Big Loser: Socialism in New York and Texas

Even though I’ve taken off from my Winners & Losers newsletter this summer, I still join the Cardle & Woolley Show on Talk 1370 Radio in Austin Friday mornings at 8:30 a.m. to announce the week’s list. You can listen live here every week or download the broadcast anytime by clicking here. This week I want to talk about one big loser: socialism in New York and Texas.

Socialism in New York — and Texas

To start, let me set the record straight. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is invariably described as the “first Democratic Socialist” to serve in the top job in New York City.

In fact, the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to be elected mayor was David Dinkins, who took office in 1990. Perhaps because he was also the first African-American mayor, the DSA distinction got lost. I worked for Dinkins — more on that a little later.

I bring this up because the big political news this week is that, buoyed by endorsements from Mamdani, three Democratic Socialists ousted three establishment Democrats, including the Chair of the Hispanic Caucus, for New York City congressional seats in the Democrat primary. The victors are calling it an “insurgency” over the Democrat establishment. Socialist senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, also endorsed the trio whose collective credentials are riddled with anti-capitalist and anti-American positions. One stated the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attack while another refused to condemn Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack in Israel and called for “the complete and total destruction of Western Civilization.”

When Mamdani was first elected, he was viewed by many as a fluke — something that could only happen in New York City, where voters were ultimately given a choice between him and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who many New Yorkers believe was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of elderly people during COVID-19.

Nobody thinks Mamdani is a fluke now — he is a kingmaker, the new face of the Democrat Party — or what the Democrat Party is about to become.

A half dozen more DSA members won New York State legislative Democrat primaries on Tuesday night, which virtually ensures that 16 socialist lawmakers will be seated in Albany after November, the largest socialist delegation in any state.

Washington, D.C. also nominated a Democratic Socialist mayor this week, and Democratic Socialist Nithya Raman is in a tight race with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for control of the country’s second largest city. Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson was elected last year and has famously driven Starbucks, which was born in Seattle, to Nashville with her “tax the rich” policies.

Because we are blessed to live “deep in the heart,” it is easy to dismiss New York’s socialist sweep as something that could never happen here, unless you live in San Antonio, like I do, where three DSA members have been elected and currently serve on City Council. So far, they have proposed a Trans History Week and a program called LOVIN to ensure that men who say they are women are not restricted from public women’s restrooms.

Austin has only has one DSA member on City Council now that the DSA mouthpiece, U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, has moved onto Congress. None of this should surprise us. Gallup released a poll last summer that found that 66% of Democrats view socialism positively, compared to the 42% of Democrats who view capitalism positively — a 24 point gap.

One big problem with the media failing to report that New York City has already had a Democratic Socialist mayor is that they also didn’t report what happened under previous socialist leadership. Here’s what I saw:

When Dinkins was mayor, I worked in his administration as part of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. The administration operated 18 hospitals all over the city, ostensibly to provide universal healthcare to every New Yorker, but largely to provide a pipeline for federal funds. Democrats had run New York City into a ditch and it was already bankrupt when Dinkins got there, but things got much worse when his only strategy for change was to beg for a federal bailout.

The reality was a nightmare. Like a third world country, New York City was battling four simultaneous epidemics — AIDS, low birth weight babies, asthma and tuberculosis. Crack cocaine was also rampant, and there were “crack babies” convulsing in tiny cribs in hospitals across the City while breast cancer deaths skyrocketed among African-American women because messages to get regular mammograms weren’t being delivered, and even if they were, there were no mammogram machines in black communities.

Then, as now, most people recognized that poor people with no other options were using emergency rooms for basic healthcare, siphoning off resources and escalating costs. Five- and six-hour emergency room wait times were common. I worked for months on a program to establish a network of clinics to treat asthma patients so people — mostly kids — could go to a clinic where they could get medication or an inhaler.

It was relatively inexpensive and we pushed the program forward without anticipating any problems. Why would we? It was in everybody’s interest to provide better care for patients, free up emergency room slots and decrease wait times.

I was wrong. It was not in everybody’s interest. The New York City Health and Hospital Workers Union didn’t mind that emergency rooms were jam-packed — that simply meant more overtime and more jobs. In a Democratic Socialist administration, the big unions had lots of clout, and they were able to shut down the community asthma clinics proposal in a day.

Outside the hospitals, crime and homelessness skyrocketed. In a city that requires walking, constant garbage strikes kept the streets littered with huge stinking garbage bags. Rats stopped even bothering to hide.

Finally, New Yorkers reached a breaking point and the unthinkable happened. There were barely enough registered Republicans in New York City at that time to make a blip on a chart, but Rudy Giuliani, who Ronald Reagan had made the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, narrowly defeated Dinkins in 1993 and began immediately to clean up the streets and rein in the crime. One of the first things he did was to return the hospitals to private providers.

New Yorkers didn’t forget the nightmare for a long time. While the city remained deeply Democratic, they didn’t elect another Democrat mayor for twenty years.

It is not surprising that the media has failed to report that Mamdani is actually the second Democratic Socialist mayor of New York City. They don’t want to remind anyone what happened after the first one.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.