As New York City‘s mayoral race ossifies, with the leading candidates all short of a clear majority, the city, despite its lackluster choices for leaders, is still thriving.
In Central Park, trees tower, statues shine, and more than 400 species of birds sing. On Manhattan’s avenues, sidewalks teem, stores bustle, and towers rise, sentinels over the excited cacophony. The latest generation of pushcart-wielding immigrants sell clothes, fruit, and wares in every borough, reaching for a better future for their children. And in neighborhoods clustered around subway stations, three-story walkups stretch for blocks, punctuated by parks. Even the subway map looks like a pulsing brain — a network of connections binding the city in steel.
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One thing makes all of this possible: people. New Yorkers past and present built the city. They took risks coming here, starting businesses, forming community organizations, and imagining new physical realities — and they reified those dreams.
Sometimes, they even elect capable leaders. But in today’s politically polarized America, in which the Left and Right provoke each other for attention and funding, New York City is unlikely to get the reasonable, centrist mayor it deserves.
Depolarization is what America and New York City need, and it’s not just a political phenomenon — it’s a chemical one. In certain batteries, hydrogen gas builds up on one end, forming an insulating layer that blocks the electrical current. The solution is a “depolarizing mix” — carbon and manganese that absorb the gas and keep the current flowing.
Our politics needs the same treatment. The leaders of the left wing provoke the leaders of the right wing and vice versa, building up layers of gas until America’s dynamism is smothered. Even though most Americans are politically unpolarized, their political leaders are, creating the urgent need in America and New York City for depolarizers, or leaders who deflect the heat of extremism and foster our spark.
Unfortunately, the leading candidates for New York City mayor, especially self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani, misunderstand what keeps the city thriving.
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New York City is not a public policy sandbox. It’s an 8-and-a-half-million-resident, $116-billion-per-year albatross operation with dozens of agencies, hundreds of unions, hundreds of thousands of public workers, and innumerable special interests. It needs capable executives, not the leading Democratic candidates who are corrupt egoists, ethically compromised leaders, or ideological purists.
Rent freezes sound compassionate, but they trap people in place and keep newcomers out, making it harder to thrive. The median cost of a New York City apartment is $1,600, but to get it on the open market, you’ll spend $4,000 because a million homes are already price-controlled, distorting the market. More rent regulation throttles the people instead of unleashing them to build more homes.
Similarly, public groceries may sound nice, but for results, just look to Venezuela, which pursued similar policies. You don’t need to hop on a plane, actually, since more than a million Venezuelan refugees have fled to America (amid 8 million total) from catastrophically bad socialist policy.
Spending lots of other people’s money will always curry favor, but without any plan for results, it just robs our descendants, worsening life for future generations of New Yorkers.
A centrist, competent leader would reject left-wing ideological policies that will cripple the city’s dynamism and instead invest in the individual agency that has brought immigrants from every corner of the Earth to New York City’s shores. Specifically, they could thoughtfully administer the apparatus of the New York City government to excel in three areas:
- Individual success: Make it easy to start a business, raise a family, own a home, educate children, care for elders, and live full, meaningful lives.
- Equal dignity: Protect the vulnerable from poverty, crime, and addiction, and ensure access to transit and parks by focusing on these issues, allocating resources to proven programs, and always measuring results.
- Competent execution: Keep streets clean, neighborhoods safe, transit reliable, and schools strong. Do what only the government can do, do it well, do it transparently, and do it on budget.
Ben Wattenberg, a lifelong Democrat and speechwriter for former President Lyndon B. Johnson, warned his party in the 1980s not to drift too far to the left. But he found Democrats interested instead in blaming “accidents, tricks, personal popularity. Everything but substance. Everything but the issues they have come to represent.”
Wattenberg saw Democrats falling into a trap that turned off centrists: “Reagan said, several million times, that government is not the solution — it’s the problem. Many Democrats took the bait. If Reagan said government was so very bad, and Reagan was such a silly fellow, then Democrats must therefore say government is so very good. Trap snaps! Republicans win the White House.”
Today’s left wing fuels the Trumpian right wing (and vice versa) in the same way. Right-wing and centrist Americans react with fear to the well-known unpopular policies of the left wing, and left-wing leaders fall daily into traps set by the presidential entertainer in chief.
A competent mayor would avoid this theater, reject partisan rhetoric about standing up to the president, and focus on making the city work.
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If ideology wins out over competence, New York City risks reliving the 1970s: near bankruptcy, rising crime, business flight, and crumbling infrastructure. Pandering to left-wing politicians with compassionate-sounding but realistically crippling policies could well sentence New York to that familiar fate.
New York City has survived such bad mayors before. But it thrives only under good ones — centrist leaders who blend pragmatism with vision and toughness with empathy, who understand that the job is to make New York City’s people thrive. New York City deserves a centrist mayor who treats it not as a stage but as a sacred trust, whose highest good is keeping its pulsing energy flowing. For that, the city needs a great depolarizer.
Raphael Rosen is a historian, entrepreneur, and the author of Pedestal: What Makes American Democracy Stable And Why Your Everyday Thoughts, Words & Actions Determine Its Success.