In November, socialist Zohran Mamdani will almost certainly be elected mayor of New York City, but Wednesday last week he was booed out of a Staten Island restaurant, a reminder there are still some parts of this city willing to say, “Get behind me, Stalin!” Some of the things they said were pretty rude, and I’m not endorsing it all, but it’s nice they have a rebellious spirit. Staten Island is like an amazing little chunk of the real America that somehow got sneaked into this otherwise politically depraved left-wing megalopolis.
For those mercifully unaware of how things work here, New York City in the modern sense was created 127 years ago by the consolidation of five boroughs, with one of them, Staten Island, becoming in the past few decades the one borough where Republicans are commonplace, living and loving openly. It produces the rare Republicans on the City Council and, at the national level, the only Republican members of New York State’s congressional delegation that aren’t from Upstate to the north or Long Island to the east.
It might be tempting to conclude Staten Island has become a lowly de facto place of banishment across the water for those who don’t fit in politically in the rest of the City. Remember, though, that Staten Island, while a bit isolated, isn’t the only island making up New York City. The Bronx is, roughly speaking, the only one of the five boroughs that’s on the U.S. mainland. Manhattan is a borough/island that sometimes imagines itself seated at the center of the universe, and the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn sit next to each other on the western end of Long Island, which stretches eastward far beyond the political boundaries of New York City. They’re all legitimate lifestyle options.
While I’m glossing over various geographic footnotes and caveats and little protruding thingies on the map, I should note that some condescending ass on X took exception to me calling NYC only America’s second-richest city in a recent column, but unlike some talliers, I refuse to forget that a third of national income each year is harvested and controlled by D.C., the way socialists such as Mamdani like it. Ill-gotten though that wealth it is, it’s still immense. By comparison to our D.C. overlords, we’re just tiny little capitalists here in NYC, eking out a meager living on the stock market, media, and tourism.
I’ve spent my whole adult life on the east side of Manhattan, and by New York standards the east side admittedly has its fair share of Republicans, about 60 or 70 percent of the vote in some neighborhoods, but Republican enclaves in this town can’t hold a candle to the fervor and homogeneity of Democrat strongholds like the west side of Manhattan. There, Republicans manage no more than about two or three percent of the vote. Not coincidentally, it was while dining with a politically mixed group on the west side years ago that I heard a shocked elderly woman react to a fairly milquetoast group of economic conservatives and libertarians by saying, shaken, “I didn’t know there were people who believed such things!”
The occasional visit to Staten Island is thus a bit of an ideological holiday, in physical terrain a bit like my leafy native New England but in a political mindset more like Florida, with locals proud to run small businesses and bars that put up Trump posters. It’s New York City’s own internal Florida, you might say. So, a Manhattanite or Brooklynite needn’t wait until retirement to relocate someplace more sane and livable, having gradually learned over several decades—as even New Yorkers tend eventually and reluctantly to do—that the left must be fled. It’s all Frances Ha and AOC among the young in about four of the boroughs, but age brings wisdom. The old tend to be conservative not because they’re calcified or stuck in another era but because they’ve learned.
Amused as I am by last week’s restaurant resistance to Mamdani, I’m not sure I’d do that business any favors by naming it (it’s easily found in other articles about the incident). New Yorkers may be too stupid or intellectually arrogant to learn free-market economics—or keep track of the difference between a few rowdies and the location where the rowdies acted up—but New Yorkers are just smart enough to organize a boycott if they hate a venue for booing their incoming boy king (Mamdani is 33 and unlikely to relocate to the real Florida anytime soon). I wouldn’t want to make life any harder for the place if pro-Mamdani counter-protests ensue.
Socialists, by contrast, want things to be more politicized, more homogenized, more centralized. Soon, in all likelihood, Mamdani will be sitting atop the whole five-borough, $114 billion budget, surveillance-grid-perfecting, culture-skewing apparatus that is New York City government. He will grin his boyish grin and spout his platitudes about human dignity, but it’ll be interesting to see what he does to Staten Island and how gleefully socialists around the world watch. Pray Staten Island does not forget its capacity to boo.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey