prominent Republicans, and not only from the defense sector. In 1993, he brought on a double bill from George H. W. Bush’s administration: Secretary of State James Baker—a Princeton classmate of Carlucci—and Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman. During Bush’s term, Rubenstein had put his son George W. on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary, too. That proved to be a misstep: Rubenstein told investors that the son had a taste for off-color jokes and no evident feel for private equity. Finally, in 1998, Carlyle added the former president, Bush himself, as an adviser. “I recruited people who I thought could get their calls returned,” Rubenstein told me.

Those Rubenstein brought along made out well. By 2001, Baker may have held as much as $180 million in equity in the firm.

To ask Rubenstein about the value of Carlyle’s high-profile hires is to observe a rhetorical two-step. These men were door knockers, he said, the shiny objects meant to attract attention. A potential client might turn down a dinner invitation to talk out investment opportunities with David Rubenstein, he told me, but they’d show up for Jim Baker: “I’m paying these guys basically to speak at the dinner or lunch.” As wealthy guests appeared, Rubenstein would move in, shaking hands, persuading them to invest in Carlyle.

There was more to it. Carlucci’s phone calls led to the purchase of companies. After he left office, the elder President Bush helped Carlyle win a battle to acquire a Korean bank. When Rubenstein flew to the Middle East to raise money, he invited Baker to tag along. “Because I’m Jewish, I didn’t think I should go,” he told me. But when he expressed his reservations to Baker, Baker gave him a look as if to suggest he was a naif. “It’s not a problem that you’re Jewish,” Baker replied. (Rubenstein since has come to see a certain advantage to being Jewish in that region. As he put it, “People in the Middle East thought: ‘Jews are smart. They know how to manage money.’”)

That cozy world changed on September 11. As the airliners crashed into the World Trade Center towers, Carlyle was running an investor conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. In attendance were members of the bin Laden family, including Shafiq bin Laden, an estranged half-brother of Osama. This was unfortunate timing for both Carlyle and the bin Laden family, which hurriedly liquidated its holdings in a Carlyle fund that invested in buyouts of military and aerospace companies.

Within a few years, Carlyle’s challenges began to cascade. Anti-war demonstrators picketed. Congress asked tough questions. The Economist magazine opined that Carlyle “gives capitalism a bad name.” The founders felt exposed. “We were heavily criticized for having been part of the ‘war machine,’” Rubenstein told me. He gave a slight shrug. “If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”

The life of a private-equity titan is wonderfully remunerative and unfailingly unsentimental; he knew what he had to do. In March 2005, as body counts in Iraq mounted, Rubenstein and a partner, Daniel A. D’Aniello, walked into Baker’s office.

The former secretary of state eyed the Carlyle founders scuffling and staring at their shoes. He chuckled. He recognized his end. “You guys!” he said loudly to Rubenstein. “You need to separate from me. I’m a big boy, I get that.”

Carlucci had retired two years earlier. Rubenstein turned his attention to George H. W. Bush. He was fond of Bush, and regarded him as a smart man of impeccable manners. “It was awkward,” he allowed.

Rubenstein need not have worried. The former president was scion of a wealthy WASP family and a former intelligence chieftain, and reacted with no less sangfroid than Baker. This was the business these men had chosen. “Bush said to us, ‘Look, I know the war is going south and you’re getting blamed. Cut me loose,’” Rubenstein recalled.

Since 2004, Carlyle has pivoted away from defense—but it still runs by the logic of access capitalism. Carlyle does private lending and holds stakes in aerospace companies, luxury housing, health care, oil fields, natural-gas pipelines. It has owned and sold majority stakes in Hertz; Dunkin’ Brands; Cogentrix Energy, an American power generator; and Booz Allen Hamilton. It has purchased significant tracts of real estate, extended credit to builders, and moved into the insurance sector. Carlyle took a minority stake in McDonald’s China in 2017; it sold that for $1.8 billion in 2023. It helped finance and lead a renovation of John F. Kennedy International Airport, creating 10,000 jobs.

[Roge Karma: The secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy]

But not all is well. Interest rates have climbed, the sector has grown crowded, and as more and more private-equity firms compete to buy companies, prices go up and profit margins are squeezed. Private-equity firms hold more than $3 trillion worth of unsold firms; investors cannot see returns until these sales go through. “Private equity has struggled a bit,” Rubenstein told me, adding that growth has slowed noticeably. The biggest firms resemble great white sharks, swimming in ceaseless search of yield and profit. Although they have ventured into obscure or unlikely areas, the weight of their deals has tended to fall heavily on working-class Americans. As Brendan Ballou wrote in his book, Plunder, private-equity firms were responsible for 600,000 jobs lost over the past decade in the retail sector alone.

Mobile-home parks offer an instructive case. Twenty million working-class and poor Americans live in trailer parks, the biggest pool of nonsubsidized affordable housing in the nation. Family operators traditionally owned these parks, but private-equity firms have piled in, seeing opportunity in a national housing shortage. Blackstone, Apollo, and Carlyle are among the 23 private-equity firms that now own more than 1,800 mobile-home parks with 377,000 lots, or about 4 percent of all parks in the country.

Which, after a fashion, explains how I found myself driving through the high desert and the Carson Mountains to Sparks, Nevada. I turned into the Sierra Royal Mobile Home Park on a razor-sharp morning and saw well-kept mobile homes with ornamental bushes and flowers. Jeanneil Marzan, a white-haired retiree, stood at her door. “We bought here because it was a nice, quiet community, and affordable,” she told me.

Jared Soares for The Atlantic

A commemorative wall recognizing donors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, November 2025

Mobile-home economics are straightforward: Marzan owns her home and rents the land for about $900 a month from Sierra Royal. But in 2022, when Carlyle purchased the mobile park, monthly land rents for new tenants rose to $1,010. That set a tough standard for new renters and drove down buyer demand.

“It was like ice water thrown on us,” Marzan said.

“Carlyle wants money we don’t have,” Roger George, one of her neighbors, told me.

Some days later, I talked mobile homes with Rubenstein, who insisted that Carlyle seeks to improve mobile parks and discusses plans beforehand with tenant groups. (No tenant I interviewed at the Sierra Royal recalled such a consultation.) “People are living in mobile homes not because, I suspect, they love mobile homes but because that’s what they can afford,” Rubenstein told me.

A spokesperson suggested I examine Plaza Del Rey, a mobile-home park in Sunnyvale, California. Carlyle purchased this working-class pocket of Silicon Valley 10 years ago, and he said “it worked out really well for everyone.” But when I exchanged emails with a Plaza Del Rey tenant, Fred Kameda, I heard a different story. He moved there in 2011. When Carlyle took over, he said, it sharply increased costs for new residents, doubling rents in five years. “The land-rent increases had the immediate impact of reducing the sales price of our home,” Kameda said. “Our mortgages are underwater and our homes unsellable.” Carlyle paid $150 million to acquire Plaza Del Rey in 2015 and sold it four years later for $237 million.

Carlyle’s foray into nursing homes raised more troubling questions. In 2007, the firm purchased Manor Care, one of the nation’s largest nursing-home chains, for $6.3 billion. At the time, critics cautioned that Carlyle did not appreciate the patients’ vulnerability, and warned about the consequences of trying to juice the profit margins. But Carlyle’s analysts exuded cockiness. “Manor Care is poised to become an even stronger health care provider under Carlyle’s ownership,” the firm stated in a 2007 release.

Carlyle borrowed $4.8 billion and put that on Manor Care’s ledger. There was a sale leaseback. Carlyle paid itself handsomely to manage the nursing homes, but the nursing-home chain began to leak money. A 2018 Washington Post investigation found that patient care crashed after Carlyle’s takeover; inspectors saw patients with bedsores and sitting in urine, and residents and their families consistently reported that staffing was inadequate. In March 2018, the chain filed for bankruptcy and Carlyle slipped away. (Carlyle told The Washington Post at the time that it had only reduced administrative—not nursing—costs, and attributed Manor Care’s financial troubles to a decline in federal Medicare spending. A spokesperson told The Atlantic that Carlyle had “exited the investment in 2018” and was no longer involved with the chain.)

Manor Care represented a significant investment and a large embarrassment for Rubenstein and Carlyle. How, I wondered, did a nursing-home chain with tens of thousands of employees deteriorate so markedly while owned by one of the globe’s wealthiest private-equity firms? “Nursing homes is a difficult business, right?” Rubenstein replied.

Right.

“It’s pretty easy to say, Well, 20 percent of your people died,” he continued. “But, you know, they get into the nursing home when they’re 90 years old. They’re probably going to die at some point.” Going forward, he said, Carlyle will avoid investing in nursing homes. “It’s hard to convince people that you’re adding a lot of value,” he said. That was perhaps especially the case with respect to Manor Care, where the reverse was true.

Rubenstein sat in his office on a sultry summer day at Camden Yards—he had recently purchased his hometown Orioles for $1.725 billion—as our conversation turned to his wealth. He’d presented himself to me as a run-of-the-mill billionaire, recounting deals missed and titans with fortunes that eclipsed his own.

Rubenstein’s not that rich, by billionaire standards. The nation has some 1,000 billionaires, and his pile is a fraction of that of his wealthiest peers in private equity, a fact that has not escaped his notice. As Rubenstein had noted to me, having $1 billion is not what it used to be. But he also acknowledged that he is fabulously wealthy—he is at least that self-aware.

Rubenstein knows that many Americans view his sector as a fixed casino, and hinted at slightly bruised feelings. “You can always make jokes about private equity,” Rubenstein told me. “People think, as Balzac said, that behind every great fortune there’s a crime. If you’ve done something to make a lot of money, you must have done something wrong somewhere.” But where was the crime, Rubenstein continued, in accumulating piles of riches for yourself and your investors if, along the way, you also delivered great returns to public-employee-pension funds and college endowments and invested in companies that create jobs?

Rubenstein tutored me in the mathematics of private-equity profit extraction. His analysts target underutilized market sectors, whether a gas pipeline in Alaska or a Mumbai-based life-insurance company. It fell to him to persuade trustees of pension funds and managers of university endowments to hand over investment dollars. (He made many phone calls and several trips to California to woo trustees of Calpers, the agency that manages public retirement funds in that state. It’s now a major investor in Carlyle, with billions of dollars in various funds.) Private-equity services do not come cheap. Although management fees have fallen recently, the standard industry charge for years was 2 percent of total capital annually and 20 percent of profits. The legendary returns make it all worthwhile.

Or not. Ludovic Phalippou, an economics professor at Oxford and a critic of private equity, has argued that when fees are factored in, private-equity returns differ not much from those of stock funds. Other prominent analysts take an even more pessimistic view; Morningstar, a well-regarded fund-rating agency, cautions that of the 14 private-equity-focused funds launched in 2022 or earlier, 11 have underperformed the S&P 500 since their inception, some “by a lot.” To Phalippou, private equity is terrific at creating wealth—for its founders. One speculates he is not a favored guest at private-equity soirees. (Private-equity economists argue that their companies’ investments cannot be measured by comparing them year over year to, say, stock-index funds. The sale of equity investments are carefully timed, they argue, and they note that many sophisticated investors apparently agree with them).

I asked Rubenstein whether the private-equity fee structure is a touch avaricious. He shrugged. “Trying to defend making high rates of return and making 20 percent of the profits is not easy to do,” he replied evenly. I looked at him, puzzled, and he steadily returned my gaze.

Private equity charges what it does because it can. And private equity, whatever its capitalist digestive problems, continues to disgorge billionaires. From 2005 to 2020, private-equity billionaires have multiplied from three to 22; Phalippou calls the sector a “billionaire factory.” To Rubenstein’s repeated point, some of his peers—Leon Black, Henry Kravis, and Stephen Schwarzman leap to mind—have a net worth far greater than his own.

Central to Rubenstein’s sense of himself is an inchoate desire to outstrive peers, in business, in philanthropy, in public fame. Without a therapist—he has never seen one, he told me—he cannot explain this compulsion. Age, however, has rendered him curious about its genesis.

Patrick Smith / Getty

Rubenstein, the majority owner of the Baltimore Orioles, celebrates his team’s victory over the Cleveland Guardians with fans at Camden Yards, April 16, 2025.

He invited me to engage in a speculative exercise. Who was first in your high-school class? Do you remember? he asked in a manner that suggested he had forgotten his answer. “There are many people who had incredible résumés that I would have died for, and now they’re retired. They’re not doing much. They’ve lost their drive. It’s strange how the world works.”

He mentioned a friend in Chicago, a wealthy man diagnosed with ALS, the deadly neurodegenerative disease. He also told me that, a few days earlier, then–Georgetown University President John DeGioia, another acquaintance and eight years his junior, had suffered a stroke during a meeting. (DeGioia has since stepped down.) Rubenstein told me he peruses newspaper obituaries with careful attention to detail. “I read the obituaries to see whether people younger than I died and why they might have died,” he said. “I’m at an age where a lot of your friends die.”

“How did I get lucky?” he asked.

There was his unspoken chaser: How long will his luck hold? Rubenstein has spent much of his adult life in black SUVs and private airports and mansions and princely restaurants, in conversations with sheikhs, presidents, and managers of sovereign wealth funds. He has spent 250 days a year on the road, often as the lone passenger—he prefers solitude—on his Gulfstream jet. He rarely if ever watches movies on the plane, preferring to read the books and newspapers piled at his feet or study numbers and rehearse his pitches. As he joked (I think) on a recent business podcast: “I told my family, ‘Bury me in my airplane.’ I’m never so happy as when I’m in my plane. I can call people or not call people. They can’t reach me easily. I can watch TV; I can sleep.” A boulder outside his mansion in Nantucket, where he rarely sleeps, is inscribed I’d rather be working.

“I want to get it done before I die,” he said of philanthropy and empire building. He calls it his “sprint to the finish.”

Rubenstein gave me a list of his friends and colleagues. All praised his intelligence and attentiveness. When I asked if Rubenstein ever called them to just chat, if they shared laughs over long dinners, they fell silent or shook their head.

Each year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, James Gorman, the former Morgan Stanley chair who is now the chair of Disney, throws a big dinner, and Rubenstein joins him at the head table. “Some people feed off of moving constantly,” Gorman told me. “If you slowed David down, he’d slow very quickly. It’s like a fish that stops swimming. They stop and they die.”

Rubenstein told me once that he wondered whether his three children had inherited his obsessive drive. He has said that they grew up “reasonably wealthy.” (He had earned millions by the time his eldest daughter was in elementary school, and he was closing in on his first billion by the time she graduated from college.) Too much comfort, he said, puts the children of the wealthy at a disadvantage. “You might have grown up spoiled, without the drive to achieve something,” he said.

As adults, his children, now ages 34, 37, and 40, followed Rubenstein into the family business, and although he’s signed a pledge to give away perhaps half of his fortune to charity, he’s also plowed millions—“modest amounts,” he calls the sum—into his children’s private-equity funds. He noted, a touch archly, that the kids have yet to produce quite the promised returns. His son, Andrew, is a co-founder of the venture-capital firm Shorewind Capital. His daughter Alexa Rachlin works at Hobe Mountain Capital, a firm spun off from Declaration Partners, which is anchored by Rubenstein. His younger daughter, Gabrielle, who co-founded Manna Tree Partners, seems to most embrace his work ethic. Years earlier, at a conference in Zurich, she offered a glimpse of what it was to labor in the shadow of an influential multibillionaire father. She spoke of embarking on an exhausting 323-day, 18-country fundraising tour that she halted only as COVID swept the globe in early 2020. “It really destroyed my microbiome,” she said at the conference. But “I earned my father’s trust. My father’s language is fundraising.”

There’s a decent chance today that if you are not in the finance industry, you know of Rubenstein less for his career in private equity than for his role as a benefactor: the halls and galleries, the placards on monuments, the board seats at elite nonprofits and universities. His philanthropy resembles the late-life turn of many famously wealthy men. Andrew Mellon established the National Gallery of Art. John Rockefeller gave away a large chunk of his fortune, equivalent to more than $10 billion in today’s dollars. Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron, divested himself of 90 percent of his wealth and built 2,509 libraries. Carnegie even marked himself as a sort of class traitor by celebrating progressive taxation: “By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.”

No such heresy escapes Rubenstein’s lips; he has no inner Bernie Sanders, and has defended the tax advantages that his class views as birthrights. He gives great sums to children’s health care and cancer research, but his passion is his own brand: patriotic philanthropy. He said that reminding people of America’s narrative arc strengthens American democracy. It’s also the case that his philanthropy reinforced his station—as an exemplar of Washington’s old establishment.

In return for his donations, Rubenstein has collected a blur of board memberships and chairmanships—the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution. Celebrities surrounded him. He has stood with evident joy among presidents and first ladies, chatted with the comedian Billy Crystal, given awards to Bette Midler and Big Bird.

Rubenstein tended to the business of reputation building ever so carefully. He is averse to controversy and does not donate to political campaigns. But a man of wealth has many ways of rendering service to political patrons. He has several times turned his 13-acre Nantucket estate over to the Bidens. (George H. W. Bush and his wife have stayed there as well.)

This is an old sort of D.C. power projection. To wit, in the final days of his administration, Joe Biden awarded Rubenstein the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That could be read as status affirmed, another honor to be tucked into Rubenstein’s obit file, his sprint to the finish looking grand.

One observer was, however, not so impressed: Donald Trump, who, during his first term, was often stiffed by the sort of celebrities who surrounded Rubenstein. He watched Rubenstein, his maybe friend, aglow in a nest of Democrats, sitting on stage with Hillary Clinton and Alex Soros. Anna Wintour was there as well, and she had not put Melania, the first lady, on the cover of Vogue. The perceived slight, say those who know them, ate at Trump. Three weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, Rubenstein was out as chair of the Kennedy Center.

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

President Joe Biden presents Rubenstein with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S.'s highest civilian honor, January 2025.

In one of my interviews with Rubenstein, in the conference room of a 32nd-floor Carlyle aerie in Manhattan, I asked whether Trump’s unsettling admixture of resentment, bullying, and retaliation threatened his legacy. This president is—Rubenstein paused and picked his word carefully—“unique.”

I looked at him. Was that all? What of Trump’s mercurial game with tariffs, the humiliation of foreign leaders, the masked men carrying out immigration arrests in schools and stores, the deportations without due process? What of Trump’s challenge to constitutional norms? Rubenstein, who fancies himself a lay historian of the American presidency, speculated that Trump might circumvent the law and run for a third term in 2028. “He feels he can be president longer,” he said. Amend the Constitution; “just stay there,” refuse to leave the White House at the end of his term; or run as vice president on a ticket with J. D. Vance so that Vance can resign upon their election, leaving Trump to take power again.

Rubenstein laid out these scenarios. And a few seconds of silence followed. The unspoken thought seemed to hang in the room: Don’t captains of finance have a duty, perhaps even an obligation, to speak up? “Right now, who in the business community is publicly saying, ‘You can’t be doing all the things you are doing’?” Rubenstein said after a while. “Nobody, nobody.”

Rubenstein sat for the first time this year on the committee of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation that hands out the annual Profile in Courage Award. Past award winners have included the civil-rights legend John Lewis, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Senator John McCain. In these perilous times, Rubenstein said, the board had trouble finding someone “who actually has the courage right now to deserve the Profiles in Courage award.” Too many have shrunk from the moment. On May 4, the foundation gave the award to former Vice President Mike Pence, who withstood Trump’s extraordinary pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

A business titan is not nature’s rebel. Rubenstein’s vote to honor Pence for standing up to Trump likely did not escape the president’s notice. So maybe that counts for courage. But couldn’t a man with all that money, and all that power, do something more for the country he loves? Rubenstein shook his head and gave me a look that suggested that, like most of his class, he’d already made up his mind.

This article originally stated that Alexa Rachlin works at Declaration Partners. In fact, she works at Hobe Mountain Capital, a firm spun off from Declaration Partners. It also misstated Rubenstein’s family name upon arrival to the United States.

