Zohran Mamdani was sworn in this week as New York City’s next mayor.
While many applauded his vision and his goals of making life more affordable, I hung back.
Why?
I wasn’t quite sure at first. On paper, his goals of free child care and free public transit, stronger rent controls and renters’ protections, ticked a lot of boxes on my personal checklist of Making The World More Fair. His history of antisemitic statements and postures, easy to spot if you knew where to look, was made murkier by a spin machine designed to get him elected. Pure politics, nothing to see here, blah blah blah.
Even some of my Jewish friends — mostly leaning farther to the left than I do — thought he’d be a breath of fresh air for NYC. I remained silent, because I didn’t know enough and because I live three thousand miles away, well beyond his reach.
And then, in his inauguration speech, he said the thing that brought it all back, that made me feel the betrayal all over again: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
The warmth of collectivism.
It was the promise held out to me when I signed on to join the staff of a collectively run bicycle business back in 1995. A promise of transparency, mutual support, honesty and equality. A promise that everyone’s contribution would be equally important and equally valued. A promise of a workplace that would not be hostile to difference, but open to learning, personal and collective growth, and respect.
I believed in that promise, and stayed on for nearly twenty years.
I stayed on through endless committee and board meetings, worker reviews and shop floor dynamics that showed me again and again that I could not possibly work hard enough or well enough to feel fully embraced by the mutual support, respect or acceptance of difference that had been held out to me as a carrot. I was too different from too many other co-workers, who were uncomfortable with my Jewishness, my direct communication style and my avoidance of alcohol and recreational drugs. My articulate, thoughtful demeanor was no match for the bullying tactics of the women who thought I somehow betrayed their very selective form of feminism, and the bullying tactics of men who simply brandished their force of personality like a bludgeon to get their way in questions of policy and functional operations.
I stayed because I loved my work. I stayed because I loved bicycles, and I loved getting customers excited about riding them. I stayed because I liked not having to cower in front of a boss — indeed, the length of time it took for most decisions to be reached by consensus assured everyone’s job security well past any reasonable point and allowed everyone (including me) to find their own ways to game an overly permissive and dismissive system.
In the end, though, when I most needed the mutual support promised by the cooperative structure, I was effectively shut out from that support in favor of the biggest bully on the board. Because his bone of contention reeked of antiZionism, which is often a slippery slope to antisemitism, it was simply easier for my coworkers to refuse to censor his shop floor speech and off-schedule actions and wait for me to get up and leave. I read the room, instantly knew that it could not be any other way, turned in my keys and quit on the spot. While I was downstairs cashing out my parts credit page, one of my coworkers came to me in tears and begged me to stay.
“Why?” I asked her. “You didn’t beg me in the meeting, in front of everyone else. I don’t need that kind of support.” And I left.
Although I have moved on and even healed from my personal experience of that time and place, Mamdani brought back the memory of it all in an instant with his statement.
The ugly truth is that the “warmth of collectivism” is still a lie. Beneath the facade of pure socialism, some people are still more valuable than others, and some people will never be welcome for one reason or another. Beneath the protests and chants and the performative poverty of a few charismatic, photogenic leaders, socialism is a costume hanging on the backs of human beings who are just as flawed and self-interested as you and I are.
You want to protest in the streets, fine.
But how far will you go?
Are you willing to chain yourself to a government building, or break windows, and demand the
the government restore mental health services and drug treatment for
everyone who needs it?
Would you hijack a Safeway truck, or a fleet of them, and divert the contents to feed those in greatest need?
Are you just as willing to take in an illegal immigrant to protect them from ICE, even if it means getting arrested yourself for aiding and abetting?
Are you willing to bring a homeless person in off the street, house and clothe and feed them and help them get on their feet? Are you willing to personally help them get clean and sober?
..::cue crickets::..
My Jewish tradition teaches me that human beings contain within them a combination of good and bad inclinations. We have both, need both, and we need to figure out how to navigate a balance between them that will allow us to be decent human beings. No collectivist — or conversely, me-first — movement will honor that striving for balance. Maybe that’s part of the reason why Jews remain suspect in the larger society. I don’t know.
Sooner or later, people who speak out against Mamdani and his favorites will find themselves shut out of his warm collective. And no matter our values and intentions, some of us will never belong. In fact, some of us won’t belong in any identifiable group a great deal of the time. So we practice moderated, shifting levels of self-reliance -- and when necessary, societal camouflage -- and learn how to balance those with some degree of thoughtful socialization. In the messy middle, there is only a messy balance to be struggled for.
Meet me in the middle. Let’s talk over a cup of coffee and see what we can learn together. But let’s not be blinded by promises of things which aren’t humanly possible. Let’s be real.
