You Can Fear Zohran Mamdani but Also Hate Andrew Cuomo

Mamdani's socialism is unacceptable, but the former governor is himself unacceptable.

For many New Yorkers, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not an exciting prospect. The likely winner of Tuesday's Democratic primary—the votes aren't all counted yet, though the outcome is now a foregone conclusion—is a democratic socialist who subscribes to a whole host of city-ruining political positions. He would like to dismantle New York City's selective school system in favor of increased equity (a surefire recipe for making schools worse for everyone), is in favor of a rent freeze that will almost certainly make affordable housing scarcer, and thinks government-run grocery stores are a good idea. And while his views on the conflict between Israel and Hamas are not terribly relevant to the position he's running for, his failure to condemn the slogan globalize the intifada is probably not an encouraging sign from the standpoint of New York City's Jewish population.

Moreover, socialism is very bad. Everywhere it is tried, it clearly fails as an economic system, leading to greater government centralization and control and less prosperity. And while democratic socialists usually insist that they also object to the sort of political repression that was characteristic of actually existing socialist regimes throughout the 20th century, their rhetoric often revolves around relentless demonization of wealthy, productive people. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the country's foremost elected democratic socialist, was on Joe Rogan's podcast just this week, attacking Elon Musk for spending millions of dollars to help reelect Donald Trump—taking specific umbrage at the idea that rich people might want to spend money advocating for policies that Sanders dislikes.

This is a long way of saying that the concerns expressed by Reason's Liz Wolfe in her lament, "My City Just Voted for Socialism," are entirely justified.

"The socialist project is fundamentally wrong, both morally and in its understanding of human nature," writes Wolfe. "Mamdani won't get us quite there, but he sure is taking us one step closer."

On the other hand, the major alternative for Democratic primary voters was Andrew Cuomo.

 

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Good Riddance

Cuomo, to his credit, is not a socialist. That's one of the only kind things you can say about him, though. The former governor of New York resigned in disgrace in 2021, ostensibly due to numerous allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.

What was absolutely disqualifying about Cuomo, however, is not the #MeToo issue—it's his COVID-19 nursing home policy and its appalling cover-up. The details, which are now known to most people, are incredibly disturbing: As governor, Cuomo ordered elderly people who were sick with COVID-19 to be released from hospitals and returned to nursing homes while recovering from the infection. Cuomo has maintained that this policy was in line with federal guidance, but he's wrong: Federal guidance only suggested that sick seniors should go back to the nursing homes if circumstances allowed for them to receive proper care. Subsequent studies have proven the lethality of Cuomo's approach.

Cuomo was not the only governor to send sick seniors back to nursing homes, where they infected others and where mortality rates were highest. Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrats' vice presidential pick for 2024, did the same thing, and even defended the policy as "not a mistake" well past the point at which it was conclusively determined to have been so.

Unlike other misguided governors, however, Cuomo wrote a book extolling his own leadership during the outbreak, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic. Given the high death rate in New York and the failure of his own policies, this was a galling thing to do. Worse still, Cuomo attempted to conceal the extent of the damage of the nursing home policy, with one aide admitting to the press that the governor instructed his team to undercount deaths on purpose. A report commissioned by the New York Assembly found "overwhelming evidence" of misconduct on Cuomo's part.

Given all this, it is astonishing that Cuomo attempted to run for office again. On some level, it doesn't particularly matter that he was the more ideologically moderate of the two major Democratic mayoral candidates. An individual who is this pathologically dishonest and nakedly unethical—who failed New York in its moment of need and lied about it in order to cover himself in false glory—cannot and should not be allowed back; at least not without a full apology, restitution, and a significant amount of time in the political wilderness. The bodies are scarcely cold.

And that's the silver lining that comes with Mamdani's triumph: Cuomo got exactly what he deserved. Perhaps Democratic Party elites have learned an important lesson about backing utterly unappealing politicians, though I wouldn't count on it.

 

This Week on Free Media

We filmed two episodes, one with Amber Duke and one with Andrew Heaton! In the coming weeks, Free Media plans to expand and film more regularly with a few different people in the mix as co-hosts.

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Worth Watching

Tonight, I'm headed to Italy for a vacation; I'll be gone all next week, so there won't be a newsletter or new videos until the second week of July.

I'm still finishing up Brideshead Revisited, but I also picked up Madeline Miller's Circe, which is a retelling of the myth of Circe, a sorceress who waylaid Odysseus on his way home from the Trojan War during the events of The Odyssey. Miller gave the mythical Greek hero Achilles a similar treatment in The Song of Achilles, which I read and enjoyed on a vacation several years ago. I'll be in Sicily, and not the Greek islands, so you may think this an ill-fitting choice—but funny enough, some scholars have placed Circe's home, the fictitious island of Aeaea, as just off the Italian coast. Ciao!