Why Donald Trump Seems Taken With Zohran Mamdani

2025-11-21T22:55:11-05:00

Today’s White House meeting between New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, and President Donald Trump suggests that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government won’t go to war with its largest city. The event was much anticipated as blood sport, a showdown between a young communist and an old despot, to use their favored insults for each other.

Instead, the two men put on such a show of good manners that at times I had to laugh out loud at the stagecraft. After a closed-door meeting, Trump and Mamdani summoned the press, and there was Uncle Donnie seated behind his desk in the Oval Office, beaming as his favorite nephew, Zohran, stood by his right shoulder looking dutiful.

“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Trump said, peering at Mamdani. “I feel very confident that he can do a very good job.”

He does? Trump, after all, had previously posted on Truth Social that Mamdani “looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart.” He had also threatened to defund the city if Mamdani became mayor. Mamdani, for his part, said of the president on Election Night earlier this month: “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.”

[Tom Nichols: The president is losing control of himself]

No hint of such insults—or of attempted “dismantling”—was heard today. When a reporter asked Mamdani whether he considers the president a fascist, the mayor-elect momentarily fumbled. “I’ve spoken about—”

“That’s okay,” Trump interjected. “You could just say ‘yes.’ It’s easier—it’s easier than explaining it.” He smiled indulgently and patted Mamdani on the arm. “I don’t mind.”

This was one of several moments in the press conference that felt more like a Saturday Night Live skit than a newscast. But perhaps all this was not as improbable as it looked and sounded. Trump bellows and insults and demeans, but so much of that is an act, guff and bullying. His earlier talk of Mamdani as “my little communist mayor” even carried an odd hint of affection, and there was evident admiration in the way in which he spoke of Mamdani’s unlikely mayoral victory. These men are, in their very different ways, populists, Queens men, and sometimes statists; they share a disdain for political establishments. And Trump, the developer, is aware of the extremely high cost of New York real estate, a focus of Mamdani’s campaign.

Trump always and ever loves winners, whether a Saudi crown prince, a billionaire businessman, or, apparently, a democratic-socialist mayor fresh off an underdog win. He also admires those who dress well and carry themselves with confidence. Mamdani meets these requirements. He is a well-educated, well-spoken son of privilege; his parents are among the cinematic and academic elite. Several wealthy New Yorkers already talk with him entre nous. Kathryn Wylde, the long-serving president of the Partnership for New York City, a sort of oligarch’s chamber of commerce, offered advice during his campaign and recently said that she had voted for Mamdani.

[Michael Powell: Zohran Mamdani is about to confront reality]

Mamdani can at times drop his smile and sound confrontational, as he did in his Election Night speech, slamming his vanquished opponent, Andrew Cuomo, and challenging Trump directly. But his more impressive ability as a pol was on display in the weeks that followed, as he slipped into that smile of his once more and quietly went about appointing some wise old hands as mayoral aides.

This afternoon, Mamdani appeared to charm a dangerous foe and, in so doing, perhaps purchased himself a respite from Trump’s threats to send the National Guard to New York. But Mamdani should restrain his postgame talk.

In 2017, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, then the Senate and House minority leaders, talked, joked, and negotiated hard with Trump, and they emerged with a budget deal so beneficial for Democrats that Republican legislators were startled and wounded. Many Democrats bragged that they’d outmaneuvered Trump, which turned out to be deeply unwise; he remains adversaries with Schumer and Pelosi to this day, of course. Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker and is acutely sensitive to any claim that he has been taken.

In the months to come, Trump could still decide to send the National Guard marching down Broadway, or direct masked Border Patrol agents to raid Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, or try to strip federal funding for housing and bridges. The best way to avoid these outcomes is for Mamdani to accept his victory quietly.

And perhaps he knows that. Mamdani appears to be preternaturally possessed. As the half-hour press conference at the White House wound down, I watched for a presidential slap, or a slip of Mamdani’s genial mask. That never came; in fact, Trump went on to say that he would feel comfortable living in Mamdani’s New York.

“I’ll be cheering for him,” Trump concluded. He shook Mamdani’s hand and, with his other hand, gave him a benevolent pat. I doubt that Mamdani needs any lessons in getting what he wants.

The Moral Cost of the Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy

2025-11-11T15:52:23-05:00

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The longest-ever government shutdown has ended with a negotiated whimper rather than a glorious Resistance victory, and many Democrats are furious at their leaders. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut argued on Bluesky that the Senate’s vote to end the suspension leaves President Donald Trump stronger, not weaker. Representative Ro Khanna of California wrote on X that leaders must pay. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he argued, “is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”

There was, in fact, a strong moral case for ending this shutdown. The Democrats’ decision to back down, however painful, will save tens of millions of poor and working-class Americans who had lost food stamps from going hungry. Millions more travelers will be spared chaos at airports. Federal employees will no longer have to pay mortgages and bills without their salary. Had Democrats refused to make this compromise, which passed on the Senate floor last night and now heads to the House, they would have forced some of the nation’s most vulnerable to shoulder the greatest burden.

From the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats’ challenge was one of optics and substance. Democrats pride themselves on being the party that defends the role of government and fights for the impoverished. But now they were bringing the government and its services to a stop. Substantively, they bet that they could weaken Trump, forcing a nihilistic president to compromise and restore subsidies for the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire soon. Safe to say that the plan did not work out. Trump spoke in vengeful terms of the “radical” Democrats as he laid off federal workers and fought to withhold funding for food stamps, and as his transportation secretary announced a crisis in air-traffic control. And the president, of course, blamed the shutdown, rather than his own declining approval ratings, for the Republicans’ electoral losses last week.

[Jonathan Chait: Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake]

Democratic politicians, as well as liberal writers and activists, insisted over the past weeks that the party’s handling of the shutdown was a strategic success. Most polls showed that Americans, by a slender margin, blamed Republicans rather than Democrats for the stoppage. Many on the left argued that the Election Day victories of Democratic candidates in Virginia and New Jersey reinforced that advantage. “It would be very strange if, on the heels of the American people rewarding Democrats,” Murphy said, “we surrendered without getting anything.”

Some Democrats seemed to suggest that the suffering of American citizens might redound to the party’s benefit. Stories of families going without food stamps would, they hoped, shame Republicans. Thanksgiving loomed, and GOP lawmakers would face constituents angry about airplane delays and cancellations. In October, the House Democratic whip, Representative Katherine Clark, went on Fox News and described the overarching logic candidly, if unartfully: “I mean, shutdowns are terrible, and of course there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously. But it is one of the few leverage times we have.”

Democrats have framed their battle as grounded in principle. They wanted to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies that will otherwise terminate at year’s end, resulting in sharp hikes in health-care costs for millions of Americans. But that goal was always a long shot. Jim Manley, who once worked for Senator Harry Reid, told The New York Times yesterday: “I never could figure out how you could ever get Republicans to vote for the health care extension.”

For those many Democrats who claimed they wanted to battle on, what, then, was their end game? Too many of their arguments came to sound desperate, born of anger and frustration with their own impotence. When the deal to end the shutdown was announced, Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, a former co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, posted what amounted to a tantrum on X: “What Senate Dems who voted for this horseshit deal did was fuck over all the hard work people put in to Tuesday’s elections.” But many Americans might wonder if it was okay for the Democrats to do the same to them. Few middle-class workers have enough money on hand to survive six weeks without a paycheck, and few poor and working-class families can easily withstand the loss of food stamps.

[Read: Why the Democrats finally folded]

Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal-employee union, usually supports Democrats. But he sounded like a man who had long ago grown tired of either political party using his workers as sacrificial lambs. There is, he wrote on his union’s website late last month, “no ‘winning’ a government shutdown.” And it is “long past time for our leaders to put aside partisan politics and embrace responsible government.”

For Democrats who opposed the shutdown deal, Schumer has become the ultimate symbol of fecklessness. When another shutdown loomed this past spring, he warned that to embrace it threatened chaos. “It’s a Hobson’s choice,” he told the Senate Democrats. “Either proceed with the bill before us, or risk Donald Trump throwing America into the chaos of a shutdown.” Schumer chose the former. Yet as the year went on, and his members hankered for a fight, Schumer changed course and embraced a shutdown.

Through careful messaging, he and other members of the party leadership managed to shift a measure of blame onto Republicans, and perhaps helped Democratic candidates succeed last week. As matters began to look apocalyptic, eight centrist senators—who say they remained in touch with Schumer throughout—opted yesterday to make a deal with Republicans. The agreement reverses the layoffs of federal workers that the administration tried to enact during the shutdown. Senate Republicans also agreed to a vote on the ACA subsidies, which could set up a difficult decision for GOP members.

All of this describes a reasonably adept bit of legislative handiwork, but a painful one.

The Democrats’ anger and frustration with the Trump administration and the Republican Party is no doubt heartfelt. Trump has trampled democratic norms, gutted government programs, and insulted and intimidated his opponents. But the Democrats’ grand problem is not that centrist senators—most of whom hail from battleground states and none of whom is up for reelection in 2026—cut a compromise. It’s that they lost control of Congress and the presidency in the 2024 election and need to win back power again. Focusing on the 2026 midterm elections might not sound as emotionally satisfying as engaging in political war with Trump. But it offers the best and most productive path out of the party’s current nightmare.

Zohran Mamdani Is About to Confront Reality

2025-11-06T14:40:55-05:00

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Zohran Mamdani’s grin was as magnetic as ever, his rhetoric soaring, as he began his victory speech Tuesday night by summoning the spirit of an American socialist who died 99 years ago. “The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,’” the mayor-elect of New York told his audience in Brooklyn.

Mamdani’s election was indeed consequential. A democratic socialist, he is among New York’s youngest mayors ever, and its first Muslim and South Asian leader. His margin—he claimed 50.4 percent of the vote—fell short of grand. But this election saw remarkable turnout. Mamdani was the first New York mayoral candidate to gain more than 1 million votes since 1969. Andrew Cuomo, even in defeat, received more votes than any victorious mayor since 1993.

Yet for all Mamdani’s success in organizing and inspiring volunteers and voters, he will govern in a perilous landscape, and he will need to prove his bona fides quickly.

[Read: The anti-MAGA majority reemerges]

Mamdani’s campaign was marked by his audacious, sometimes improbable proposals. He and his supporters often bridled at those who shook their heads and said that the numbers behind those proposals did not scratch out. But on Tuesday he doubled down. “This will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve,” he said, “rather than a list of excuses.” He spoke again of freezing rents for rent-stabilized apartments, making buses fast and free, and providing universal child care. Notably, he left out his campaign promises to deliver cheap, city-run grocery stores (a City Department of Supermarket Affairs?) and more low-income housing than the city appears to have money for.

Watching the speech on TV, I felt the yearning—his and that of the crowd—for transformational change but whispered to myself: Vaya con Dios, Zohran.

Mamdani’s challenges are steep, particularly for a leader who has never run anything bigger than a five-person assemblyman’s office. Much as he might enjoy lashing out at the city’s billionaires—“The billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour,” he said in his victory speech—this cohort controls businesses with tens of thousands of employees and fills city coffers with its taxes. If even a handful of extremely wealthy individuals leave, that means a lot less revenue for Mamdani’s wish list. Recreationally warring with them is ill-advised. Many New Yorkers in the city’s large and influential Jewish community are also deeply suspicious of Mamdani because of his opposition to Israel and Zionism, and he can’t afford to alienate them any more than he already has.

At the same time, managing his political base could prove tricky. Mamdani is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a formidable and tetchy group that adores its champions, even as it punishes those who deviate. At the DSA’s national convention two years ago, Mamdani explained how the socialist legislators in the New York statehouse survived by observing an allegiance to the DSA that distinguished them from less ideologically disciplined Democrats. Without that commitment to DSA orthodoxy, he said, “You will start to rationalize that which you initially rebelled against.”

Those, however, were the words of a back-bench state assemblyman. As mayor, Mamdani will inevitably need to compromise and make deals, and the DSA faithful in New York are not infinitely patient. Only a few years ago, they canceled a talk by the noted Black socialist scholar Adolph Reed because his planned topic—he intended to argue that the left’s emphasis on the disproportionate impact of COVID on Black people undermined its own agenda—caused a backlash among some DSA members. Last year, the national DSA withdrew its endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by far its best-known standard-bearer. Among her heresies was that she had affirmed Israel’s right to exist and signed a press release supporting anti-missile systems for the country to defend its civilian population. (The New York City chapter of DSA endorsed Ocasio-Cortez.)

Another problem is the ever vengeful Donald Trump, who has loosed the National Guard and masked ICE agents on one Democratic-run city after another (or tried to), and who has his eyes on New York, his hometown. Mamdani in his victory speech took declamatory swings at the president. “Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: Turn the volume up.” His words were brave and chesty. But Trump can make New York City bleed in many dozens of ways. For Mamdani, charting a path through the chaos might require tempering confrontation with compromise.

How can he achieve the transformational change he’s promised while managing all this? His best bet might be cutting the deals needed to get one quick, early win, to demonstrate that his aspirations can yield concrete achievement. Perhaps his focus should be the proposal for free municipal buses. This is no small task. The city’s buses carry an average of 1.4 million passengers per weekday and cost $700 million a year. The state-run MTA oversees buses and subways in New York City, which means that Mamdani will need to persuade the centrist Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, to help him, and she has resisted raising taxes on the rich.

[Rogé Karma: Mamdani has a point about rent control]

Hochul and Mamdani have a nascent political relationship born of her endorsement of him after he won the Democratic primary this summer. (Senator Chuck Schumer, by contrast, never endorsed anyone in the mayoral race.) Some of Mamdani’s followers drowned out the governor with cries of “Tax the rich!” when she attended one of his rallies last week. But Mamdani held her hand aloft that night. Now he has something to trade for her help. Hochul is expected to face an opponent from the left in next year’s Democratic primary, and Mamdani’s praise—or even his artful neutrality—could prove invaluable to her. Might he trade that chip in seeking Hochul’s acceptance of new taxes to underwrite free buses?

Alternatively, Mamdani could focus on expanding day care. In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio opened his first term by persuading then-Governor Cuomo to fund universal prekindergarten. Mamdani would like to cover every New York child from age six weeks to 5 years old, while boosting child-care-worker wages to match those of public-school teachers. This would be, he says, transformative. It would also be extremely expensive and require the state to approve a tax increase. Again, in the hands of a nimble mayor, perhaps there’s a compromise to be made.

Yet in remarks since his victory on Tuesday, Mamdani has sounded not-so-conciliatory, and has revealed hints of a serrated edge. In his Election Night speech, he dismissed his vanquished opponent Cuomo in a sentence: “Let tonight be the final time I utter his name.”

Mamdani could do worse than to pay attention to another combative politician, Senator Bernie Sanders, who played the role of mentor throughout Mamdani’s campaign. Many years ago, I covered Sanders when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His office was dominated by a large black-and-white photo of Eugene Debs. And he was a battler, befriending Sandinistas and denouncing Ronald Reagan. But Sanders also balanced budgets and championed affordable housing, and when the snow fell, he went out and rode the city plows and joked with sanitation workers and police officers. Perhaps that was not as emotionally satisfying as dueling with a mercurial and dangerous president might be. But for the working people of Burlington, the city basically worked, and Sanders reaped the rewards.

Mamdani might keep that in mind in the months to come.

Crime in Chicago Is a Choice

2025-10-20T11:30:00-04:00

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On a mild spring night in Chicago, a woman told her 18-year-old boyfriend she wanted money for a barbecue. He rounded up three teenage friends, each with a long criminal record, and, according to prosecutors, they donned masks, carried guns, and robbed four people, tossing two to the ground. They went searching for more victims in a stolen Kia; shortly after 1:30 a.m. they crossed paths with Aréanah Preston.

Preston, a police officer, had finished her shift and, still in uniform, parked across the street from her family home on the South Side. The 24-year-old was to receive a master’s degree in law the following week. The police department viewed her as a future leader; the FBI had talked with her about a job. The young men in the Kia saw her as a target. They ran at her; a grainy security video shows muzzle flashes. Police and prosecutors say that at least two of the teenagers shot at Preston, who returned fire but was struck in the face and neck. One of the young men grabbed her firearm, and they fled.

Preston’s mother, Dionne Mhoon, had been out with friends in the suburbs and arrived home to patrol cars and swirling red lights. An officer drove her, praying, to the University of Chicago hospital. In a private waiting room, a door opened, and the mayor and a trauma surgeon walked in. We’re so sorry. We did all that we could. She was so brave, your daughter. Mhoon felt ruin. “I had poured so much love into her,” she told me in late September, as we sat in her office on Chicago’s South Side, where she runs a day care. She grew up and raised her daughters there. “It was unreal. I never expected this outcome, never. I don’t know what to make of this city.”

The story of this accomplished young Black woman slain in front of her family’s home gripped me when I first read of it. Preston died in May 2023, but her killing remains a powerful symbol of Chicago’s inability to solve its decades-long violent-crime problem. Mhoon and her daughter tried to ward off the violence around them but still couldn’t avoid it. And Preston’s own department failed her: The ShotSpotter sensor technology the city used marked the sound of eight shots and relayed the address to police dispatchers. Preston’s smartwatch alerted dispatchers to what it detected as a “car crash” and also conveyed the address. Yet, on a busy night for the police, 31 minutes passed before an officer arrived and found Preston lying on the sidewalk. (The police department launched an investigation into the response time. I asked a spokesperson about the status but didn’t get an answer by publication time.)

Preston’s killing was particularly high-profile, but among America’s cities with populations of more than 1 million, Chicago has, for decades, had among the highest rates of homicide. President Donald Trump has seized crudely upon this misfortune and recently described the city as a “killing field.” He has mocked the mayor, Brandon Johnson, and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, and earlier this month he sent 500 National Guard troops to the Chicago area declaring that Johnson and Pritzker “should be in jail.” (Courts have temporarily blocked troops from deploying in the city.)

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

Dionne Mhoon, the mother of Aréanah Preston, started a foundation in honor of her daughter.

Democratic politicians have taken the president’s bait. Chicago, they argue, is not as violent as it once was. Crime in some cities in Republican-run states is worse, and red-state gun stores sell many of the weapons that Chicago men slip into their belts and hoodies. Pritzker, who has said that Trump’s threats against the city suggest that he has dementia, took a walk last month along the Chicago lakefront with an NBC reporter. The reporter recited a litany of recent shootings, and asked whether the governor would advise friends to ride the city’s public transit at night. Pritzker waved that off. Trump “has no idea that crime has gone way down in the city of Chicago,” he said. (He added, “Every crime, of course, is a tragedy.”) Johnson recently angered many in Chicago, not least the state’s attorney and police officers, when he insisted that “jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities.”

[Read: What we lose by distorting the mission of the National Guard]

What these politicians refuse to acknowledge is that violent crime in Chicago remains a serious problem, as I heard from residents there on a visit last month. The number of homicides has indeed dropped from a recent peak of 805 in 2021, and stands at 347 so far this year. But New York City, with a population more than three times that of Chicago’s, has recorded 255 homicides in 2025. The most recent homicide tally for Los Angeles, which has about a million more residents than Chicago, stood at 217. Chicago, in the same year that officials celebrated its “safest summer” in six decades, could end up roughly four times deadlier than New York and twice as deadly as Los Angeles. Chicago is deeply segregated, and homicides remain a plague for Black and Latino young men, who make up the great majority of the killed and the killers. A study of homicides in Chicago in 2020 and 2021, when the murder rate was even higher, found that young adult males who lived in the city’s most violent zip codes faced a greater risk of gun death than U.S. soldiers deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The homicide rates in the deadliest neighborhoods remain dozens of times higher than those of Chicago’s safest, mostly upper-middle-class and white neighborhoods.

In total, Chicago registered more than 8,000 homicides from 2010 to 2024, and more than 41,000 Chicagoans were wounded by gunfire in that time. A modern gun is a potent instrument; bullets can hit thighs and arms, or tear holes in intestines and lungs, paralyzing victims from the waist down or leaving them with a colostomy bag permanently affixed to their side. Selwyn Rogers, a top-ranked trauma surgeon at the University of Chicago, wrote a 2023 article in The New England Journal of Medicine about what it was like to treat the terribly wounded: “I fantasize about other possible lives for these patients. What if they had never been shot? What if they had grown up in a safe neighborhood? What if they had a fair chance to live up to their potential?”

