Socialists Sweep, Will New York City Weep?

The news of a Zohran Mamdani-backed slate of Socialist candidates — Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez — scoring big wins last night in New York City’s congressional primaries should send a shudder down the spine of America as we behold the transformation in the gilded city of Gotham. New York City’s heavy Democratic base all but assures that last night’s victors will take seats as members of Congress come January.

Something tectonic is shifting across America’s most elite sectors as candidates find receptive audiences among a voting bloc that explicitly disavows core pillars of the American experiment. What we should lament is not only political — the disavowal of the free market and self-government — but spiritual.

Post-Christian societies, which New York City has sadly become, are enacting post-Christian political economies wherein officials become czar-like, citizens become clients, and cultures deteriorate into ugliness and grievance.

Political economies are downstream of assumptions about the human person and human societies. Where Christianity and conservatism champion a constrained view of the human person and the need for government to balance competing interests under systems of law and liberty, socialism offers a rival vision deeply embedded within the progressive worldview — one that begins not with the depravity of man, but with man’s continued uplift and boundless progress through the power of an omnicompetent and omnibenevolent state. In this paradigm, people who no longer believe in the power of self-government exchange personal virtue for increased bureaucratic control. If humanity cannot govern itself from within through the “mediating institutions” that teach the virtues of self-control, thrift, and personal responsibility, it will necessarily look outside to czar-like apparatchiks who fill the vacuum left by self-government. The middle between the individual and the state thus vanishes.

In this light, citizens become clients of the state, looking to the government to deliver what was once the province of private industry, family, and voluntary associations. The Socialist agenda — rent freezes, free transportation, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare, all funded by soaking the wealthy — is a grand act of displacement. Whatever one may think of any single plank in the Socialist agenda, the result is a paradigm shift toward a provider-client relationship between the state and the individual. Here, the client cannot stand on his own and operates not within spheres or structures of civil society but as a dependent. What’s left is the residue of resentment and grievance among a people who look upon the fortunes of others, believing them theirs by right of simple lack.

What’s more, whatever progressivism touches, it eventually destroys. Consider the deleterious effect of progressivism on a city’s aesthetics. Where everything is “owned” by everyone, no one sees it as their responsibility to steward their surroundings. No surprise, then, that progressive Socialism produces debauched city centers — crime-ridden, dirty, and bedecked with ugliness. Where the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness are cast off, public ugliness follows: in a desacralized world, the prurient is upheld as the cost of “liberty.” Even if one were to point to the relative successes of state-sponsored socialism in Scandinavia, we must respond that the population differences between America and Scandinavia are stark and that Scandinavia’s cultural homogeneity makes for an apples-and-oranges comparison.

We should name Tuesday night’s results for what they are — the casting off of personal responsibility and entrepreneurial ambition for a faux solidarity delivered by government diktat.

But lament is not enough. In the same way that Jesus wept over Jerusalem for its refusal of the offer of what would bring lasting peace, so too must we look at what is unfolding in New York City and answer with superior counterarguments. We need not look far for superior alternatives — states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, where citizens are flocking to escape the onslaught of bigger government and higher taxes.

To be sure, Mamdani’s voters are reacting to perceived distresses — housing costs, fraying social services, and a growing sense that American capitalism is rigged against them. It is not enough for the Christian to dismiss the real or perceived plights of others — genuine remedies grounded in personal responsibility and a bottom-up conception of the common good must be on offer. We must advance a mediating position between increased government control and atomized libertarianism, a position that the Christian tradition refers to as “ordered liberty,” a conception of political order grounded in the reality that human beings are made in God’s image, oriented to real, concrete, and objective human goods, and ordered under the banner of law. That vision requires a total repudiation of the vision winning the day in New York City.

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Andrew T. Walker is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Managing Editor of WORLD Opinions. He is a Fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.