This weekend marks not just 249 years of the United States—specifically, 249 years of its individual-rights-based, government-limiting founding Declaration—but 10 years of me trying, in my small way, to help keep the ideas in that founding document alive by writing about politics and culture on Splice Today. I started with a defense of Sen. Rand Paul against his detractors, at a time when many hoped he’d be the 2016 Republican presidential nominee and when Obama was still in the White House, the world seemingly dominated by thinktanks and wonks.
Much has changed since then, but I was well prepared—slightly ahead of the curve in thinking both left and right easily devolve into authoritarianism and in thinking the world was becoming a postmodern, tech-dominated dystopia/conspiracy.
A prominent libertarian editor chastised me back then for talking about things like new evidence for UFOs or the risk of robots taking over, but I think the strange subsequent decade has vindicated taking an interest in such topics, even if the result is sometimes an even greater feeling of disorientation. Recall that it was only two years before that that Edward Snowden finally made it socially acceptable to say that the government might be listening to everyone’s phone calls. Prior to about 2013, you were immediately branded a nutcase for worrying about things like that. Since that point, you’re branded a nutcase mainly for thinking biology plays a role in pronoun usage.
Splice Today’s owner/editor Russ Smith is not the libertarian editor who chastised me, and indeed he’s long encouraged writers to seek truth in strange, Hunter S. Thompson-esque places (including me since my mid-1990s columns for his paper NYPress).
Based on those years of paying attention, I declare the young immigrant socialist potential next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the least-bizarre, most woefully mundane phenomenon in recent political history. Naturally the Democrats and media love a commie! He happily tells media his long-term goal is government seizure of “the means of production,” and Democrats in this town eat it up.
(By contrast, conservative columnist Tim Carney notes one of Mamdani’s signature policy proposals, government-run grocery stores, is based on a basic accounting error causing Mamdani to think the City has $140 million available for that program when it has only about $3 million. Well, fingers crossed a Mayor Mamdani would handle the other $100 billion or so in NYC’s budget more competently and not shovel it to boondoggles or radical cronies.)
So, a Uganda-born, Muslim rap/theatre guy—a citizen for only six years now—whose only significant employment has been working for his mom is poised to take over the financial capital of the U.S. and the world, and still you wonder why the idiots of the right have devolved from being defenders of markets, as I always wanted them to be, into being ornery foes of any and all forms of “globalization”? I dare say the left has been provoking them, not just during this mayoral race or the past couple presidential terms but for a century or more now.
Meanwhile, under Trump, the Republicans are offering no sane alternative—not even on the narrow issue of groceries. How could the right, if it were still sincerely interested in free-market economics, mount a credible critique of something as dinky as Mamdani’s communist supermarkets when the Republican secretary of agriculture is proudly touting vast new agricultural subsidies in Trump’s bloated Big Beautiful Bill budget non-overhaul?
If rationales as thin and perfunctory as it being a tough year for farmers (always) and us having to help them out are all it takes in Republican minds to justify the Soviet-style Department of Agriculture continuing its price-controlling, failure-rewarding, big-spending ways, what difference does it really make whether we elect nominal socialists or their nominal foes? The Republicans know they have potential votes in the heartland, and if all they have to do to get those votes is keep shoveling trillions in subsidies, then by gum, subsidies the farmers shall have.
Indeed, given Mamdani’s recent defense of the term “intifada” as a harmless synonym for “struggle,” maybe it’s time he and Trump co-authored a defense of big-government political leaders called My Struggle, borrowing a title used by one of their authoritarian mid-century predecessors. Mamdani is also welcome to recycle the “I, Madman” title I used atop this column, an anagram of his name, after all.
Even as I excoriated various menaces-of-the-week over the past decade, my hope—a secret wish shared by many a political pessimist—was really that the insanity of the left and the stupidity of the right would occasionally cancel each other out, allowing the relatively sane, smart, apolitical people to thrive in the occasional lulls. As the right and left get nuttier and moderates fewer, it gets harder to believe in that strategy—one that seemed natural and in keeping with a healthy bourgeois apathy back in the 1990s and still did, to some extent, when this column began 10 years ago, when sites like Buzzfeed and Salon seemed about as crazy as the world of political discourse got.
I didn’t make too many predictions over the years, which is probably for the best, and I have no idea what happens next.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