I reported on New York’s crack and crime epidemic in the early 1990s, and on the wave of homicides in Washington, D.C., later in the decade. As violent crime fell dramatically in those cities and elsewhere, I wondered why Chicago remained so bloody by comparison. Disinvestment and industrial decline are part of the answer; these forces led about 1 million people to move out of the city over decades, and left many Black and Latino neighborhoods blighted and dangerous. Another is the ineffectiveness of the Chicago Police Department, which has moved far too slowly into the 21st century and has never managed to bring the city’s gangs to heel. Perhaps most troubling of all, the city’s political leadership—which Democrats have dominated for nearly a century—has tolerated disorder for far too long. Some politicians talk of killings as they might of the weather, an implacable force.

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

A memorial near the site where Aréanah Preston was shot in 2023

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

Preston’s name on an honorary street sign

Few residents I spoke with said that they want to see the National Guard manning corners on the West and South Sides, although several parents of children who navigate risk-filled blocks to school told me that they did not object to that possibility as strenuously as politicians might imagine. There are far worse traumas. Mhoon recalled laying down rules for her daughters: home before dark, homework done, care for your neighbors and each other. Aréanah followed these rules and prospered. “She’s been fearless since she was a little girl, and I loved that in her,” Mhoon said. “But all I did was worry.”

Walking the streets of the South and West Sides of Chicago, I passed several commercial stretches multiple blocks long where every storefront—what used to be butchers, hardware stores, dress shops—was boarded up and abandoned. Some residential blocks had handsome, well-tended homes. Others were so deserted that they had an almost rural character, with knee-high grasses and alders, red hickories, and oaks.

[Read: Trump gains when elites downplay D.C. crime]

The commercial buildings of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile feature an exhilarating blend of Art Deco and modern architecture. There are the beaches and marinas along the waters of Lake Michigan, the Art Institute, and the gentrified neighborhoods that run north through Wrigleyville to Evanston. But beyond those parts of the city, Chicago too often feels hollowed out. Its once-formidable manufacturing economy has fallen away, and although finance, insurance, and health care are strong industries, the population has decreased by nearly 900,000 since 1950. Black residents led the exodus. From 1980 to 2017, 391,000 Black Chicagoans left, greater than the population of Cleveland.

I walked two miles west from the 51st Street Green Line L stop to the Back of the Yards neighborhood, where the Union Stock Yards once stood, offering jobs to tens of thousands of immigrants and inspiring Carl Sandburg to write of the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.” A map of the area produced by DePaul University researchers confirms what the eyes reveal: Today, Back of the Yards, across its roughly five square miles, has 478 city-owned vacant lots and another 2,000 or so privately owned vacant lots. Chicago as a whole has more than 40,000 vacant lots, about 9,000 of which are held by the city. Most of these lots are in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods, where years of disinvestment resulted in many thousands of foreclosed and abandoned homes. City officials, fearing that these homes posed a crime threat, were assiduous about tearing them down.

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

Chicago has more than 40,000 vacant lots; about 9,000 are held by the city.

That decision, however, has contributed to physical disorder in these neighborhoods that, in turn, has led to a pervasive sense of menace and fear on many blocks. Chicago officials have talked of plans and more plans but have handed over relatively few vacant lots to local groups and developers, community leaders told me. “We have been cannibalizing our city for decades,” Richard Townsell, the longtime executive director of the nonprofit Lawndale Christian Development Corporation, told me. “It has been planned shrinkage, and it’s asinine.”

Jens Ludwig, the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told me that efforts to rebuild the city’s troubled neighborhoods might be the only social programs that truly matter in attacking violent crime. He pointed to a study in which an organization picked vacant lots at random in Philadelphia and cleaned and beautified them, putting up fences around many; crime fell around those same lots. “Changes to the built environment make a remarkable difference,” Ludwig said.

Townsell’s organization is part of United Power for Action and Justice, a 38-member consortium of religious groups and neighborhood nonprofits that wants to build 2,000 new homes on the West and South Sides. For several years, organizers told me, members have pressured city officials to turn over some 600 lots for a dollar a piece. The group has raised more than $50 million and built and sold 57 affordable homes; another 150 are under construction. (An affiliated organization in New York, East Brooklyn Congregations, has built 5,000 affordable homes, opened public schools, and renovated parks. New homeowners applied pressure to police precincts to crack down on drug corners.)

[Read: The conquest of Chicago]

In a former school building that now houses the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, a Catholic group that is a member of United Power and focuses on building relationships with families and youth scarred by violence, I met the director, David Kelly. A lean man with a baritone voice, Kelly, a priest, told me that he holds a monthly meeting with mothers and grandmothers. “We have over 100 mothers who have lost children to homicide,” he said. He explained how a desolate landscape amplifies the neighborhood’s threats. “You have such open lands. There’s no grocery store here, no Target, none of that stuff,” Kelly said. “And the kids know it’s dangerous to walk anywhere. Why wouldn’t they carry guns?”

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

David Kelly, the executive director of Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

A display at Precious Blood showing young men who were sentenced to life without parole as minors

Kelly introduced me to a young man named Joe Montgomery. He was polite and spoke softly. At 19, he had been sentenced to four years in prison for armed robbery. Now 28, he works as a lead mentor at Precious Blood, counseling younger boys. I asked him what it was like to grow up in Back of the Yards. “My friends, we all grew up around each other. We felt okay, right?” He paused. “Then, as time went on, you know, a lot of us died, right? And a lot of us went to jail.” The empty lots, the trees and tall grasses, do not register to him as bucolic. He still does not take casual walks or ride alone on the elevated trains (which were near empty when I got on at mid-evening). When he sees a car pull a U-turn or slow as it approaches, his nerves jump. “I had a childhood friend,” he told me. “She was standing on the sidewalk, and some people killed her. They weren’t aiming at her, but, y’know, it’s not like a bullet has anyone’s name on it.”

He used to shrug this off as just a part of life. “Now I look back at it, like, and think, Goddamn, that’s a traumatizing way to grow up.”

Chicago’s recent drop in homicides has stirred much hope, and it feels unkind to sound a skeptical note. But the city has seen seemingly promising drops in homicides since the 1990s, only to watch violence flare up again.

Part of the problem is that the Chicago police have been slow to modernize. New York City and Los Angeles, thanks in part to leaders such as Bill Bratton and, early on, Raymond Kelly, diversified their forces, offered better training and accountability, and infused data analysis into crime fighting. Chicago is still “a long way behind” New York and L.A., Ludwig said. “Those cities show us that even in an ocean of gun availability, you can reduce gun violence dramatically.” Politics plays a role as well. In Chicago, which last elected a Republican mayor in 1927, police departments were often creatures of the Democratic political machine, not to mention a political force in their own right; the lack of political competition perhaps has given them less incentive to change.

The Chicago police, Ludwig added, have begun to use data in a sophisticated manner, and some police-district captains are learning to work better with local organizing groups. In August, the mayor’s office said that the city’s homicide clearance rate had leapt to an astonishing 77.4 percent. Still, earlier this year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Chicago police claimed a high number of “exceptional clearances” for homicides; these were cases in which no arrest was made owing to the death of a suspect or because prosecutors declined to bring charges. Only about 25 percent of Chicago murders led to an arrest, the newspaper noted.

[Read: A very, very expensive way to reduce crime]

There is also the question of discipline. From 2019 to 2024, according to an analysis by the local PBS station, WTTW, the city spent $491.7 million to resolve lawsuits concerning 1,643 Chicago police officers who allegedly committed a wide range of misconduct, including false arrests and use of excessive force. A ProPublica report earlier this year found that the department frequently failed to investigate officers accused of sexual misconduct. A police department with a reputation for brutality alienates precisely the communities from which it needs support.

The city cannot rely on policing alone, a point often made by the mayor, who lives with his family in the Austin neighborhood, where gun violence runs high. Many neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago have long been dominated by gangs: the Vice Lords and Latin Kings, the Black Disciples and the Gangster Disciples. Federal investigations have brought down leaders, but gangs in turn have fragmented into loose affiliations of young men laying claim to desolate turf. What sparks them to violence can be hard to pinpoint, former members told me. Some beefs are so old that younger gunmen lose track of the origin story. Social media plays a pernicious role. One group mocks another—a guy kisses another guy’s girl on TikTok, say—and young men with guns start saying they want to “light up someone’s ass,” as Montgomery put it.

In the past few years, city officials, philanthropists, businesses, and community-organizing groups have worked to short-circuit the impulse to pull out a gun and shoot a rival or just someone who annoys you. The notion is that violence interrupted is violence delayed, which opens an opportunity for an intervention. Arne Duncan played basketball as a teenager in gyms across the South Side and lost mentors to gun violence. He later served as Chicago’s school chancellor and President Barack Obama’s secretary of education. Of late, he runs Chicago CRED, which, along with many other community organizations, fields an army of more than 1,200 peacekeepers and violence interrupters. (Duncan is also a managing partner at Emerson Collective, the majority owner of The Atlantic.) CRED’s work is challenging and can leave him sounding haunted. “In my seven years heading the schools, we lost a child every two weeks. Today I saw the mom of a child who had been killed on the bus going home,” he told me one evening. “Now I find myself trying to negotiate a gang peace with a 17-year-old.”

To work with these boys and men requires diplomatic skills and an appreciation for the blustering insecurities of young people. Cedric Hawkins is a CRED violence interrupter in the Roseland and West Pullman neighborhoods of the South Side. He has an easy swagger that speaks to his own decades on the street; he served a 10-year sentence in federal prison for dealing heroin and cocaine. He took me for a drive around the neighborhoods where he grew up and now works. Hawkins pointed to a corner where three teenagers had died, a bungalow once used as a drug traphouse, an avenue where seven young men died in a single shootout in 2020. He slowed his car as he eased it through the gully that was the site of his first gun bust, at age 12. Hawkins told me that he has lost eight cousins and an uncle to gun violence. He’s the rare one who made it into his 40s.

Taylor Glascock for The Atlantic

Cedric Hawkins, who served time in prison for dealing drugs and has lost several relatives to gun violence, is now a violence interrupter for Chicago CRED.

When he got out of prison, he cast about for work. Some friends suggested peacekeeping. “They say, ‘You didn’t tell on nobody. You took your sentence like a man. People respect you,’” he told me. “But to be honest, I was reluctant. I didn’t want anything to mess up my negative credibility.” Once he tried mediating, his view of himself changed. He saw the work as compensation for all the pain he had brought to the world.

He explained his diplomatic arts. If groups are beefing, he tries to negotiate a nonaggression pact. “We’re not saying you all got to love each other. Just agree to stay off each other’s turf and play defense, cool?” This means that gang members agree not to cross a truce line. “You saw Trump trying to tell Ukraine what to do?” Hawkins said, wagging his head. He explained that the president was trying to dictate terms to warring parties. “That’s not the way to do it. You let one side say what they can do, and you let the other side give their line.” When a nonaggression pact turns into a peace agreement between two gangs, Hawkins and CRED try to cement it with the promise of education, jobs, and therapy. The offer of therapy piqued my interest. Hawkins was surprised at my surprise. “Around here, we got trauma coming out of the womb,” he said.

I asked Duncan whether all of this could really work. Can former gangbangers—and the assumption that all are former gangbangers requires a leap of faith—actually help police tamp down homicides? He said he is aware that some peacekeepers might be a “foot and a half” away from their old lives. But he pointed to the city’s recent decline in homicides as a promising sign. His hope is that peace begets peace, even as he harbors no illusion of a miracle. He mentioned New York’s much lower violent-crime rate and said, “My goal is just to be normal for a big city.”

Nine days after Aréanah Preston’s death, Johnson delivered his inaugural address as the new mayor. A candidate of the left, he had once described incarceration as a “racist system,” and promised during his campaign to end the ShotSpotter technology, which he argued is susceptible to human error and can encourage cops to act too quickly. (Johnson discontinued the city’s use of the technology in 2024. A majority of alderpersons representing Black and Latino districts have voted to keep ShotSpotter, and some claim that the mayor is putting Black and Latino lives at risk. Surveys suggest that most Black and Latino residents also favored the technology.) In his speech, Johnson invoked Preston by first talking of Adam Toledo, an armed teenager who two years earlier had fled in the dark from a cop and was shot dead after dropping his gun. “The tears of Adam Toledo’s parents are made of the same sorrow as the parents of Officer Preston’s parents and relatives,” Johnson told a cheering crowd. (Johnson’s office didn’t respond to interview requests for this story.)

[Read: Trump is right that D.C. has a serious crime problem]

Johnson was correct when he said recently that National Guardsmen “occupying our city” would solve more or less nothing. Pritzker, too, was correct when he told the NBC reporter that big-city crime is inevitable, although that sidesteps the particular tragedy of Chicago’s high homicide rate. The National Guard deployments, although significant for the country and our sense of our democracy, are in most respects a sideshow in Chicago. At the same time, Trump doesn’t entirely miss the mark when he lambastes generations of political indifference to so much suffering. When he deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., crime fell.

What is striking, infuriating even, is that Dionne Mhoon speaks with more honesty and compassion than any one of these leaders about ending the city’s violence epidemic. She is herself dubious that the National Guard can accomplish much. They are not, she told me, intimately familiar with Chicago’s troubled communities. But she sees a deeper pain and deterioration that often goes unaddressed by politicians. When she went to watch the bond hearing for the young men charged with her daughter’s murder, she told the press that she was praying for the accused even as she wanted them imprisoned. (All have pleaded not guilty, and their cases have yet to go to trial.) Afterward, she told me, family members and friends of those young men crowded around her, as if trying to draw her into a fight. (Two law-enforcement sources confirmed Mhoon’s account to me.) She told me that she has received “dozens” of anonymous threatening phone calls and letters. At one point, the police department posted a patrol car outside her house for a month. “There has to be some accountability in the households. Like, we can’t blame the mayor or the superintendent if your child is on the street at 11 p.m.,” she said. “Too many in our communities are detached from values and morals.”

Mhoon has started a foundation in honor of her daughter, with an emphasis, she told me, on reaching precisely the at-risk children who too often grow up to become victims and victimizers. She volunteers weekly at public schools on the South Side. She talks with young girls, telling them that they matter. She speaks with boys too, hoping to break the cycles of violence that claimed her daughter’s life. “I talk about thinking about their choices, and their long-term effects, however hard that may seem,” she said. “Too many are clueless about love. They don’t have it, and they don’t know it.”

I asked whether her work offered any salve for her loss. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, and shook her head. There’s no healing, she said. “Even when I’m pumping gas, I look around and think, Do you know what I lost? You don’t have a clue,” she said. “Then I hear every other day of another kid getting shot, and I wonder: How do we make it end?”

The Mainstreaming of Zohran Mamdani

2025-08-18T06:00:00-04:00

Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic young Democratic Party candidate for mayor of New York City, has been hard at work balancing his deep-dyed socialist beliefs with his need to show voters that he is at least a cousin to mainstream liberal Democrats.

Last week, he confirmed that he had previously fielded a phone call from former President Barack Obama. With cameras rolling, Mamdani spent a day in early August in the political embrace of Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democratic doyen. The Massachusetts senator talked passionately of challenging billionaires while Mamdani talked of his sympathy for police officers whom he described as overstretched and overworked. The same day, they sat on a park bench like old buddies, chatting and leaning in toward each other. Mamdani shed a possibly impromptu tear—after which he and Warren burst out laughing, in a moment that his campaign promptly retailed on Facebook and TikTok.

Mamdani, 33, conveys that he is a man prepared to work with the organs of capitalist democracy to progressive ends and not to demand ideological litmus tests. But the Mamdani who takes great pride in his identity as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and who told Meet the Press in late June that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”—to the alarm of Wall Street donors—has hardly disappeared.

By his own account, his political journey from state assemblyman to mayoral nominee owes almost entirely to his umbilical connection with DSA. A cache of podcast interviews and speeches over the past five years sheds light on his view of this evolution.

Two years ago, in a speech at DSA’s national convention, he described how belonging to the organization helped him and a handful of fellow socialist assembly members survive in the cauldron of Albany. “We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization,” he said. “It is far easier to corrupt an individual than a mass-movement organization.” He concluded, “So sincerity forever, solidarity forever, and socialism forever.” In past years, he has also argued that DSA must push for causes that make some supporters uncomfortable, such as the “end goal of seizing the means of production.”

[Read: Zohran Mamdani’s lesson for the left]

The practical meaning of that rhetoric—its old-school socialist flavor bordering on obscurantist—is difficult to parse, and not just because Mamdani is remaking his image in real time. The political left from which Mamdani emerges is a collection of disorderly tribes, sheltering self-styled revolutionaries alongside those who prize compromise and electoral victory, and those who want to sand the edges off capitalism alongside those who want to replace it altogether.

Within DSA, that tendency toward sectarianism can produce a cacophonous and quarrelsome internal politics: Marx meets the Marx Brothers. Some members—likely a majority of the organization—seem intent on trying to change the Democratic Party from within, by supporting figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in primaries. Some speak of the group becoming a party of its own. Still others have formed Leninist cliques that yearn to transform DSA into a revolutionary vanguard.

Earlier this month, a DSA-friendly Substack account cobbled together a reader’s guide to the organization’s clotted mass of caucuses. Among them is Red Star, a Marxist-Leninist outcropping whose unforgiving politics can be discerned from a recent post entitled “We Do Not Condemn Hamas, and Neither Should You.” My favorite DSA offshoot is the Caracol caucus, an eco-socialist degrowth group named for the Spanish word for snail.

Those allied with Mamdani, and those who fear and oppose him, are alike in speculating how much socialism he might try to bring to New York. But the bigger question might be what kind of socialism he embraces. His challenge will be to draw on DSA’s organizing support while transcending its fractiousness and some members’ ideological excesses.

DSA sprang to life in 1982 from the dying embers of earlier left-wing organizations. Its founders were committed to working within the Democratic Party. The group’s intellectual father was Michael Harrington, whose 1962 book The Other America: Poverty in the United States was credited with helping build support for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program. Harrington described DSA as occupying “the left wing of the possible.” That DSA refused for many years to work with Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyites, who were seen—for reasons grounded in decades of empirical observation—as authoritarian and disdainful of democracy. It attracted New York politicians such as former Mayor David Dinkins and had a membership of about 6,000. It remained bookish and locally respected and—for the first couple of decades after the end of the Cold War—more or less irrelevant.

Then came 2016 and Bernie Sanders’s electric run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Vermont senator is both avowedly a democratic socialist and temperamentally unsuited to behaving as any group’s obedient cadre. He never joined DSA (and long avoided joining the Democratic Party), but young people flocked to his banner—and to DSA’s. Two years later, a 28-year-old bartender and waitress vanquished a top House Democratic leader in a congressional primary. That insurgent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was a preternatural political talent. She became the face of DSA and played a role in attracting tens of thousands more young people to join the organization, whose national membership stands at about 70,000. The New York City chapter has 10,000 members.

Joshua Freeman, a retired historian at the City University of New York, joined DSA a few years ago, drawn by its sense of possibility. “The party is dominated by younger people, which is absolutely everyone except for about three of us,” he said. The 20-somethings gravitating to DSA in the past decade could be forgiven for viewing as ancient history the angry polemics and intellectual brawls that marked relations between 20th-century social democrats, Stalinists, and Trotskyites.

[Read: Why older socialists are quitting the DSA]

Yet significant divides have opened up within today’s group. “The problem is that while New York City DSA is pretty much in the ‘left wing of the possible’ tradition, the national party is not in that place,” Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College, told me. He was a DSA member for many decades before quitting when DSA equivocated about the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7. “Once the left sectarians are lodged in place, they become an immovable force.”

Militant groupings within DSA local chapters wield more power in cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Syracuse, and Portland, Oregon, than in New York. The Portland branch—four of whose members now sit on the city council—urges members to pursue a “rupture with the Democratic Party.” And its co-chair, Olivia Katbi, recently boasted on X of telling a New York Times reporter to bug off because that newspaper published “disgusting, racist, dehumanizing propaganda” about Palestinians.

