Et Tu, Seattle? 'Democratic' Socialism Goes Bi-Coastal

Will America, as we know it, survive?

With New York and now Seattle gone socialist, are we about to have a teaching moment from the Atlantic to the Pacific?

What will be the result? Will these two experiments, if we can call them that, fail to the degree that we won’t have to repeat them, at least for a while?

Let’s hope so, because if not, the future of this country is gloomy indeed. Think the Soviet Union circa 1975.

Seattle may only be a city of 800,000 compared to Gotham's 8,000,000, but it’s still significant and a harbinger of more to come. The Soros family is licking its chops.

As it happens, I am reasonably familiar with both places, having been born in NYC and having had a part-time home for a few years on Bainbridge Island, a rather upscale bedroom community replete with swank, overpriced marijuana stores resembling fancy wine shops, a half-hour ferry ride off Seattle—in other words, a hotbed of leftism.

Arriving at the Seattle ferry terminal from Bainbridge was even then a depressing scene. The area was swarming with junkies and the homeless, often one and the same. It was getting so bad that we decided to flee the area. That was about the same time we moved to Nashville from LA, as our neighborhood there was becoming similarly infested.

This was all pre-COVID, when everything got worse.

Could socialism be the solution to all this? Now that we have mayors in New York—Zohran Mamdani—and Seattle—Katie Wilson—both self-described Democratic Socialists and members of the Democratic Socialists of America, not to be confused with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), we are about to find out.

Although of different ethnicities, Mamdani and Wilson have remarkably similar bourgeois backgrounds, par for the course for leftists. Neither is remotely poor nor from the working class. We can assume they have met a few, but probably not extensively. They are the children of successful college professors and grew up in comfort, sometimes great comfort. Indeed, Ms. Wilson reportedly still relies on those parents for some of her support. Mamdani recently hosted a lavish three-day wedding reception at his family’s estate in Kampala, Uganda, following an engagement party held in a Dubai hotel with a view of the Burj Khalifa. (“Power to the People! Right On!”) Who paid for that?

They also both support a variety of leftwing causes, including free city transportation and low-cost food in grocery stores. Mamdani, as is well known at this point, seeks to make many government-owned. Wilson wants to prevent national chains from closing stores, regardless of whether they are losing money.

Obviously, they have many more changes in mind than just those, but the question arises: Can they be achieved in a capitalist society?

No doubt they have been thinking about that. In fact, the NY Post has an article today (Nov. 14), “Top Mamdani aide looking for ways he can ‘unilaterally’ use NYC mayoral powers to deliver socialist agenda.” Only a few days behind the New York mayor-elect, Ms. Wilson is undoubtedly looking over his shoulder. (Someone should send her this article, if she hasn’t already seen it. It has some good suggestions.)

Both, it goes without saying, share a disdain for one Donald J. Trump and seek to Trump-proof their cities. Mamdani wants to call him in advance, presumably to warn him to keep his hands off. (Wouldn’t you like to listen in on that conversation?)

Ironically, the Seattle area, “progressive” as it would seem to be, is the home of many of America’s most salient capitalist business successes—Costco, Amazon, Microsoft, and so forth. How will the captains of those industries respond? Will they seek to decamp, as many have done from California and are rumored to be about to do from New York?

That will give us some of the answers to some of this, but I wouldn’t bet on the success of Mamdani or Wilson for another reason. I can’t think of an example where socialism has ever succeeded in anything faintly like the long term, anywhere. However, I can think of cases, as can you, where it has evolved into something truly frightening and lethal.

Of course, Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Wilson would tell you it just has never been done properly. They, undoubtedly, will finally be the ones to do it. Right?

ON A HOPEFULLY MORE UPBEAT MATTER

Thank you to those who responded in the comments or via private email to my book-publishing questions. They have been taken under advisement by the management (me).

I have already had a fair number of adventures with this new book, mainly due to the advent of AI, which has become increasingly pervasive since my last one. ChatGPT did a cover that wasn’t bad, but I discarded it because it made me feel guilty about abandoning human artists. (Actually, the man doing it is doing a better job.)

ChatGPT also offered marketing advice—to position the book as a comeback after my initial series years ago, but with a deeper meaning. (I think I could have thought of that myself. The scary part was that ChatGPT read the manuscript accurately in about thirty seconds, and it’s about 80k words.)

It’s a tricky world out there for artists of any sort these days. In my next life, I think I’ll be an electrician. That seems to be the thing these days.