These militant caucuses wield considerable power on DSA’s national committee, which controls national endorsements. The militants hold candidates to exacting, even self-defeating, standards. In 2024 the national organization withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez, the group’s best-known candidate. She apparently had paid insufficient attention to its Federal Socialists in Office Committee and, in a moment of apostasy, had co-signed a press release supporting stronger anti-missile systems to help Israel defend its civilian population.

DSA’s New York City branch, by contrast, voted by a wide margin to endorse her. “We’re concerned at the increasing mismanagement and sectarianism in DSA’s national leadership,” a caucus prominent in the New York chapter said in a statement, “as some leaders attempt to steer the organization into powerlessness and isolation.” (Ocasio-Cortez survived the national DSA snub, besting her Republican opponent by 38 points.)

Mamdani is more of a from-the-cradle socialist than Ocasio-Cortez. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent theorist of settler colonialism at Columbia University; his mother, Mira Nair, is a well-known filmmaker—Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist—with left-wing politics. When invited to attend the progressive Haifa International Film Festival in Israel in 2013, she declined, tweeting that she would go there only when Israel ended the occupation and stopped “privileging one religion over another.” Zohran, who identifies as a Muslim, noted in August 2023 that Palestinian liberation is “at the core” of his politics and was the cause that drew him to DSA.

DSA’s national political platform, rewritten when Mamdani was an assemblyman, is a gumbo of left-wing positions, many of which sit miles from the political mainstream. The organization would free all inmates from prisons and jails and decriminalize the drug trade, prostitution, and squatting in unoccupied homes. DSA endorses cutting police budgets “annually towards zero,” disarming cops, and decertifying their unions.

[Maurice Isserman: The cause that turned idealists into authoritarian zealots]

Mamdani has hauled some of this ideological baggage into the national spotlight. In December 2020, just after he was elected to the state assembly, Mamdani wrote of New York City’s police force: “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it.” That view has not aged well. Mamdani of late has taken to energetically disavowing his former view, portraying it as an artifact from many years past, before he was an elected official. “I am not defunding the police. I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters last month, after meeting in late July with the family of a police officer killed in a mass shooting. Mamdani said that he is a “candidate who is not fixed in time, one that learns and one that leads, and part of that means admitting as I have grown.”

The political successes of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and now Mamdani have done much to rehabilitate the term socialist and even give it a hip aura. Evidence that the term no longer carries a toxic sting can be heard on the right, as conservative commentators now use a harsher term to describe Mamdani: communist.

His actual positions range from splendidly consumer-friendly promises such as free municipal buses and cheap groceries in city-owned supermarkets to universal day care for all children ages six weeks to 5 years. He promises to freeze apartment-building rents and to triple the city’s capital budget, creating 200,000 units of publicly subsidized housing. The price tag for this is $100 billion over 10 years. He has sidestepped the question of how he would pay for all this, however badly day care and housing are needed, other than to propose billions of dollars in new taxes, all of which are controlled by the state legislature and governor.

[Michael Powell: The magic realism of Zohran Mamdani]

As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani met recently with the Partnership for New York City, a chamber of commerce for finance, real-estate, and corporate leaders. Afterward, Kathryn S. Wylde, its longtime president, told me that although Mamdani “has no policy chops—none—he is smart, has a smile that will kill, and he will listen.” He has overhauled his communications and campaign team, importing distinctly non-cadre sorts from the Democratic mainstream.

Mamdani seems aware that, however much he might still listen to his DSA comrades, he faces a larger reality: He could soon oversee some 300,000 employees in a city of 8.5 million people.

Still, unease among wealthy New Yorkers is palpable. They are accustomed to winning and not inclined to bet on the chances that a smart left-wing candidate might moderate after being elected mayor. They would prefer to spend money and seek his defeat. Several years ago, Mamdani joked about this reflex: “It’s almost a ritual of the donor class to set their money on fire when it comes to running against DSA candidates.”

Exhibit A is an email that an acquaintance forwarded to me in late July. Written by Ricky Sandler, the CEO of a global equity-management firm, the message predicted that a Mamdani victory would have “dire consequences.” It proposed a joint fund that would shower millions of dollars on a competing candidate. In his email, Sandler, who did not respond to my request for an interview, pledged to toss in $500,000, and he set the desired minimum counterrevolutionary donation at $25,000.

Alas, the donor class’s other choices are not appetizing. They include formerly indicted Mayor Eric Adams, now running as an independent; former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now running a sputtering independent campaign after Mamdani soundly defeated him in the Democratic primary; and Curtis Sliwa, a Republican best known for founding the anti-crime group Guardian Angels in the 1970s and more recently for sharing his apartment with 1 6 cats. (According to his campaign, he now has only six cats.)

Mamdani’s commanding lead in the polls offers him much room for political redefinition. His transition in the past five years—from obscure socialist state assembly candidate to a TikTok star who attracts Obama’s interest and sheds an artful tear with Warren—is remarkable. It is premature to say that he will wind up as just another left-liberal Democrat. He has been insistent throughout his brief political career on the centrality of his identity as a socialist. Without that, he told the DSA convention two years ago, “you will start to rationalize that which you initially rebelled against.” Socialists know, he told the convention, that “winning an election is not an end, but a means to an end.” The precise contours of his desired end remain, for now, something of a mystery.

This article has been updated to include the fact that, today, Curtis Sliwa has only six cats.

Trump Gains When Elites Downplay D.C. Crime

2025-08-15T10:30:00-04:00

As I listened this week to liberal politicians and journalists wave off talk of Washington, D.C.’s heartbreaking violence as mere Republican demagoguery, I was struck by many progressives’ dispiriting inability to talk candidly about the plague of crime afflicting working-class and poor Americans. This denial opens a door for President Donald Trump to speak in a language, however cynical, that resonates with those voters.

Responding to Trump’s takeover of policing in the nation’s capital, Senator Tim Kaine, a liberal Democrat from Virginia, stated this week that crime “is at a 30-year low in D.C., making these steps a waste of taxpayer dollars.” Although that’s true of violent crime in general, the city’s murder rate was lower throughout the 2010s. The Guardian acknowledged that “violent crime is higher in Washington DC than the national average” but reassured readers that the capital is “not among the most violent large cities in the United States today.” Jim Kessler, a think-tank executive who previously worked as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s legislative and policy director, went on Fox News to advise Americans to stifle their fears. “If people are afraid to come to D.C.,” he said, “go to Disney World, get fat, eat French fries.”

I am loath to defend Trump’s takeover of policing in D.C. Reassigning FBI agents as beat cops is a dubious crime-fighting practice, as agents know little of the District’s neighborhoods and how to distinguish between the good folks and those who are pure trouble. National Guard soldiers, to state the obvious, have little training in police work.

[Charles Fain Lehman: Trump is right that D.C. has a serious crime problem]

And some of the nation’s most violent cities—such as Memphis, Cleveland, and Little Rock, Arkansas—are found in pro-Trump states.

That doesn’t mean the city is safe, or that it’s politically wise to dismiss concerns about crime. Trump’s opponents this week made much of the fact that homicides in the District fell from 287 in 2023 to 187 in 2024. That improved number in the District is equivalent in per capita terms to 2,244 homicides in New York City. The actual count there last year was 377—slightly more than twice as many homicides as in D.C., but New York has more than 12 times as many people.

When I worked for The Washington Post in the late 1990s—not long after the period when D.C. was the nation’s murder capital—I reported on the city’s tragically high homicide rates. Both then and now, that problem, like so many other aspects of life in Washington, was de facto segregated by race and class. The Post recently published a map of 2024 homicides, with tiny circles for the name and location of everyone who was killed. This becomes clear: To wander the predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park and the thoroughly gentrified areas of Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard is to pass through neighborhoods with homicide rates closer to Copenhagen’s.

But across the Anacostia River in the majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, where more than 40 percent of the children live in poverty, reality is far grimmer. More than half of the District’s homicides last year occurred in these wards. Four years ago, the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform released a report on gun violence in D.C. Well in excess of 90 percent of the victims and suspects were Black males, the report found, “despite Black residents comprising only 46 percent of the overall population in the District.”

[Jonathan Chait: Donald Trump doesn’t really care about crime]

When I arrived in Washington in 1996, the Post would print at the beginning of each week a news brief that reduced the preceding weekend’s death toll to a terrible agate of victims’ names and addresses. What I recall most from that time was talking with young men who had seen friends killed, and some of whom possessed terrifying armaments and body armor. Mothers described to me how they trained their children to roll off their bed and hit the floor at the sound of gunfire. A grieving father told me maybe it was just as well that his son, a drug dealer, had died. “If he’d made it,” he said, “the first thing that would have come to his mind was revenge.”

The intensity of that bloodletting was not easily explained at the time—and that remains the case today. The D.C. police force still has more officers per capita than New York City or Chicago, and that does not include the federal police forces patrolling Capitol Hill and the parks. Something remains terribly wrong in too many neighborhoods in the District, and no one should dismiss that just because Trump appears to be making cynical use of that misery.

I have no doubt that Trump enjoys targeting Democratic-controlled cities for embarrassment. I also have little doubt that a mother in Ward 8 might draw comfort from a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child’s school. And I try to imagine having the audacity to insist to her that the homicides and the danger that are her daily reality are somehow a phantasm.

The Magic Realism of Zohran Mamdani

2025-06-18T14:40:28-04:00

Updated at 7 a.m. ET on June 20, 2025

Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing daydream of a New York City mayoral candidate. He’s young—33—and proudly socialist. His campaign ads call to mind a mashup of TikTok clips and hip-hop videos. The graphics look like something from the zany 1960s Batman TV series. He is a character in these ads, walking into the picture at odd angles on street corners and shawarma stands, and poppin g up to chat with taxi drivers.

You’d need to have a crabbed spirit not to admire Mamdani’s inventiveness, charisma, and championing of working-class New Yorkers. A third-term state assemblyman of no great accomplishment, he has upended the field in the June 24 Democratic Party primary, leaving better-credentialed opponents behind. He now runs a vigorous second in independent polls behind former Governor Andrew Cuomo and has formed alliances with lower-ranking rivals that benefit him most of all. But Mamdani’s candidacy also has a quality of magic realism, a campaign exuberantly disconnected from actual government budgets and organizational charts. His promises are grand: Freeze rents. Free municipal buses. Free day care for all New Yorkers ages six weeks to 5 years.

And, my personal favorite: cheap groceries.

How would he pay for his most ambitious plans? Tax the rich and major corporations.

Writing in In These Times, the author Bhaskar Sunkara sounded enraptured: “We need more democratic socialists who can do what Mamdani can do,” Sunkara wrote. “Communicate complex ideas clearly, relate to ordinary people without pandering and present a vision that feels achievable rather than utopian.”

Reading this, I rolled my eyes. Mamdani is a clever politician who can wink at his base—a new Marist poll of likely primary voters shows him a strong favorite among those under 45 and those who are “very liberal”—even as he flirts with less ideologically driven followers. Who, after all, objects to frozen rents and free buses? He grasps that New York City, like so many of this nation’s big Democratic-run cities, has grown oppressively expensive, culturally liberal, and economically royalist. Two-bedroom apartments rent for $6,000 a month in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, while one-bedroom apartments in what used to be working-class areas go for $3,500. The top 1 or 2 percent rule while the majority of New Yorkers scramble.

[Read: New York is not a democracy]

But few of Mamdani’s policy and funding proposals weather scrutiny. And that calls into question what might happen to his socialist political project should he end up overseeing a $112 billion city government with about 306,000 employees, and dealing with a president who would revel in using a left-wing New York mayor as a piñata. Perhaps Mamdani would be forced to moderate—and quickly—in office. He has promised to hire very smart people; that could help, although very smart, alas, is not universally synonymous with competent.

And his very smart aides might struggle, for instance, to make his housing proposals work. Mamdani has promised to create 200,000 units of new publicly subsidized, rent-stabilized housing and to fast-track projects consisting entirely of below-market-rate units. His campaign website claims that previous administrations relied “almost entirely” on the zoning code to encourage affordable housing. This is not so. For 40 years, New York has run the nation’s most ambitious and successful affordable-housing program, which rebuilt great swaths of the city using billions of dollars in municipal investment. Zoning changes to allow more housing construction are of recent vintage.

“Zohran and his advisers don’t know history and don’t have the slightest grasp of the numbers,” a former top city housing official told me. (He asked not to be identified because he still works with the city on affordable-housing projects.) Mamdani himself has proposed to triple the amount of money spent on housing in the city’s capital plan, pushing overall costs toward $100 billion over 10 years, which overshadows the estimated cost of his rivals’ plans. And he proposes to accomplish this with union labor, which the city’s Independent Budget Office found would add 23 percent to overall costs.

Meanwhile, Mamdani’s proposal to freeze rent in rent-stabilized units ignores fundamental problems: Landlords of much of the city’s rent-stabilized housing stock—including a number of respected nonprofit groups—cannot afford maintenance costs and debt service, the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission wrote recently. Because expenses are growing faster than rents in older buildings, many are “teetering on the edge of a ‘death spiral.’”

I reached out to Mamdani’s campaign for comment on these issues and have not yet heard back. His supporters seem unbothered by the obvious holes in his proposals. His tax increases sound righteous, a socialist holding the wealthy to account. But the state legislature and governor would have to sign off, and that is a very distant possibility.

Former Governor David Paterson once represented Harlem in the state assembly, and he opposed neither higher taxes nor social spending. But Paterson recognizes the line between ambition and fantasy. Mamdani doesn’t. “You understand exactly what he’s saying,” Paterson told Politico last month. “The problem is: Nobody told him there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.”

Mamdani has gained traction in no small part because the front-runner in this primary race is Cuomo, a double-espresso politician whose rivals on the left attack him as corrupt and in the thrall of conservative real-estate and financial lobbies. That caricature ignores that Cuomo was a successful and liberal governor. He rebuilt bridges and roads and subway tunnels, and gave a makeover to LaGuardia Airport, previously a dump. He turned the dream of gay marriage into law, championed abortion rights, and banned fracking. Under pressure from then–Mayor Bill de Blasio, he brought expanded prekindergarten to many corners of the state. He made state-university tuition free for full-time students from families with incomes of less than $125,000, passed legislation that protected tenants against large rent increases, and raised the minimum wage.

[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]

My accounting here will set some liberal friends to shuddering, so let me add caveats: Cuomo can be devious and vindictive as a matter of blood sport; as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he reportedly passed out copies of Machiavelli’s The Prince to aides. In Albany, he cut deals with political bosses and wreaked vengeance on opponents. He made a grievous error in the desperate early days of the pandemic. At that time hospitals were overwhelmed by the sheer number of COVID patients, and Cuomo required nursing homes to readmit medically stable elderly patients who had tested positive. The health-news site STAT News reported that these transfers were not the primary driver of nursing-home COVID deaths. But certainly some nursing-home residents got infected and died as a result—and Cuomo’s administration hid the data. “Ethicists said that Cuomo’s conduct stands out not because the policy he put in place was especially egregious, but because he obscured public health data for political gain,” STAT News reported.

Cuomo stepped down as governor after being accused of multiple cases of sexual harassment—allegations that he largely den ies today. And he has dodged and weaved to avoid the press and its questions during this campaign.

From Cuomo’s history, some conclude that he’s interested only in power and preserving the status quo—in contrast with Mamdani, who has framed himself as a tribune of the forgotten and the poor. The latest Marist poll showed Mamdani gaining among Latinos in particular; until recently, his support was strongest among white Democrats. But polls continue to point to an unsettling irony for the left: Mamdani outperforms with men and college-educated voters, while Cuomo finds his deepest well of support among Black and low-income voters. Cuomo draws 49 percent of the vote from New Yorkers making $50,000 or less; Mamdani draws 14 percent.

Although Mamdani still trails Cuomo by 10 points in Marist’s estimate of the final vote count, he has surged since the pollster’s previous report in mid-May. He is now marching about the city in the company of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has endorsed him. So has Senator Bernie Sanders. But transmuting socialist dreams into electoral victory is a tricky business, and governing by those principles could prove trickier still.

This article previously misstated the length of Zohran Mamdani’s tenure as a state assemblyman. He is in his third term.

An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So

2025-05-10T06:00:00-04:00

Professional baseball has a pitching crisis, as its starters throw harder and faster—and get injured more often. In search of what’s gone wrong with a pillar of this beautiful game, I drove along Lake Hartwell, in South Carolina, and pulled into a dirt driveway, where a baseball wizard by the name of Leo Mazzone greeted me. From 1990 to 2005, he oversaw the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff, one of the greatest in history. He’s long been dismayed by Major League Baseball’s relentless focus on analytics and what it has done to pitchers, and I figured I would give him a chance to say I told you so.

I asked Mazzone: What happened?

“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”

He chuckled.

“You see guys with these crazy-violent deliveries, spinning out on the mounds. Would I trust these guys in a game? Sheeit.”

Mazzone, 76, lives in a retirement exile, ignored by the Ivy League quants who now dominate teams’ front offices. In December, though, Major League Baseball released a report that implicitly acknowledged the core truths of Mazzone’s critique. The emphasis on throwing as hard as possible on every pitch is likely ruinous for a pitcher’s ligaments, the report found, and has led to a sharp increase in elbow surgeries. A pitcher’s craft is reduced to optimizing his “stuff”—arcane computer-driven metrics such as spin rates, horizontal and vertical breaks, and radar-gun-certified speed.

Beyond putting pitcher health at risk, this insistence results in boring, plain-ugly baseball. Pitcher workdays come with strict limitations. Two decades ago, after injury rates began to climb, teams imposed a limit of 100 pitches a game, and that somewhat arbitrary threshold yielded to limits of 90, 80, and even 70 pitches—meaning that most starters leave the pitching mound after five innings, before being replaced by largely anonymous relievers who are also throwing as hard as they can.

“The focus on velocity, ‘stuff,’ and max-effort pitching—have caused a noticeable and detrimental impact on the quality of the game on the field,” the report observed. “Such trends are inherently counter to contact-oriented approaches that create more balls in play and result in the type of on-field action that fans want to see.”

[From the July/August 2023 Issue: Moneyball broke baseball]

So far, though, the report hasn’t changed anything, perhaps because the fixation on pitch velocity and spin rates has become entrenched throughout the sport, from youth travel baseball to college to the majors. Electronically clocking a prospect’s fastball, and analyzing the arm and wrist torque that causes a ball to spin, is easier than forecasting whether he has the mental discipline and control needed to thrive for years in the majors. Front offices may calculate that burning through little-known relievers is cheaper and easier than finding and nurturing future stars.

More than two decades into the sabermetrics era, baseball evinces what is obvious in many fields: Fixating on statistics changes everything, and not always for the better. Pitching is not math; it’s an art.

Mazzone still advises college coaches and speaks at youth baseball conventions. He shudders when he sees young pitchers lift barbells and hurl weighted baseballs at walls. “The game now is all about speed,” he said, “and it’s all bullshit.”

Mazzone grew up in the rural sawmill town of Luke, Maryland, and labored for 10 years as an itinerant Minor League pitcher, including a stint in Mexico with the Guaymas Oystercatchers. As a Minor League coach for the Braves, he found a mentor in Johnny Sain, a perpetual rebel and pitching savant. Sain had tutored baseball’s best pitchers and insisted that they concentrate less on brute strength than on varying speeds and the location where the ball crossed home plate. “Every night he took me to his RV and fired up his grill, and we’d have a sip or two and just talk pitching,” Mazzone recalled. “I wondered about all the dumbasses who would not listen to this man.”

From Sain, Mazzone learned the elements of his pitching gospel. “All of our efforts were put on movement, change of speeds, location. Velocity was No. 4 on that list,” he said. Mazzone settled on simple rules: A good pitcher should throw at 85 percent of his full effort and learn to save his best for late in the game.

Mazzone was elevated to Braves pitching coach. His three best starters, Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, and Tom Glavine, won a total of six Cy Young awards as the best pitcher in the National League during Mazzone’s tenure in Atlanta and strolled into the Hall of Fame. He worked his magic on many other starting pitchers, whose careers were revived with the Braves. Some baseball writers and historians argue that Mazzone, for his wisdom and innovation, belongs in the Hall too.

Mazzone left the Braves in 2005 and served as pitching coach for the Baltimore Orioles, grooming some fine starting pitchers. After the Orioles fired him in 2007, Mazzone was prematurely retired, his strong opinions and barbed wit doing him no favors with front offices.

For more than a century, the starting pitcher was a favored prince. Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Juan Marichal, Justin Verlander, Steve Carlton, Pedro Martinez, Jim Palmer, Randy Johnson: To rattle off these names is to conjure up that lovely baseball pleasure, the solitary duel between a great pitcher and a great hitter.

I recall as a kid watching on a black-and-white television the 1973 World Series between my beloved New York Mets and the Oakland A’s. There was Seaver, with that relentless drop-and-drive delivery of his, facing off against Reggie Jackson, the swashbuckling Oakland slugger—darting fastballs and curves matched against a magnificent swing.

Batting styles have also changed since then, with much emphasis put on hitting with power, preferably home runs. Strikeouts have spiked sharply, and batting averages have plunged.

[Matteo Wong: The great torpedo-bat panic]

Mazzone does not care for that: more dullness. He’s not opposed to computer analysis as a tool in a coach’s arsenal. But his pitching credo had little to do with 100-mile-an-hour fastballs and the obsessive monitoring of pitch counts and spin rates. Mazzone has no patience for the conventional wisdom that pitchers tire and struggle on the third time through an opposing lineup, in the sixth or seventh inning.

Mazzone told me that his most reliable pitchers played well late in games. “The key was controlling the amount of effort,” he said.

In 1987, the Braves traded a fine but aging starting pitcher, Doyle Alexander, for John Smoltz, who came from the Detroit Tigers’ Minor League system. People chattered that the Braves had been fleeced. Take the kid out back to a pitching mound, then–General Manager Bobby Cox told Mazzone, and tell me what we’ve got. Scouting reports suggested that the 20-year-old Smoltz had a lively but erratic fastball.

Mazzone and the kid walked to a back lot in the Braves training complex. “I told Smoltzy to just throw natural,” Mazzone recalled. On the fourth or fifth pitch, Smoltz shook his head and muttered,: “This ain’t right.”

“What ain’t right?” Mazzone asked.

“Well, my left leg has to go here, and my right leg has to go there,” Smoltz said. “When I was in Detroit—”

Mazzone cut him off. “You’re not in fucking Detroit. Throw natural.”

Smoltz—who has recalled their conversation similarly—calmed down and tossed one fastball after another across the plate, beautiful as could be. From there, Mazzone worked on developing Smoltz’s off-speed pitches.

A year later, Smoltz reached the majors at age 21. A year after that, he pitched more than 200 Major League innings. “I said to myself, Damn, this was too easy,” Mazzone recalled.

Although Mazzone kept a clicker in his pocket to count pitches, he is no fan of that stat. From Seaver to Nolan Ryan to Ferguson Jenkins, many great pitchers threw more than 270 innings in multiple seasons—which meant they tossed well in excess of 100 pitches a game. Yet the record shows that most of them, particularly at their career peak, were harder to hit in later innings than earlier in the game. Mazzone’s top Braves pitchers averaged 200 to 250 innings a year and rarely missed games because of injuries. “My greatest satisfaction was the health of my staff,” he said. “We gave them a chance to earn their money.”

John Smoltz of the Atlanta Braves, circa 1988. (Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Owen C. Shaw / Getty)

Even when Mazzone counted pitches, he was purposely erratic about the count, he gleefully admits. He wanted to teach his pitchers to work through fatigue without resorting to trying to muscle pitches by a batter. Far better to rely on good form and guile. “Hell, I used to cheat,” he said, cackling. “Smoltzy would come off the mound and say, ‘I’m a little tired’ and I’d say, ‘Geez, that’s strange—you’ve only got 60-something pitches.’”

Cox caught on: “Bobby Cox would ask me, ‘Is that the real pitch count or is that fucking yours?!’” Cox, who had the fourth-highest win total in history as a manager, was not much more enamored of data. Because of him, Mazzone said, the Braves stadium was the last in the majors to install a digital screen showing the count and speed of pitches.

Quants would counter that trying to return to Mazzone’s era would be folly. Hitters have more sophisticated workout regimens, and the emphasis on swinging up on the ball to hit home runs has changed the game. To ask a pitcher to throw at less than maximum effort is to risk getting clobbered.

But many successful pitchers have eschewed that ethos. In 2016, I watched Bartolo Colon pitch for the Mets at age 43, well past the point when most pitchers have retired. A portly fellow, he threw a fastball that was notably slow and more often traveled in the mid-80s. Yet he artfully varied speeds and hit his spots, and pitched nearly 200 innings and finished 15–8.

Compared with today, pitchers were at a far greater disadvantage in the ’90s and 2000s—baseball’s Frankenstein Era, when steroids were rampant among power hitters and home-run totals soared. Yet in 2000, the relatively diminutive Pedro Martinez (5 foot 11 and 170 pounds; known for his exquisite control) pitched 217 innings for the Red Sox, struck out 284 men, and posted a record of 18–6 with a microscopic 1.74 earned-run average. In the National League that same year, Maddux, then 34 and past his prime, pitched 249 innings and finished 19–9—even though, Mazzone recalls, his fastball rarely edged past 90 miles an hour.

If, in that most hostile era, the best pitchers could control the strike, today’s pitchers have nothing to fear. “Hitters are bigger and stronger, but they make less contact than ever,” Mazzone said. “That’s good for pitchers!

Mazzone’s motor never stops. When he was with the Braves, he rocked back and forth on the bench. The more intense the game, the faster he rocked. As we sat in his study—lined with uniforms, signed baseball photos, championship rings, and bats and balls—and talked about recent pitching foolishness, his voice rose, and he rocked in his chair. He dismissed any suggestion that he was stuck in the past. He endorsed recent reforms intended to liven up the game that has slowed down dramatically in the sabermetrics era.

He likes the pitch clock, which gives pitchers no more than 15 to 18 seconds between throws. Starters, he said, should adhere to a brisk pace. And he has made peace with the decision to start extra innings by placing a man on second base. “It adds strategy,” he said.

But he’s no optimist about the future of his beloved starting pitchers. From the majors to youth Pony League, a mania for speed predominates, as if everyone has purchased stock in radar-gun makers. “I talk to youth leagues and warn them: Never talk about velocity to your kids,” he said. “Then I take questions, and it’s all about speed.”

[Devin Gordon: Arms are flying off their hinges]

When I interviewed Mazzone several years ago, he recounted how Maddux had once tried to explain to young Braves pitchers during spring training how old-fashioned craft could lead to fantastical riches. “You know why I am a millionaire? Because I can put my fastball wherever I want to,” Maddux had said. “Do you know why I own beachfront property in L.A.? Because I can change speeds. Okay, questions?”

I asked Mazzone: What would happen if Maddux gave that speech today? Mazzone scoffed. “They’d nod,” he said, “and go back to throwing weighted baseballs at walls and trying to throw 100 miles per hour.”

The Double Standard in the Human-Rights World

2025-03-27T12:25:42-04:00

The demonstration in London was like so many others in the past year and a half. A swell of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, tens of thousands of them, banged drums and chanted against Israel. Although this march in early October observed the one-year anniversary of the day Hamas militants broke a cease-fire by invading Israeli territory, the marchers paid no heed to the civilians who were murdered or kidnapped.

The U.K. chapter of the world’s largest human-rights organization, Amnesty International, echoed the marchers’ point of view. The official Amnesty UK account on X promoted a video of an unnamed young female protester clad in a red shirt and a keffiyeh. She peered into the camera and said: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October, 2023.”

The video showed a demonstrator’s placard: It’s been 76 years & 364 days—a reference to events that culminated in the founding of Israel in the late 1940s. The implication: Israel, a member state of the United Nations, has no right to exist. The clip, which Amnesty UK captioned “It didn’t start one year ago,” drew 9.7 million views. Amnesty employees around the world shared it.

The social-media promotion of this march marked an astonishing shift for one of the world’s most prominent human-rights organizations. Amnesty’s handbook declares that it is “independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it necessarily support the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.”

Amnesty’s goal was to serve as an advocate for victims and prisoners of conscience, and to stand apart from the polarized politics of the Cold War. The same ethos influenced the founders of Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders. As the latter group proclaims on its website: “We are independent, impartial, and neutral.”

More recently, though, human-rights leaders have grown accustomed to looking at the complicated stew of politics and culture in Israel and Palestine and blaming Israel foremost. As the cultural and political left has come to dominate the human-rights community, young staffers with passionate ideological commitments have helped rewrite the agendas of the best-known organizations. Critical theories of social justice, built on binaries that categorize Palestinians as oppressed and Israel as the oppressor, now dominate many conversations about the Jewish state, which a constellation of groups casts as uniquely illegitimate—a regressive, racist ethnic “Western” state in an Arab sea.

[Dara Horn: Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies]

Rasha Khoury, the president of the board of Doctors Without Borders USA and a surgeon who has worked courageously in war zones, might be seen as the embodiment of this new tendency in the human-rights establishment. She was born in the occupied Palestinian territories. A month after the Hamas attack and the beginning of the Israeli counterattack, she posted an essay on the organization’s digital bulletin board, known as the Souk, the Arabic word for “market.” “We must decolonize our minds,” she wrote. “The mainstream discourse around the unhinged bombardment and massacre of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli forces for the last 33 days continues to affirm the colonizer’s world view, one rooted in white supremacist logic.”

Not long after October 7, Khoury was among the co-authors of “Violence in Palestine Demands Immediate Resolution of Its Settler Colonial Root Causes”—an article in the journal BMJ Global Health that, subsequent commentators argued, ignored Hamas’s role in triggering the Israeli invasion and incorrectly blamed the Jewish state for a deadly missile strike. In a follow-up article, Khoury and her co-authors responded to the criticism with scorn. “Demands for ‘corrections,’” they declared, “are almost always demands to acquiesce to Israeli state propaganda.”

In a similar spirit, Doctors Without Borders seemed to minimize the egregiousness of the Hamas attack from the start, describing it on X that very day as “the escalation between Israel and Gaza.” Other human-rights groups have more forthrightly condemned the Hamas offensive but primarily faulted the Jewish state for the underlying conflict. On the day of the attack, Amnesty’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, posted on X that she was dismayed by the mounting Palestinian and Israeli civilian deaths. She also called for addressing “the root causes of these escalating cycles of violence.” Doing so, she went on, “requires upholding international law and ending Israel’s 16-year-long illegal blockade on Gaza, and all other aspects of Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on all Palestinians.”

Human-rights groups fairly argue that disagreeing with Israel’s actions and policies is not anti-Semitic, but they have become more and more averse even to considering Israel’s side. “There’s clearly a leftist perspective that would like to do away with Israel,” the longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth told me. Roth led the group for decades before stepping down in 2022 and maintained that his former employer did not share this perspective. Some other former employees of the group disagreed. “The trend is to substitute ideology and personal belief for the principles of the human-rights movement,” Danielle Haas, who left her job as a senior editor at Human Rights Watch, told me.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International took the extraordinary step of suspending its Israel chapter, after that chapter criticized a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. In an internal email to colleagues in Europe, Amnesty Israel deputy director Yariv Mohar suggested that the broader organization was playing into “a zero-sum victimhood game, as if any attention or acknowledgment to the victimhood of one side comes at the expense of the other.”

Major human-rights groups’ shift toward overt opposition to Israel has had the unusual effect of sidelining many of Israel’s own activists, who historically are among the sharpest critics of the Israeli government’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank. These activists—along with many Jewish counterparts around the world—object to the reflexive condemnation of Israel and wrestle with questions they find vexing: How can the country protect itself from Hamas? What would a proportionate, defensible response to October 7 look like?

Roy Yellin is a longtime left-wing human-rights activist in Israel who has worked closely with the big international groups in Europe and the United States over the years. “Human-rights organizations earned their prestige because they described reality as it was,” he said. “But too often now I’ve seen lots of colleagues in the international community who I thought of as partners who are in complete denial about what Hamas did in Israel.”

Within human-rights organizations, anger toward Israel has been simmering for decades, particularly as the country’s politics have shifted rightward and its settlements have expanded in the West Bank. On October 7, the divide within the human-rights movement over Israel began to seem unbridgeable, in particular to many Jewish employees. That morning, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters viciously attacked Israel, slaughtering civilians before retreating back into Gaza, where they gathered their armaments and hid in tunnels, using the dense civilian population aboveground as human shields. Hospitals, schools, and universities—all became hiding spots for Hamas militants.

Israel responded with a relentless, at times brutal, invasion of Gaza, in which many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, were killed. This has given rise to a heated debate about whether such actions can be justified. Many critics have argued that Israel, as a democracy that professes to follow modern rules of war, has an obligation to minimize civilian casualties, and they point to abundant evidence that Israel chose to drop bombs on Hamas militants and headquarters even when aware that these sites were crowded with civilians. Even some Israelis have objected to the duration of the war and felt that it was too driven by feelings of rage and revenge. The international human-rights movement has gone further. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders have all accused Israel of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide. Some human-rights leaders have openly questioned Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Over the past six months, I’ve reviewed internal emails and hundreds of social-media posts by leaders of prominent human-rights organizations. I’ve also spoken with more than two dozen Jewish employees of these groups, nearly all of whom described a pervasive and growing estrangement from the organizations where they had worked, in some cases, for decades. None of these staffers would pass for an apologist for Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics are left of center and many are deeply critical of Israel’s invasion and of actions that they categorize as war crimes. But, they said, talk of taking a nuanced view of the conflict drew contempt from colleagues and supervisors.

These Jewish employees argued internally that Israel had waged a brutal war, but also that Israelis were badly scarred by the slaughter of October 7 and that Hamas had committed terrible war crimes and acts of terrorism. Yet to take these positions was to risk being labeled as a propagandist for a settler-colonialist regime. Many of these employees are particularly galled by the frequent claim that Israel is a white-supremacist state. More than half of Israeli Jews are descendants of those who lived in Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia; a great many others have ancestors who were driven from Europe by the Nazis.

A former top executive with a well-known human-rights organization noted the frustration inherent in trying to draw evenhanded distinctions that were once elementary in the human-rights world. “Hamas has an obligation under international law not to use human shields and to distinguish between military and civilian targets,” this person, who asked not to be identified to avoid further alienating former colleagues, said. “But if you bring this up internally, it’s framed as a distraction, an Israeli talking point.”

The leaders of the world’s most prominent human-rights groups have displayed little appetite for acknowledging the uncertainty and moral murk of the Gaza war. On October 17, 2023, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital and killed close to 500 Palestinians. Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders immediately picked up on that claim: The leaders of the latter group posted about the Israeli “massacre” on their social-media feeds. And Human Rights Watch’s director of Israel and Palestine issues, Omar Shakir, amplified a post blaming Israel for the attack. He added: “Abject horror. THIS MUST END.”

Shakir backed off a few hours later, saying that his organization was investigating. And to its credit, Human Rights Watch did so judiciously. A month later, it reported that the explosion likely was caused by a misfired Palestinian missile, which hit a paved area next to a parking lot and not the hospital itself. It also faulted the Gaza Health Ministry for reporting a death toll that is “significantly higher than other estimates, displays an unusually high killed-to-injured ratio, and appears out of proportion with the damage visible on site.” (Unlike Amnesty and Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch has also released a report that researched and documented Hamas’s war crimes on October 7.)

[Read: The case for Palestinian pragmatism]

To this day, Doctors Without Borders has not removed its debunked claims of Israeli malfeasance from its social-media feed.

Doug Sandok worked with Doctors Without Borders in Rwanda, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka in the 1990s. He has charted the curdling of the group’s rhetoric regarding Israel. “I went to an organization-wide meeting in November 2023, and the discourse shocked me, all about anti-settler-colonialism and racism,” he told me. “A number of us asked, ‘Is it really a foregone conclusion that Israel has committed genocide?’ It feels like one more institution captured by the ideological left.”

For Dan Balson, working for Amnesty International was a longtime dream. He and his parents got out of the Soviet Union in 1988, as part of a wave of Jewish émigrés. Amnesty, he told me, played a key role in pressuring Moscow to release families like his. “It was a household name in my world,” Balson, who is 40, said.

He became Amnesty’s advocacy director for Europe and Central Asia, covering territory that stretched from Russia to Afghanistan to Ukraine. He admired the courage and creativity that his colleagues showed in documenting human-rights abuses. One used a fragment of an exploded shell that killed civilians to track down and publicly identify the armaments manufacturer; another donned a niqab and traveled through a war zone, documenting the crimes of a government and its secret police.

Slowly, however, Balson noticed a harshness creeping in whenever the subject of Israel arose. In particular, when he visited Amnesty’s global headquarters in London, he sensed an antipathy toward Israel and anyone who identified as a Zionist.

On the morning of October 7, Balson checked and rechecked his messages to see if Israeli friends had been harmed. Then he scrolled the Amnesty International website, which issued a statement that day deploring that “civilians on both sides” were “paying the price of unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza.” That statement just once referred to Hamas, which controls the government of Gaza, preferring the term “Palestinian armed groups.”

Balson turned to X and saw that his colleague Rasha Abdul-Rahim, then the director of technical services for Amnesty, had claimed that although she was distressed by reports of Palestinian fighters dancing on Israeli bodies, Palestinians had suffered worse for decades. She added:“To be truly anti racist and decolonial is to recognise that resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly.”

That night Balson wrote his resignation letter. Amnesty International’s time-honored approach, he wrote to his supervisors, was to decode the motivations, anxieties, and limitations of a nation and its leaders, even when those are disagreeable. None of that seemed to apply to Israel. Amnesty’s approach, he wrote, “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”

Even Amnesty’s sparing acknowledgment of Hamas’s role on October 7 had proved too pro-Israeli for some staffers, who insisted that Amnesty’s statement was too understanding of Israel. As debate grew within the organization, and some Jewish staffers argued for measured tones, other Amnesty employees complained that such arguments were “triggering” and accused Jewish colleagues of Islamophobia, multiple staffers told me.

I asked Amnesty International USA’s director, Paul O’Brien, about these tensions. He replied that most conversations within Amnesty USA were respectful but “not pain-free.” Might unbridled passions and angry social-media postings, I asked, interfere with Amnesty’s work? “I have seen social-media publications that I wish we had not sent,” he acknowledged.

O’Brien’s critics see his own conduct as at times emblematic of the movement’s growing opposition to Israel’s entire reason for being. In March 2022, he backhandedly endorsed the disestablishment of Israel in its current form. “We are opposed to the idea—and this, I think, is an existential part of the debate—that Israel should be preserved as a state for the Jewish people,” he said at a luncheon of the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. He subsequently expressed regret for his remarks and said that Amnesty “takes no position on the legitimacy or existence of any state, including Israel.” (Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens vote and are represented in the country’s Parliament and on its supreme court.)

But making stridently anti-Israel remarks, whether in person or online, is not a barrier to gaining a prominent role at Amnesty. In April 2022, a Palestinian gunman killed three Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. Rasha Abdel Latif, a human-rights activist in D.C., reposted a social-media statement written in Arabic that stated: “This land is our land … The occupation has no choice but to leave.”

Four days later, Amnesty USA appointed Latif to its board. Two people told me that angry Jewish employees demanded a meeting with O’Brien and management, during which O’Brien conceded that, yes, Latif’s social-media post could be read as anti-Jewish. But he said that she had learned her lesson and that the board would not censure her so as to avoid giving comfort to the organization’s critics. Latif’s critics accused Amnesty of treating her as a victim. “The only reason she was not removed from the board is that the victims of her bias were Jewish,” Balson told me.

Writing inflammatory social-media posts has become common among Amnesty officials. On the first day of 2024, Abdul-Rahim, the former technical-services director, posted on X, “Happy new year to everyone except the #israeli apartheid state.” Even Amnesty USA’s official website features dubious statements. In May, Amnesty put up a collage of footage from its “Solidarity With Gaza” conference, accompanied by music from the hip-hop artist Macklemore. “Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but white supremacy is finally on blast,” Macklemore said in his rap about Israel.

I asked O’Brien about that post, which at a minimum seemed ignorant of Israel’s actual demographics. O’Brien said he was unfamiliar with it (though it had been on Amnesty USA’s site for half a year, even after employees had complained about it to senior managers). I sent him a link, and he replied the next day: “Thanks for flagging that post. We have removed it as it did not follow our internal guidelines.”

This past fall, on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, an extraordinary anonymous statement purporting to represent more than 40 current and former Doctors Without Borders staffers appeared on the Souk. It angrily protested how the Geneva-based organization, which has 69,000 employees and an annual budget well over $1 billion, tended to characterize the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The statement accused Doctors Without Borders of remaining silent about Hamas’s “ferocious barbarity” and sexual violence and of ignoring Israelis taken hostage, some of whom died in captivity, including infants. “This version” of the organization, the statement declared, “does not represent us. It barely represents itself.”

French physicians founded Doctors Without Borders in the aftermath of a civil war and famine in Nigeria. Its charter committed to providing medical care without regard to politics, race, or nationality. But five staffers, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of endangering their jobs, described an environment in which their colleagues refused to entertain any nuance about the Jewish state. In November, for example, Javid Abdelmoneim, the former president of Doctors Without Borders UK, endorsed a full boycott of Israel, writing on X: “Invest no other time on Israel other than to cut it out of your life.”

Michael Goldfarb, a former longtime communications director for Doctors Without Borders, had worked in desolate and dangerous corners of the world. But his patience for his former employer eventually reached an end. He posted last year on the Souk, writing of his frustration with the “blatantly hate filled and, yes, anti-Semitic responses” within the organization to the anonymous Souk statement. “Fear of retaliation, silencing, and ostracism grips many MSF colleagues,” he wrote, using the French abbreviation for Doctors Without Borders, “who nonetheless courageously endorsed the publication of the post.” (Goldfarb declined my request for further comment.)

As if to underline his statement about organizational intolerance, Doctors Without Borders employees let loose on the Souk, going after Goldfarb and all those who signed the statement. “I leave you with your hatred, your racism and your victimization (We’re used to it!),” one rank-and-file staffer wrote. Another employee, Olivier Falhun, of the press office in Paris, responded to the dissenters, “At the risk of offending your principles-based catechism, I can’t resist sharing with you a self-evident solution … ‘We’ll have to give the land back. It’s as simple as that.’”

[Gershom Gorenberg: Netanyahu takes desperate measures]

These and similar statements have remained on the organization-wide site for many months. (I sought to talk with senior leaders at Doctors Without Borders USA about this atmosphere and other questions regarding Israel. A press officer, Brienne Prusak, wrote back that “we are respectfully going to decline.”)

The organization’s one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes beyond incendiary sentiments on message boards and social media. The fact is that the hospitals they worked in were often home to Hamas gunmen and armaments.

In November 2023, the Israeli army announced plans to root out Hamas operatives that it said were hiding in Al-Shifa Hospital, a major medical facility in Gaza City. A large contingent of Doctors Without Borders staff worked there, and its leaders took offense at the Israeli claim. The president of its Australian chapter, Katrina Penney, told a newspaper that she had “seen no evidence that the hospital buildings or the compounds are being used by Hamas as a military base.”

I asked two Doctors Without Borders employees who had worked in East Jerusalem and Gaza about such claims. These staffers frowned. The presence of Hamas gunmen in that hospital and in others was an open secret. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” the staffer, who asked for anonymity out of a desire to continue to work in the human-rights field, told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

Laws of war require soldiers to act with great care when fighting around hospitals, and none of this testimony would justify Israeli brutality. Likewise, however, humanitarian groups such as Doctors Without Borders claim to observe the principle of bearing witness to abuses—an obligation that includes challenging armed groups such as Hamas that risk civilian lives by using hospitals as bases and hiding spots.

Months after that Israeli operation at Al-Shifa, Hamas’s subterfuge was exposed—as was the willful ignorance of Doctors Without Borders. A New York Times investigation strongly suggested that Hamas used Al-Shifa for cover and to store weapons. U.S. spy agencies went further, saying that Hamas used Al-Shifa as a command center and that it held hostages there. That would be a war crime.

Last June, Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of killing one of its staff physiotherapists, Fadi Al-Wadiya, as he biked to work. Organization officials portrayed this as a war crime, an innocent family man slaughtered. An official statement said, “There is no justification for this; it is unacceptable.”

Doctors Without Borders posted a photo of Al-Wadiya’s fractured bicycle. Word circulated that he had been a fighter with Islamic Jihad, a radical group that allied with Hamas on October 7. The organization vigorously denied this. Then the Israeli army released photos of Al-Wadiya, who it said was a rocket specialist, wearing an Islamic Jihad uniform. Doctors Without Borders ultimately conceded that it was “deeply concerned by these allegations” and said it would “never knowingly employ” a fighter.

A staffer involved in hiring for Doctors Without Borders spoke of great organizational pressure to expand hiring in Gaza. “We were told not to check backgrounds,” this employee told me, adding that one office in Gaza had two known Hamas militants. “Our Arab staff was greatly concerned because to be in the same room with operatives put all at risk.”

This staffer paused. “Look, I’m truly not defending Israel; there is a lot in its actions to criticize,” this person said, adding that Doctors Without Borders had been “blindly pro-Palestinian to an extent that was destructive. And if you were Jewish and questioned it, you were just waved off.”

Amid the terrible losses and savage fighting that have marked the war in Gaza, human-rights groups have demonstrated far greater urgency in documenting and denouncing Israel’s conduct than that of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In December, Amnesty International released its much anticipated and publicized report accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Amnesty, however, has yet to complete a long-promised report examining the Hamas-driven murder and rape of Israeli civilians on October 7. O’Brien said the staff is hard at work on this. “The documentation has been extraordinarily difficult,” he told me. “Investigating sexual violence in an ethical and sensitive manner can take many months.”

Amnesty has moved with far more dispatch to stamp out dissent within its ranks. Amnesty’s Israeli chapter is known for feisty independence, taking on Netanyahu’s government and at times its own international parent group. The Israeli branch has maintained that, although it was not downplaying “the many horrific atrocities made by Israel in Gaza, which, according to the information we have, seems, on the surface, to have crossed the threshold of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing,” it viewed Amnesty’s accusation of genocide as poorly reasoned. The genocide claim, the chapter argued, seemed designed to “support a popular narrative among Amnesty International’s target audience.” The Israeli branch, frustrated with the broader organization’s silence on such questions, also began what it called a “pro-human campaign” to condemn both what it saw as anti-Semitism in some worldwide protests and the Islamophobia inside Israel, and to point out that extremists on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict promote ideologies of annihilation.

[Read: The left’s self-defeating Israel obsession]

The campaign announcement angered top Amnesty officials in the United States and Europe. Last May, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the senior director of global research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, ordered the Israeli chapter to end its campaign. “Given the serious reputational and legitimacy risk, I am asking you to take this document down from all your platforms immediately,” she wrote in an email that I obtained.

The right-wing Israeli government and its supporters frequently clash with the country’s Amnesty chapter. For their part, Amnesty International leaders view the Israeli branch as rogue and disloyal, and in January, not long after the criticism of the genocide report, they suspended the chapter for two years. Amnesty emails suggest that this could turn into a full expulsion. Tiumalu Lauvale Peter Fa’afiu, the New Zealand–born chair of Amnesty’s international board, wrote to his team that it must decide “whether Amnesty International Israel has a future within the Amnesty Movement.”

These emails revealed that Amnesty leaders planned in advance to deflect the Israeli chapter’s criticism of their genocide report by accusing it of “endemic anti-Palestinian racism.” A Fa’afiu email underlined the real grievance: The Israeli branch had tried to “publicly discredit Amnesty’s human rights research and positions.”

After leaving Amnesty, Dan Balson has found himself adrift. He has begun, with reluctance and disappointment, to wonder about the assumptions of so many in the human-rights movement. “Within Amnesty, the phrase ‘Criticism of Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism’ has taken on a kind of mystical significance,” he told me. “It is repeated frequently and forcefully, in private and in public. Amnesty’s leadership appears to believe that, if said with the proper zeal and elocution, the phrase will magically ward off deeper scrutiny.”

Yellin, the left-wing Israeli activist who has collaborated with major international groups, is even more disillusioned. “They think if they just scream ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ maybe we will go back to Europe.”

He exhaled. “Some days I feel like I’ve just been a useful idiot.”

What Trump Is Getting From Eric Adams

2025-02-11T17:08:59-05:00

What a glorious time to be an ethically challenged politician. President Donald Trump began yesterday by pardoning Illinois’s eminently corrupt former Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, who’d tried to auction off a U.S. Senate seat. Last night, Trump extended his mercies to the indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. The message is twofold and rather elemental: Prosecutors are not to be trusted. And bowing to Trump will yield rewards even for newly minted loyalists.

The Justice Department acted as the mayor’s agent of deliverance, directing the local U.S. attorney to drop the corruption case against him. Adams faced daunting and highly credible federal accusations that he’d accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets and collected contributions from wealthy foreigners who are not legally allowed to contribute to campaigns.

Adams’s reign has been plagued by many other scandals. Many in his inner circle at City Hall have come under federal, state, and city investigation and resigned in the past year. In December, his chief adviser was indicted on charges of bribe taking.

Adams has denied breaking the law. Quite remarkably, the memo from the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, says the agency reached its decision without even assessing the strength of the evidence against the mayor or the legal theories used in the indictment.

The motives proffered by Bove are baldly political. The federal indictment under which Adams labored had “unduly restricted” the mayor’s ability to devote his energies to the president’s policy agenda. While in private practice, Bove represented Trump in three criminal cases. Presumably, he is well practiced at keeping a straight face while advancing preposterous arguments.

[Read: The low comedy of Eric Adams’s indictment]

In fact, Bove is extending a quid pro quo that was neither hidden nor subtle. He noted that the Justice Department reserves the right to reinstate charges against Adams at some future date, the suggestion being that the mayor’s behavior could determine his fate. Remain shoulder to shoulder with Trump on immigration, warn New York school principals and homeless-shelter managers against ill-considered displays of conscience such as demanding that ICE produce search warrants, and the mayor can expect to remain out of the legal dock.

Adams expressed no qualms about this deal, as he so rarely displays any hint of embarrassment at his self-serving behavior. Adams’s defenders argue that this was just penny-ante grubbing about for small-time benefits and merited a slap on the wrist rather than an indictment. That ignores the fact that his alleged corruption of the campaign-finance system helped him obtain fraudulent millions of dollars in matching funds. Safety may have been at stake: Prosecutors said that Adams obtained some of his upgrades and hotel rooms in exchange for pressuring the fire department to stifle concerns about building violations and speed approval of a new office building for a Turkish consulate.

Adams pursued the dropping of charges with single-minded energy. He traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump and worked to snare an invi tation to his inauguration. He appeared on an online show hosted by Tucker Carlson, the Trump ally and former Fox News personality who is sailing ever faster toward the kookier ports of the far right. When asked of late to criticize the president, Adams has kept silent. “If I do disagree,” the mayor told the press, “I will communicate with him directly.”

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

His knee remains artfully bent now. He recently told the city’s law office to instruct city employees to cooperate wherever possible with federal immigration officials.

Adams learned of the dropping of charges while enjoying a meal with the Republican billionaire John Catsimatidis at Gallaghers, a high-priced steakhouse. The billionaire is said to have proved helpful in this matter. Did he pick up the mayor’s tab? A shrug is perhaps the best response. Because at this point, who would bother to investigate?

The Cumulative Toll of Democrats’ Delusions

2024-11-09T08:00:00-05:00

Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, cut me off before I even finished my question: Congressman, were you— “Surprised? No, I was not surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class district in the Bronx, told me. “Much of my side in politics, and much of the media, was in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”

Which is to say, too many in Torres’s party assumed that they were heralds of virtue and endangered democratic values and that Americans would not, as a despairing New York Times columnist put it this week, vote for an “authoritarian grotesquerie.”

This, Torres argued, was purest delusion. Inflation and steeply rising rates on credit cards, car loans, and mortgages may not have been President Joe Biden’s fault, but they buffeted Americans. The immigration system was broken, and migrants swamped shelters in big cities. There’s no need to assume—as some commentators have after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory Tuesday—that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; across the globe, voters have tossed out governments on the left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for the inflation, but objectively, that was a near-insurmountable disadvantage.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics. “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”

The result is the reality that Americans woke up to on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of counties in the nation, even some of the bluest of blue, had shifted rightward. The Republicans had broken down the door to the Democrats’ house and were sitting in the living room drinking its beer (or wine, as the case might be). On the day after the election, I clicked through a digital election-results map of New Jersey. Biden in 2020 took New Jersey, a Democratic Party bastion, by nearly 16 percentage points over Trump; Harris won the state by a more parsimonious five points. Everywhere, Republicans sanded down Democratic margins. In the state’s northeast corner, across from New York City, Biden had taken prosperous Bergen County by 16 percentage points in 2020; Harris took the same county by three points. Far to the south, in Atlantic County, which includes the deteriorating casino capital of Atlantic City, Biden had won by seven points; Trump took it by four points.

Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign. But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.

In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.

Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting blocs, and Trump’s gains this year among nonwhite voters are part of a longer trend. Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

For some anti-Trump and progressive commentators, the leakage of Latino, Black, and Asian voters from the Democratic column this year registered as a shock, even a betrayal. This week, the MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough and his guest, the Reverend Al Sharpton, both upset with Trump’s triumph, suggested that Harris’s race and gender worked against her. “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates,” Scarborough opined; Black men, Sharpton said, are among “the most sexist” people.

To accept such stereotypes requires ignoring piles of contrary evidence. In 2008 and again in 2012, to cite an example, Hispanic voters up and down the Rio Grande Valley in Texas delivered huge electoral margins to President Barack Obama, who is Black. Many millions of Black men, nearly 80 percent of those who cast a ballot, exit polls suggest, voted for Harris this past Tuesday.

Black and Latino voters are not the only demographics drawing blame for Trump’s victory. Some commentators have pointed an accusatory finger at white women, suggesting they bear a group guilt for selling out women’s rights. This fails as a matter of fact. Nearly half of white women voted for Harris. But more to the point, telling people how to think and not to think is toxic in politics. Yet many liberal commentators seem unable to help themselves.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.

[Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose]

This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Professors might heed the words of Representative Ruben Gallego, a Latino Democrat who is currently wrapped in a tight race for a Senate seat in Arizona. Four years ago, I spoke with him about identity politics in his party. A progressive, Gallego is a favorite of Latino activists, who flock from California to work on his campaigns. He told me that he appreciated their help but warned them that if they used the word Latinx when talking to his Latino constituents, he would load them onto the next bus back to Los Angeles.

“It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us,” he told me.

And nonwhite liberals too, he might have added.

Having lost twice to Trump in three election cycles, and this time watching Republicans reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.

The party might pay some heed to Torres, the Bronx representative. A veteran of political wars, he is a progressive Democrat on economic issues and has taken much grief of late from left activists for his vigorous support of Israel. He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.

But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

In an election year that fell decisively, disastrously short of utopian for Democrats, such advice registers as entirely practical.

The Low Comedy of Eric Adams’s Indictment

2024-09-28T07:00:00-04:00

Credit is due to indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. His recent predecessors took multiple terms to become enmeshed in scandal. Adams was elected in November 2021; less than three years later, federal prosecutors have hit him with five felony counts.

In a document that was unsealed Thursday, the government accuses Adams of ripping off the city’s campaign-finance system in a not particularly ingenious fashion, and of cadging free luxury-hotel rooms overseas and airline upgrades from people who may have been agents of the Turkish government. This is a sad step down from the classical municipal scandal, entailing mayors conspiring or looking the other way as contracts are fixed or commissioners bribed or political parties corrupted in clever and devious ways. No such criminal arts are entailed here.

[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]

Instead, the pages of Adams’s indictment are full of low comedy. In November, FBI agents waved aside the mayor’s security team, stepped with Adams into his SUV, and took away his cellphones and a laptop. But the mayor’s personal cellphone was missing. As this was the phone that Adams used to communicate with aides about his travel and fundraising, FBI agents demanded to see it.

The mayor produced the phone for the FBI the next day, but, according to the indictment, there was a problem: It was locked. Adams told the agents that he had recently changed its password and, alas, had forgotten the new code.

Years ago, a friend of mine reported on former Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Sharpe James, a powerful machine boss who was convicted of fraud. After the Adams indictment became public, my friend sniffed that the ham-handed derelictions attributed to the New York mayor made James look like Enrico Fermi, the nuclear physicist.

In November, federal prosecutors and investigators also sat down with an Adams staffer who acted as the mayor’s liaison to Turkish Airlines. The agents made clear that they knew the mayor and the aide—who is unnamed in the indictment but has been identified in news reports as Rana Abbasova—used an encrypted messaging app to communicate with Turkish officials about travel and fundraising. The aide, the indictment stated, excused herself to use the bathroom, where she deleted the messaging app.

[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]

The most damning accusations against Adams center on his supposedly taking money from foreign businesspeople, which is illegal, and using that money to obtain matching funds from the city’s campaign-finance system, which is also illegal. Far more amusing is what the government portrays as a nearly decade-long insistence on obtaining tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines—most of which Adams failed to report. It comes off like a frequent-flier-club obsession run mad.

The indictment indicates that no matter where in the world Adams flew—Ghana, France, China, Oman—he instructed aides to route flights through Istanbul, the better to get perks from Turkish Airlines and luxury-hotel stays subsidized by Turkish interests. So in 2016, Adams and his girlfriend flew to India, purchasing economy tickets for $2,286. Turkish Airlines promptly upgraded them to business class, where two tickets would have cost about $15,000.

On one trip, Adams’s girlfriend texted him and was surprised to discover that he was in Istanbul, because their planned vacation was in France. According to the government, he texted back: “Transferring here. You know first stop is always instanbul.”

This pattern reached an apogee when Adams’s girlfriend asked him if the two of them could visit Easter Island, in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Adams was game, the government asserts, but only if they could fly on Turkish Airlines. Disappointment loomed. As the indictment noted, he asked her to check with the airline “to confirm they did not have routes between New York and Chile.”

Adams apparently was not oblivious to the risks he was running, and he seems to have resorted to a sleight of hand that in the reading sounds halfhearted. He took trips on Turkish Airlines in the summer of 2017, according to prosecutors, and three months later sent an email to his scheduler telling her that he had left the cash for those flights in an envelope in her desk. “He did not do that,” the indictment asserts.

Such inept subterfuge appeared to offend the crime-hunting sensibilities of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “That’s just a clumsy cover-up,” Williams—who has prosecuted corrupt financiers and the music mogul Sean Combs, not to mention the occasional mafioso—told reporters.

For all its absurdity, Adams’s alleged behavior, which prosecutors say began after he became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, was no small matter. The indictment noted that Adams’s Turkish contacts were working with the Turkish government, and all were intent on buying influence with an up-and-coming politician. He might, one of the Turks speculated, even become president.

As Adams neared the mayoralty, the Turks began to call in their chits, the indictment suggests. In September 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic mayoral primary, a Turkish official said it was Adams’s “turn” to repay Turkey. When an aide relayed the message, Adams replied: “I know.” A Turkish consulate was due to open in a new 36-story office tower in Manhattan, and city fire inspectors had found many problems and would not sign off. Embarrassment loomed for Turkish officials.

[Read: An era of shamelessness in American politics]

Adams, the indictment stated, put pressure on the fire department. The chief of the department in turn told his subordinates that their jobs were at stake; if they hoped to keep their positions in Adams’s upcoming administration, the office tower must open.

Not long after, prosecutors say, a Turkish Airlines manager sought a prime seat on one of Adams’s mayoral transition committees. He warned that if this did not happen, the mayor might find himself sleeping in economy class on his next trip. “Seat number 52 is empty,” the airline official noted. He was promptly appointed to a transition committee.

The ridiculous mixed with the pernicious. What’s remarkable was the lack of discretion among people in Adams’s circle, even as they realized that investigators were rummaging about. In June 2021, an aide—apparently Abbasova—was recorded talking with Adams’s contact at Turkish Airlines.

“How much does he owe?” the aide asked.

“It is very expensive,” the airline manager replied. “I am working on a discount.” A short time later, the airline manager said he would charge the mayor $50. That answer, apparently too low, annoyed the mayoral aide: “$50? What? Quote a proper price.”

“His every step is being watched right now,” the Adams aide warned the airline manager. The aide suggested “$1,000 or so,” adding, “Let it be somewhat real.” In the end, Adams paid $2,200 for two round-trip tickets to Istanbul—which, according to prosecutors, were upgraded to business-class tickets worth $15,000.

Long before the FBI took his phones, Adams was struggling to gain any traction as mayor. Recent months have been particularly unkind. FBI agents have raided the homes of his police commissioner and schools chancellor and a deputy mayor. Yesterday, his chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, returned from vacation in Japan to find two law-enforcement agencies waiting for her at the airport. New resignations come every week, and this mayor’s power seems more and more like an hourglass nearly run out of sand. For the Adams administration, “Let it be somewhat real” would make a fitting epitaph.

Why Trump’s Arlington Debacle Is So Serious

2024-08-30T06:00:00-04:00

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The section of Arlington National Cemetery that Donald Trump visited on Monday is both the liveliest and the most achingly sad part of the grand military graveyard, set aside for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Section 60, young widows can be seen using clippers and scissors to groom the grass around their husbands’ tombstones as lots of children run about.

Karen Meredith knows the saddest acre in America only too well. The California resident’s son, First Lieutenant Kenneth Ballard, was the fourth generation of her family to serve as an Army officer. He was killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, and laid to rest in Section 60. She puts flowers on his gravesite every Memorial Day. “It’s not a number, not a headstone,” she told me. “He was my only child.”

The sections of Arlington holding Civil War and World War I dead have a lonely and austere beauty. Not Section 60, where the atmosphere is sanctified but not somber—too many kids, Meredith recalled from her visits to her son’s burial site. “We laugh, we pop champagne. I have met men who served under him, and they speak of him with such respect. And to think that this man”—she was referring to Trump—“came here and put his thumb up—”

She fell silent for a moment on the telephone, taking a gulp of air. “I’m trying not to cry.”

For Trump, defiling what is sacred in our civic culture borders on a pastime. Peacefully transferring power to the next president, treating political adversaries with at least rudimentary grace, honoring those soldiers wounded and disfigured in service of our country—Trump long ago walked roughshod over all these norms. Before he tried to overturn a national election, he mocked his opponents in the crudest terms and demeaned dead soldiers as “suckers.”

[Read: Trump calls Americans killed in war “suckers” and “losers”]

But the former president outdid himself this week, when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony honoring 13 American soldiers killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul during the final havoc-marked hours of the American withdrawal. Trump laid three wreaths and put hand over heart; that is a time-honored privilege of presidents. Trump, as is his wont, went further. He walked to a burial site in Section 60 and posed with the family of a fallen soldier, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up for his campaign photographer and videographer.

Few spaces in the United States join the sacred and the secular to more moving effect than Arlington National Cemetery, 624 acres set on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River and our nation’s capital. More than 400,000 veterans and their dependents have been laid to rest here, among them nearly 400 Medal of Hono r recipients. Rows of matching white tombstones stretch to the end of sight.

A cemetery employee politely attempted to stop the campaign staff from filming in Section 60. Taking campaign photos and videos at gravesites is expressly forbidden under federal law. The Trump entourage, according to a subsequent statement by the U.S. Army, which oversees the cemetery, “abruptly pushed” her aside.

Trump’s campaign soon posted a video on TikTok, overlaid with Trump’s narration: “We didn’t lose one person in 18 months. And then they”—the Biden administration—“took over, that disaster of leaving Afghanistan.”

Trump was unsurprisingly not telling the truth; 11 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in his last year in office, and his administration had itself negotiated the withdrawal. But such fabrications are incidental sins compared with what came next. A top Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, and campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung talked to reporters and savaged the employee who had tried to stop the entourage. Cheung referred to her as “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering a mental-health episode.” LaCivita declared her a “despicable individual” who ought to be fired.

There was, of course, another way to handle this mistake. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah had accompanied Trump to the cemetery, and his campaign emailed out photos of the governor and the former president there. When challenged, Cox did what is foreign to Trump: He apologized. “You are correct,” Cox replied to a person criticizing the event on X, adding, “It did not go through the proper channels and should not have been sent. My campaign will be sending out an apology.”

[Read: Trump dishonors fallen soldiers again]

This was not a judgment call, or a minor violation of obscure bureaucratic boilerplate. In the regulations governing visitors and behavior at Arlington National Cemetery, many paragraphs lay out what behavior is acceptable and what is not. These read not as suggestions but as commandments. Memorial services are intended to honor the fallen, the regulations note, with a rough eloquence: “Partisan activities are inappropriate in Arlington National Cemetery, due to its role as a shrine to all the honored dead of the Armed Forces of the United States and out of respect for the men and women buried there and for their families.”

As the clamor of revulsion swelled this week, LaCivita did not back off. On Wednesday, the Trump adviser posted a photo of Trump at Arlington Cemetery on X and added these words: “The Photo that shook the world and reminded America who the real Commander in Chief is …August 26th 2024 ..Mark the day ⁦@KamalaHarris⁩ and weak ⁦@JoeBiden.”

The Army, which is historically loath to enter politics, issued a rare statement yesterday rebuking the Trump campaign, noting that ceremony participants “had been made aware” of relevant federal laws “prohibiting political activities” and that the employee “acted with professionalism.” The Army said it “considers this matter closed” because the cemetery employee had declined to press charges.

Meanwhile, an unrepentant Trump team kept stoking the controversy. Yesterday, LaCivita posted another photo of Trump at Arlington and added this: “Reposting this hoping to trigger the hacks at @SecArmy”—the Army secretary’s office.

It had the quality of middle-school graffiti, suggesting that Trump viewed the controversy as yet another chance to mock his critics before moving on to the next outrage. For grieving families with loved ones buried in Section 60, moving on is not so easy.

How old, I asked Meredith, was your son at the time of his death? “He was 26,” she replied. “He did not have time to live. I didn’t get to dance at his wedding. I didn’t get to play with grandkids.”

This week, all she could do was call out a crude and self-regarding 78-year-old man for failing, in that most sacred of American places, to comport himself with even the roughest facsimile of dignity.

Barack Obama’s Warning to Democrats

2024-08-21T21:19:00-04:00

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Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention last night was like stumbling upon a man from another time. His evocation of the importance, the centrality even, of searching for humanity in our fellow Americans, particularly those on the far side of our partisan divide, was moving because it felt so foreign.

“Mutual respect has to be part of our message,” he said. “Our politics has become so polarized these days that all of us, across the political spectrum, seem quick to assume the worst in others unless they agree with us on every single issue. We start thinking that the only way to win is to scold and shame and out-yell.”

He continued, “We don’t trust each other as much, because we don’t take the time to know each other. And in that space between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other.”

Obama, of course, is not a monk walking down from a hilltop to share timeless truths. He is a former president and a progressive Democrat, a wealthy man who spent much of his summer on his estate in Martha’s Vineyard. He has a steely quality and is often not particularly sentimental, and, in the back-and-forth of partisan politics, he can thrust as readily as he parries. The first section of his speech last night was more or less standard partisan fare, including a juvenile joke about Donald Trump and his obsession with crowd sizes.

[Read: The Democrats aren’t on the high road anymore]

But despite all of that, Obama’s core message resonated. He was not lecturing Republicans and admonishing them to change their Trump-loving ways. He was in his hometown of Chicago, speaking to fellow Democrats, to 20,000 activists and politicians in the United Center, people who have learned to speak angrily of Republicans lies, threats to democracy, and the MAGA-many who back them. The acronym itself, MAGA, is distancing.

Obama, in offering caution to his fellow Democrats and perhaps to himself, remained informed by his own progressive beliefs. So he mentioned adult children who must learn to tolerate the “parent or grandparent [who] occasionally says something that makes us cringe.” He said, “We don’t automatically assume they’re bad people.” As I spent quality time on Monday in a Chicago park with many young and passionate pro-Palestinian protesters who repeatedly denounced “Genocide Joe” and “Killer Kamala” and “war criminal” Democrats, the thought occurred to me that learning to look past cringe-worthy rhetoric is not a one-way generational street.

More to the point, however, as I listened to Obama last night, I thought back to 2017, when I spent six months living on the high desert Navajo Reservation, a land the size of West Virginia. I was researching a book on a high-school basketball team in Chinle, and met a white man who had cornered the business of broadcasting hundreds of games over the radio to the hoop-crazed Navajos. He evinced a deep respect for the Navajos, who treated him as a friend and deserving of their trust. We came to know each other, and I appeared on several of his halftime broadcasts. I liked him.

Soon after I returned to Brooklyn, we friended each other on Facebook. I quickly came to realize that this man was a passionate Trumper and MAGA-proud, and he no doubt objected to some of my beliefs. Soon enough, we let our social-media friendship lapse, as our political chasm felt too great to bridge.

I regret that now. He is complicated and contradictory, passionate about his basketball and his politics, and in this he is perhaps not entirely different from myself. Why should a tentative friendship end up impaled on a point of politics, even one that now feels so urgent?

Obama reminded his party that “democracy isn’t just a bunch of abstract principles and dusty laws. It’s the values we live by, and the way we treat each other—including those who don’t look like us or pray like us or see the world exactly like we do.”

That’s a message that all Americans could take to heart.

The Huge DNC Protest That Wasn’t

2024-08-20T18:50:00-04:00

On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”

I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage. I saw a line snaking toward the porta-potties, and, under distant oak trees, I could see four dozen cops chatting with one another, bicycles at their side. I saw great piles of protest signs upbraiding Genocide Joe Biden waiting to be picked up by as-yet-unseen protesters. I saw a lot of empty green space.

The Chicago Police Department had tried to kneecap the rally. They’d initially refused permits for a soundstage and, strangest of all, for porta-potties, arguing that ill-intentioned sorts might try to store weapons in them. It had gradually dawned on police brass that absent porta-potties, thousands of protesters would have to otherwise avail themselves of the few bushes in the park. They’d relented.

Liberals and left supporters of Kamala Harris had worried that these protests might fire a destructive fury and hurt her candidacy. They’d summoned memories of the anti–Vietnam War protests at the Democrats’ Chicago convention in 1968, when Mayor Richard Daley’s cops wielded billy clubs and thumped skulls, leaving an indelible mark on the national consciousness.

[David Frum: The defeat-Harris, get-Trump politics of protest]

But the Crashing the Party protest was to the protests of Chicago 1968 as a scouting squad was to an army. Several newspapers referred to “thousands of protesters,” but that was reportorial sleight of hand. Organizers had forecast 50,000 protesters, and even more. Later on this day, an organizer would tell me that the number was 15,000, but I could tell that her heart was not in it. I’d start the bidding at 2,000 and top out at a probably overly generous 5,000 people.

The New York Times initially described the rally as “a coalition of more than 200 groups, which represented a range of liberal causes.” The newspaper later changed “liberal causes” to “progressive causes,” and thank God for that. Most of the protesters would have been despondent at being described as liberal.

There were the National Students for Justice in Palestine, whose website refers to living in “occupied Turtle Island,” an obscure reference to the cosmology of several Native American tribes. There were varieties of socialists, Trotskyites, the Revolutionary Communists of America (“We are the Communist generation,” its website proclaims), and the Denver Communists, which—who knew?—comprise their own ideological grouping. Two groups sided with the government of North Korea. Two bands of anarchists, swathed head to toe in stylish black, with masks and helmets and the occasional shield, marched through. Two young men carried a yellow People’s Defense Units flag, the standard of Kurdish anarchists.

A man, neck wrapped in a keffiyeh, carried a sign that caught the tenor of the day: Decolonize everywhere now!

I appreciated the possible feint at humor. I yearned for the Dada spirit of the Yippies, who in 1968 called a Chicago press conference to nominate a pig—by the name of Pigasus—as their candidate for president.

Too much of the rhetoric yesterday was heavy on “the masses” rising and the “war criminals” at the DNC getting evicted. It underlined what is self-marginalizing about this movement. The anxious many in liberal and left-leaning households hope Harris and the Democrats can pull off their last-minute switch, yet here, speakers drew cheers denouncing “Killer Kamala” and “Genocide Joe.”

Don Rose, now 95, has been a left-liberal activist and political consultant for seven decades, and experienced the 1968 fury up close. He told me about academic research showing that most Americans ended up blaming the protesters, not the police riot. Hubert Humphrey was defeated, and Richard Nixon extended the Vietnam War another five years.

“Do you threaten to abandon the party, and put the cause above the election?” he said. “That’s what gave us Nixon.”

Protesters I interviewed said that such arguments gave them no pause. (More than a few of the organizers wore N95 masks for reasons obscure to me—the protest was outdoors on a breezy day.) If Donald Trump triumphs, so be it. The left’s agenda, the justice of the Palestinian cause, cannot be held hostage to war criminals in the Democratic Party. Andy Thayer, a left and gay activist, wrote a column in the Chicago Tribune arguing: “The most important question isn’t ‘who are you voting for?’ Instead, it’s ‘how do we make massive social change?’”

It was impressively daft.

Some protesters, of course, were there because they have a personal connection to the conflict, because they have family living in Gaza and worry daily for their safety and mourn those who have died. Some, a minority, acknowledged too the horrors of the slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 of last year. “I wish the Israelis had not taken the bait as we did after 9/11,” Keith Plum, who teaches English in a Chicago public high school, told me. Many of Plum’s students came to the United States with their families from war-torn nations.

[Read: The unreality of Columbia’s liberated zone]

My conversation with another fellow, Samer Abueid, went in a different direction. He was a Chicago native of Palestinian descent, and spoke of growing up on the South Side with friends of all sorts, Jews too. Our conversation went along pleasantly until I said, Look, after Hamas attacked and slaughtered kibbutz residents, many of whom were leftists favorable to Palestinians, what was Israel to do?

Abueid put his hand on his broad chest. “I believe to the bottom of my heart it was an inside job,” he replied. Huh? I replied. “Hamas,” he said, “had nothing to do with it.” Then he spoke of the Rothschilds and conspiracies, and I moved on.

In the end, the protesters lined up. On the far corner, an end-of-days Christian preacher promised protesters that Christ “would vomit you out his mouth.” Fortified by that image, the protesters, several of whom held large papier-mâché heads depicting Harris and Biden with bloody vampire teeth, paraded off toward the convention, as one group chanted: “We will not be useful idiots.”

The Worst Is Not Inevitable

2024-07-15T11:50:00-04:00

After the wounding of Donald Trump, funeral orations for our democracy appeared everywhere on social media. I feel the gravitational pull of that despair: We are a profoundly polarized people, and too many of our leaders—not least the presidential candidate who narrowly sidestepped death in Pennsylvania—have grown accustomed to using threats of violence and death as rhetorical devices.

We swap primal nightmares. Some right-wing Republicans portray President Joe Biden as a senescent totalitarian capable of ordering an assassination. Some prominent liberals invoke fascism’s specter in an offhand fashion. The New Republic’s decision to caricature Trump as Adolf Hitler on its cover leaps to mind as particularly juvenile.

And yet democracy is not a creature easily slain. We have been this way before and have proved ourselves stronger than our worst imaginings.

To thoroughly date myself, I was a kid during the terrible spring of 1968, when the nation’s greatest civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was shot and killed on the evening of his great electoral triumph in the California presidential primary. King’s death sparked a terrible wind of riot and destruction. U Street, the “Black Broadway” of Washington, D.C., saw its businesses and clubs lit up like so many bonfires. I remember lifting a copy of Life magazine off my parents’ coffee table and gaping at the black-and-white photo of sandbags piled high at the Capitol, National Guardsmen crouched behind with their rifles.

[David Frum: The gunman and the would-be dictator]

I recall my mother’s passionate, at times family-rending arguments with my Republican relatives in Michigan over civil rights, over the war in Vietnam. My family lived at the time in a conservative suburb of Boston, and a middle-school friend and I were fond of the righteous business of flashing peace signs at passing cars. Often we got the middle finger in return. One time, a driver braked, and he and his overfed buddy pursued us into the woods before we gave them the slip.

Yet wounded and torn though the nation was, Americans survived. The environmental movement took root, and racial progress, halting but insistent, continues to this day. The House and Senate moved to impeach Richard Nixon for his abuses of power, and his party elders signaled that his game was up. I’m aware that to make such arguments is to risk casting myself—improbably, to those who know me—as a daft optimist. But we have survived worse.

From Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, our presidents have been shot at and in some cases slaughtered. Two would-be assassins tried to kill Gerald Ford. We are a democratic nation rent by violence. Yet with the exception of a cataclysmic civil war fought over slavery—from whose outcome we can derive honor—we have not dissolved. My hometown of New York City offers hope. When King was slain, thousands in their anger and bewilderment poured into the streets of the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mayor John V. Lindsay—a liberal white Republican—walked the streets himself that night. As a wall of mourners came sweeping across 125th Street, he raised his hands and spoke. “I’m sorry,” he declared, referring to King’s assassination. “This is a terrible thing.”

[Listen to Holy Week: The story of a revolution undone]

There were many reasons my city did not explode that night, among them the brave activists and organizers working its many corners. But Lindsay and his courage and willingness to summon a common weal surely helped.

We will hear more dark murmurings now: from Republicans who claim conspiracy and a Secret Service intentionally looking away, from a Democratic strategist arguing that the shooting of Trump might have been staged, a false-flag operation. Were we not living a horror, such talk might sound almost comical. To suggest that a 20-year-old with a rifle was capable, at 400 feet, of nicking Trump’s ear while missing his cranium is preposterous.

[Peter Wehner: Joe Biden tries to calm the waters]

We hear voices of salve and hope, and of anger and division. Which we heed and which we ignore will determine how we and our democracy weather this pass. The worst is not foreordained.

What Left-Wing Democrats Haven’t Learned From Defeat

2024-06-29T06:00:00-04:00

If those on the left wing of the Democratic Party hope to exercise power and bend the national party to their will, they might try to stifle any self-righteousness and learn different lessons from Representative Jamaal Bowman’s defeat. In a primary earlier this week, the soon-to-be-former member of Congress from New York took less than 42 percent of the vote—finishing 17 points behind the winner, Westchester County Executive George Latimer.

Bowman remained curiously unreflective about his varied missteps, particularly his decision to center attacks on Israel in a district with a significant population of liberal Jewish voters whose sympathies for that country run deep. Last November, he addressed a pro-Palestine rally and insisted that there was “no evidence” Hamas attackers had raped Israeli women. That, he said, was an Israeli “lie.” It was a stunning moment, not least because the evidence of sexual assaults by Hamas is copious. Many constituents, including quite a few who’d voted for him in previous elections, would describe recoiling at this rhetoric. Only when trailing in polls last week—seven months later—did Bowman finally offer a brief apology for those remarks.

In Yonkers on Election Night, Bowman used his concession speech to rumble about the ostensibly nefarious involvement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and affiliated groups, which, according to The New York Times, spent about $15 million opposing him. He never mentioned Latimer by name. “Our opponent may have won this round in this place,” he said. “We should be outraged … when a super PAC of dark money can spend $20 million to brainwash people into believing something that isn’t true.”

[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]

The possibility that some voters might have had honest objections to Bowman’s views or rhetoric barely registered with him or the left-wing groups supporting his candidacy. After his lopsided loss, a spokesperson for the group Justice Democrats declared: “Jamaal Bowman is a model, not a warning, for what political leadership can look like.”

Too many on the left wing of American politics have become inured to the effect of their overheated rhetoric and histrionic displays of fealty to in-group norms. This approach to politics promises more pain than hope for a Democratic Party with so many election-year worries—voters’ malaise, high food and housing prices, and a superannuated nominee whose feeble debate performance has sent his partisans into a panic.

Bowman’s supporters sought easy explanations for his defeat, including that redistricting had shifted his district northward out of much of the Bronx and into Westchester. But Bowman, in fact, had fared well in the predominantly Democratic suburban county in his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

Meanwhile, claims that the massive spending of pro-Israel groups was responsible for Bowman’s defeat warrant skepticism. This fits a narrative that pleases both AIPAC and the left. AIPAC can take national credit for knocking off a nettlesome congressman, and the left can take comfort in its claim that laying its man low required the combined repressive power of billionaires, Republicans, and the Israel lobby. But as the writer Alexis Grenell pointed out in T he Nation, Bowman’s rhetoric was undisciplined and incendiary, while Latimer was a popular local politician whose internal polls showed him leading by double digits before AIPAC spent anything.

For weeks, prominent left-wing organizers on social media slammed Latimer, a centrist liberal, as a reactionary white man backed by billionaires. The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which endorsed Bowman, decried Latimer as an AIPAC-picked, MAGA-bought racist.

In most of the country outside of left-wing precincts, the claim that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—as opposed to aggressively prosecuting a war that Hamas started and has the power to end—is highly contested at best. But using the term genocide has become de rigueur for candidates seeking an endorsement from the DSA and Justice Democrats. Bowman obliged, repeatedly.

Bowman also indulged a penchant—again shared broadly on the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist left—for performative and self-righteous politics. In 1964, the American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a celebrated essay in Harper’s Magazine titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” A modern left-wing update might be titled “The Infantile Style in American Politics”—as the conspiratorial mixes with obstinacy and braggadocio.

Days before the election, Bowman held a rally in the South Bronx. When Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up, press attention was guaranteed. As her turn came to speak, Ocasio-Cortez—typically a shrewd and image-savvy politician—appeared overcaffeinated, bouncing about onstage, waving her arms, and proclaiming herself “ready to fight. I’m so excited!” She was indignant that “our brother Jamaal Bowman” should find himself facing a primary challenge—one driven, she said, by racism, by greed, and by the corruption of American politics. This was an odd assertion of political privilege—Ocasio-Cortez won her own seat by beating a Democratic incumbent in 2018. After Bowman did the same in 2020, the two appeared harbingers of a new day for the left.

At the rally, Bowman, a former college linebacker, hopped onstage, lifted a stool, and shook it at the audience. “We’re going to show fucking AIPAC the power of the motherfucking South Bronx,” he bellowed. “What am I supposed to do? You coming after me, you coming after me, you coming after my family?” He added, “We are going to show them who the fuck we are!”

Bowman lives in Yonkers and does not represent the South Bronx.

The Bronx rally offered a glimpse, too, of the sectarianism that routinely afflicts the left. Pro-Palestine protesters from Within Our Lifetime showed up and beat drums and chanted throughout the rally, doing their best to disrupt the proceedings. They denounced Bowman, Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders as “Zionists” who backed “Genocide Joe” for president. The protesters reached an impressively overwrought peak with the chants: “AOC, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” At the rally’s end, protesters charged the candidates’ bus and defaced its flanks with stickers and handwritten slogans.

[Maurice Isserman: The cause that turned idealists into authoritarian zealots]

In recent years, the progressive movement has made impressive inroads within the national Democratic Party, which has shifted noticeably leftward. In New York, left-wing politicians backed by the DSA and the Working Families Party have scored victories on such issues as rent control, affordable housing, and bail reform.

Yet these victories coexist with a growing shrillness and insistence by many on the left upon political purity. So longtime liberal Democratic politicians find themselves denounced as pro-genocide for supporting Israel and Biden’s position on the Gaza conflict. Just two years ago—in an episode all but forgotten during the recent campaign—the DSA’s political committee debated whether to expel Bowman for the perfidy of voting to fund the Iron Dome, the defensive system that lets Israel shoot down rockets from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran before they strike civilian homes.

[Read: Too much purity is bad for the left]

The DSA stopped short of expelling him. Bowman told the media at the time that he had resigned from the group. He has since claimed that he kept paying his DSA dues, and has apologized for his heresy.

Many mainstream Democrats seem less and less patient with the activist left. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and possible future speaker, would have none of the Bowman camp’s talk of martyrdom. He has often tangled with the DSA and Justice Democrats, and agreed to record a single robocall for the embattled Bowman. Jeffries took a noticeably removed and dispassionate view of that loss. “The results speak for themselves. The voters have spoken,” he said, sounding less than distraught. A senior Jeffries adviser later noted on social media that the minority leader has now supported six candidates challenged by the DSA, and his candidates have won all six races.

The question, very much open, is whether this registers among the party’s left wing. Late in Bowman’s concession speech, he expressed regrets, to a point, for his foul language that day in St. Mary’s Park. “I want to make an apology, a public apology, for, you know, sometimes using foul language. I’m sorry,” he said.

At that he paused. “But.” He paused again. “But … we should not be well adjusted to a sick society.”

We will not adjust to a sick society falls short of being a campaign slogan for the ages. In its performative extravagance, however, it demonstrates what some on the left seem to miss. Politicians and movements are most successful when they try to win people over, and change course when they fail—rather than chiding voters for being brainwashed.

‘We Want All of It’

2024-05-01T06:00:00-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, Columbia University’s campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their “liberated zone”—an encampment of about 80 tents—and Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their “liberated building.” Overnight, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive noise.

And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was “guilty of abetting genocide” and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.

[Will Creeley: Those who preach free speech need to practice it]

As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.

“No peace on stolen land,” she intoned. “We want all the land. We want all of it!”

Hearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protester’s words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possible—that two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.

No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.

The protesters confronted a university where leaders seemed alternately stern and panicked. Columbia left it to police to break a siege at about 9 p.m. in a surge of force, arresting dozens of protesters and crashing their way into Hamilton Hall.

The denouement was a tragedy accompanied by moments of low comedy, as when a student protester seemed to suggest yesterday that bloody, genocidal Columbia University must supply the students of the liberated zone and liberated building with food. “We’re saying they’re obligated to provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here,” she explained. But moments of true menace were evident, such as when some protesters decided to break into and occupy Hamilton Hall.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

Rory Wilson, a senior majoring in history, had wandered over to the site early yesterday morning when he heard of the break-in. He and two friends were not fans of this protest, he told me, but they also understood the swirl of passions that led so many Arab and Muslim students to recoil at the terrible toll that Israeli bombings have inflicted on Gaza. To watch Hamilton Hall being smashed struck him as nihilistic. He and his friends stood in front of the doors.

Hundreds of protesters, masked, many dressed in black, surged around them. “They’re Zionists,” a protester said. “Run a circle around these three and move them out!”

Dozens of masked students surrounded them and began to press and push. Were you scared? I asked Wilson. No, he said. Then he thought about it a little more. “There was a moment when a man in a black mask grabbed my leg and tried to flip me over,” he said. “That scared me.”

One more fact was striking: As a mob of hundreds of chanting students smashed windows and built a barricade by tossing dozens of chairs against the doors and reinforcing them with bicycle locks, as fights threatened to break out that could seriously harm students on either side, Wilson couldn’t see any guards or police officers anywhere around him. Two other students told me they had a similar impression. “I don’t get it,” Wilson said. “There were some legitimately bad actors. Where was the security? Where was the university?” (Columbia officials did not respond to my requests for comment.)

Less than 24 hours later, university leaders would play their hand by bringing in police officers.

For more than a decade now, we’ve lived amid a highly specific form of activism, one that began with Occupy Wall Street, continued with the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and evolved into the “autonomous zones” that protesters subsequently carved out of Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Some of the protests against prejudice and civil-liberties violations have been moving, even inspired. But in this style of activism, the anger often comes with an air of presumption—an implication that one cannot challenge, much less debate, the protesters’ writ.

[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle Island

Yesterday in front of Hamilton Hall—which protesters had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gaza—organizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, minders—some of whom were sympathetic faculty members—kept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.

All along, it has never been clear who speaks for the movement. Protesters claimed that those who took over Hamilton Hall were an “autonomous collective.” This elusiveness can all but neuter negotiations.

By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the cops—at least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian American, or Latino—by likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There was a pause, as if the protesters were searching for something more cutting. “Hey hey, ho ho, Zionism has got to go.”

As I left the area, I thought about how Rory Wilson had responded earlier when I asked what life on campus has been like lately. The senior, who said he is Jewish on his mother’s side but not observant, had a take that was not despairing. In polarized times, he told me, having so many Jewish and Israeli students living and attending class on a campus with Arab and Muslim students was a privilege. “Some have lost families and loved ones,” he said. “I understand their anger and suffering.”

After spending two days at Columbia during the protests, I was struck by how unusual that sentiment had become—how rarely I’d heard anyone talk of making an effort to understand the other. Maximal anger was all that lingered.

The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’

2024-04-22T19:32:17-04:00

Updated at 11:15 p.m. ET on April 22, 2024

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Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.

“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”

[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle Island

Privacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive.

Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.

Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons. She raises her phone to start recording video. One of the intruders speaks up to ask why they are being pushed out.

The leader talks over them, dismissing such inquiries as tiresome. “Repeat after me,” he says, and 100 protesters dutifully repeat: “I’m bored! We would like you to leave!”

As the crowd draws closer, Schwalb and her friends pivot and leave. Even the next morning, she’s baffled at how they were targeted. Save for a friend who wore a Star of David necklace, none wore identifying clothing. “Maybe,” she says, “they smelled the Zionists on us.”

As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

Of late, at least one rabbi has suggested that Jewish students depart the campus for their own safety. Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged in a statement earlier today that at her university there “have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” To avoid trouble, she advised classes to go virtual today, and said, “Our preference is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.”

Tensions have in fact kept ratcheting up. Last week, Shafik called in the New York City police force to clear an earlier iteration of the tent city and to arrest students for trespassing. The university suspended more than 100 of these protesters, accusing them, according to the Columbia Spectator, of “disruptive behavior, violation of law, violation of University policy, failure to comply, vandalism or damage to property, and unauthorized access or egress.” Even some Jewish students and faculty unsympathetic to the protesters say the president’s move was an accelerant to the crisis, producing misdemeanor martyrs to the pro-Palestinian cause. A large group of faculty members walked out this afternoon to express their opposition to the arrests and suspensions.

As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians Against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass.

[Theo Baker: The war at Stanford]

During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that included not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions. I then stood in a press zone and waited for Layla Saliba, a social-work graduate student who served as a spokesperson for the protest. A Palestinian American, she said she has lost family in the fighting in Gaza. She talked at length and with nuance. Hers, however, was a near-singular voice. As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly nonliberated when it came to talking with a reporter.

Leaders take pains to insist that, for all the chants of “From the river to sea” and promises to revisit the 1948 founding of Israel, they are only anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish. To that end, they’ve held a Shabbat dinner and, during my visit, were planning a Passover seder. (The students vow to remain, police notwithstanding, until graduation in May).

“We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said.

But to talk with many Jewish students who have encountered the protests is to hear of the cumulative toll taken by words and chants and actions that call to mind something ancient and ugly.

Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.

This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”

A few minutes earlier, I had been sitting on a stone bench on campus and speaking with a tall, brawny man named Danny Shaw, who holds a master’s in international affairs from Columbia and now teaches seminars on Israel in the liberated zone. When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.

He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested that the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II.

Shaw’s worldview is consistent with that of others in the rotating cast of speakers at late-night seminars in the liberated zone. The prevailing tone tends toward late-stage Frantz Fanon: much talk of revolution and purging oneself of bourgeois affectation. Shaw had taught for 18 years at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, but he told me the liberated zone is now his only gig. The John Jay administration pushed him out—doxxed him, he said—in October for speaking against Israel and for Palestine. He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.

Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”

A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head. “The rhetoric they use against us makes us look harsh and negative,” Shaw said. “That’s not the flavor of what we are doing.”

We parted shortly afterward. I walked under a near-full moon toward a far gate, protesters’ chants of revolution echoing across what was otherwise an almost-deserted campus. I could not shake the sense that too many at this elite university, even as they hoped to ease the plight of imperiled civilians, had allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.

This article previously misstated the name of the lawn occupied by protesters at Columbia University.

What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation

2024-04-14T06:00:00-04:00

Democratic Party analysts and left-leaning economists have had quite enough of their fellow Americans’ complaints. As a striking number of poll respondents express alarm, despair even, about the rising cost of living during Joe Biden’s presidency, experts shake their heads. Don’t people realize that jobs are plentiful, wages are rising, and inflation is in retreat?

Few have struck this chord more insistently than Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and liberal New York Times columnist. In a February column titled “Vibes, Vegetables and Vitriol,” he suggested that inflation is no longer worrisome and backed up his view with field research.

“Now, I go grocery shopping myself, and am occasionally startled by the total at the cash register—although that’s usually because I wasn’t factoring in the price of that bottle of scotch I picked up along with the meat and vegetables,” Krugman wrote.

[Annie Lowrey: Inflation is your fault]

The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself, is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous. Poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class people experience a different reality. They carry the searing memories of the Great Recession and its foreclosure crisis, when millions of American households lost their home. A large number of these Americans worked in person during the dolorous early days of the pandemic, and saw its toll up close. And since 2019, they’ve weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power. Tell these Americans that the economy is humming, that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate, and that everything’s grand, and you’re likely to see a roll of the eyes.

Krugman in his column confessed that he had “no idea” what he paid for roughly the same groceries three years earlier, although he allowed that olive oil seemed costly. He and other economists talked of a “vibecession”—an admixture of gloom and worry and misinformation that prevents Americans from seeing the rosy nature of the economy. This is a common take among prominent Democrats and left-leaning economists, all of whom speak with an eye on the upcoming presidential election. In late February, California Governor Gavin Newsom a ppeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and declared that Biden had conducted a “master class” in economic helmsmanship. “The economy is booming; inflation is cooling,” Newsom said, adding, “All because of Biden’s wisdom, because of his temperance.”

[Gilad Edelman: The English-muffin problem]

Around the same time, the Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served as chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, posted on social media: “If a year ago you had told someone [that inflation] would come down to 2.5% they would be surprised & delighted.” Just before Biden’s State of the Union address last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer predicted that “Americans will hear a clear theme: America’s economy is accelerating, inflation is decelerating.”

These commentators have been asking near as one: Where’s the problem?

Such talk of a victory lap once again appeared premature this week, with the news that the consumer price index was 3.5 percent higher in March than a year earlier, a worse reading than many economists had expected.

But even a cooling inflation rate simply means that prices are growing more slowly. Consumers—particularly those whose wages have not kept pace—still remember years of soaring price increases.

Moreover, the core inflation rate, defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and carefully studied by the rate setters at the Federal Reserve, excludes food and energy costs—economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives. As the financial analyst Barry Ritholtz long ago noted, core CPI measures “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning inflation without inflation.

[Rogé Karma: What would it take to convince Americans that the economy is fine?]

“The macroeconomy looks great, and it might appear inflation has cooled,” the University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Isabella Weber told me. “But when you disentangle the indicators that actually matter to Americans day to day, it’s not so pretty.”

The consumer price index for food rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2023. The jump in 2022 was the highest since the late 1970s. As of two years ago, Americans spent 11 percent of their disposable income on food, the highest share in three decades, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Food-price inflation falls most heavily on the poorest 20 percent of Americans, who spent nearly a third of their income on food in 2022, the latest year for which USDA data are available. By contrast, the highest-income fifth of households spent on average 8 percent. “If you are spending 25 to 30 percent of your income on food and prices have jumped 25 percent, you are in real pain,” Weber said.

Other staples of life have also grown more expensive. Gas prices have gone up by about 50 percent in the past four years. Fuel-oil prices jumped by more than half from March 2020 to March 2024. Home prices have gone up nearly 50 percent nationwide since the start of the pandemic; the ratio of home prices to income has reached an all-time high. Once-sharp increases in average rents nationwide have slowed but not reversed. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard reports that poor and working-class renters suffer disproportionate pain. “Among renter households with an annual income under $30,000, the median amount of money left over after paying for rent and utilities was just $310 a month,” the center found, adding that affordability is at an all-time low.

According to recent data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, half of Americans who earn less than $35,000 a year have reported difficulty paying everyday expenses, and nearly 80 percent are “moderately” or “very” stressed by recent price increases.

Then there’s the problem of money, which has become far more expensive to borrow. The Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tamp down inflation by pushing up interest rates have exacted a painful toll on working- and middle-class Americans—a toll not captured by the inflation rate.

The average mortgage interest payment has increased threefold since 2021. The combination of high prices and high interest rates has shut many Americans out of homeownership altogether. High rates also hurt many people who already own homes: Interest rates on equity credit lines and loans, which many Americans use to pay for home repairs, college tuition, and larger purchases, more than doubled from January 2022 to July 2023. High interest rates punish low-income renters, too, by hampering local and state agencies from financing below-market-rate apartments.

The extra costs keep mounting. Interest payments on new cars have risen 80 percent since the pandemic began. Credit-card interest rates are another burden. In March 2022, before the Federal Reserve started raising rates in response to inflation, the average credit-card rate was 16.3 percent, according to Bankrate. Two years later, it sits above 20 percent.

All of this inflation-related misery has begun to catch the eye of the economics establishment. Recently, four researchers, including the International Monetary Fund economist Marijn Bolhuis and the former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, released a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper noting that consumers are remarkably attuned to what’s going on. “Consumers, unlike modern economists, consider the cost of money part of their cost of living,” the authors write. Consumer unease about costs and borrowing, they say, is greater than at any time since the late 1970s and early ’80s. The authors developed an “alternative” consumer price index that more closely tracks actual costs felt by American consumers. The researchers claim that their preferred inflation index would explain most of why consumers feel more sour than official statistics would normally predict.

Many commentators’ eagerness to ignore inflation’s toll appears inescapably tied to Biden’s precarious reelection prospects. The president is more clear-eyed than his cheerleaders. Several months ago, he largely stopped touting the joys of “Bidenomics” and talked instead about challenging the corporations that raised prices and padded profits. During the State of the Union, Biden pledged to take on corporations that quietly shrink their products and hike prices out of greed. “Too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less,” Biden said that night. “That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price-gouging.”

Mainstream economists cringe at this kind of populist rhetoric; their assumption is that the austerity that follows raising interest rates is an unfortunate but necessary medicine. Similarly, the suggestion that wealthy corporations should bear more of the pain, and the working class less of it, has come to sound radical to some economists. In late 2021, amid the rising prices and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, Weber, the UMass economist, proposed a once-popular and now unusual form of economic therapy: limiting what companies can charge for food and energy. “Large corporations with market power,” she wrote in The Guardian, “have used supply problems as an opportunity to increase prices and scoop windfall profits … What we need instead is a serious conversation about strategic price controls.”

Krugman and others harshly dismissed her idea—the Times columnist panned it on Twitter as “truly stupid.” He later deleted the post and apologized. The German and British governments enacted something similar to Weber’s ideas in limited form on energy prices. Weber, whose argument that corporate greed helps accelerate inflation has since been echoed by figures such as European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, has gained acclaim as an iconoclastic thinker about inflation.

“I have been ridiculed in obnoxious ways, but people sense the injustice,” Weber told me. “Many Americans worked throughout COVID; they saw friends die; they think, I did all the things I’m supposed to do, and I still can’t afford this life.”

Perhaps the economic turmoil of Biden’s term will ease in the seven months before the election, and consumer agitation will cool in tandem with inflation. Krugman offers tart counsel to Americans: “Maybe my message here sounds like Obi-Wan Kenobi in reverse: Look, don’t trust your feelings.”

The temptation for liberal economists and politicians to deny the pain experienced by many Americans, and to condescend when they might instead try to empathize, is perhaps understandable in a fraught election year. But working- and middle-class Americans might conclude that they are wiser to trust their feelings and checking accounts than to rely on liberal economists riffing as Jedi masters.