Amid an increasingly polarized political landscape, it is tempting to see little hope for unity. A Pew Research survey in 2020 found that nearly 80% of Trump supporters said that they disagreed with Biden supporters not only on the best candidate but also on “core American values and goals.”
Biden supporters mirrored this sentiment. However, there are encouraging signs for our one, indivisible nation, and they come from an unlikely place: the New York City mayoral primary.
You have likely heard that the more moderate candidate in this race beat the more radical candidate. Though this description has all the truth befitting its ambiguity, it hides the fact that New York City voters resoundingly rejected what is fast becoming the main thrust of the Democratic platform. In short, even New Yorkers know that the Left has gone insane, and they took a stand against it.
NYC is America’s largest city, surpassing number two (Los Angeles) by more than 100%. In this city, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, so it is rightly considered a blue stronghold. One would expect, given the size of those gaps, to see a mayoral primary dominated by candidates who align with the Democratic agenda. One would expect a future squad member with all the misplaced confidence and lack of charm associated with that distinction.
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Fortunately, the opposite turned out to be true. Eric Adams won the primary with 50.5% of the vote (more on this later). He is a retired police captain who avidly rejected the Defund the Police movement. This issue is near and dear to New Yorkers and became the most important factor in the campaign as crime spiked.
It’s worth noting just how sharp that spike was. NYPD reported that in May 2021 the “overall index crime in New York City rose 22% compared with May 2020, driven by a 46.7% increase in robbery (1,182 v. 806) and a 35.6% increase in grand larceny (2,848 v. 2,101).” Add to that a 20.5% increase in felony assault and a whopping 73% increase in shooting incidents, and you can begin to understand why New Yorkers thought cutting police department budgets was a bad idea.
Mr. Adams repeatedly said that “[t]he prerequisite for prosperity is public safety.” This claim cut right through his far left opponent’s plan to strip $1 billion in funding from the police and gut the size of the force by at least 2,250 officers. This idea came courtesy of Maya Wiley, who is far more aligned with the Democratic platform which hopes to “overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom.”
Instead, Mr. Adams insists that poverty does not cause crime; crime causes poverty. It’s a stunning reversal of trend for a Democratic candidate, but it captures a powerful truth. The truth is that people are agents acting in environments with free will. They are not automata that are purely products of their circumstances. The guiding lights of the Democratic Party would disagree, hence the insistence that racism is not a quality of individual actions or motivations, but a systemic issue.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Adam’s position is borne out by economics. The fact that items cost more in low-income neighborhoods is not disputed. What is disputed is the cause. Left-leaning intellectuals will claim that this phenomenon is due to racism. Those evil capitalists think that “black people will steal you blind and try to get things for a nickel,” as Winona Bynum, executive director of the Detroit Food Policy Council, says.
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Alternatively, we could note that it is far more expensive to operate stores in low-income neighborhoods due to a variety of factors. And, yes, a key one is theft, meaning that stores in poor urban areas experience twice the theft of those in suburbia. That the vast, vast majority of people in these neighborhoods are not criminals does not mean that the stores can function if their costs are prohibitively high. The injustice here is not that stores decline to open where they cannot make a profit but that the innocent many must pay the price for the criminal few.
Mr. Adams recognizes something that those outside of upper-class white liberals often fail to understand: their grand visions for social justice have a cost that is paid not by those with Ivy League degrees but by the poor. As Thomas Sowell (to whom we always return) says, “The vision of the left, full of envy and resentment, takes its worst toll on those at the bottom…” Mr. Adams told New Yorkers that this is unfair, and they agreed.
The New York Times tries to claim that Mr. Adams won because of his “major institutional advantages,” but that is a hard pill to swallow given that they also note that Ms. Wiley “has the support of the city’s largest labor union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 200,000 health care workers, many of whom are women of color. And she has the backing of Ms. Velázquez and Representative Yvette Clarke, two powerful congressional leaders in Brooklyn.”
That also does not explain why the person who came in second, Kathryn Garcia, was fairly unknown before this race. She is described as “a relatively moderate technocrat,” but when compared to the Democratic Party, that relativity nearly makes her a centrist. She ended up with 49.5% of the ranked-choice votes and also rejected Defund the Police while advocating looser housing restrictions and charter schools. A far cry from Wiley’s radicalism that is known for “reimagining what public safety is.”
Wiley garnered a mere 22% of first-choice votes in the rankings to Adams’ 32% and Garcia’s less than ideal 20%. What makes this defeat even more crushing is that, while Wiley only gained 8 points after the rankings kicked in, Garcia gained an incredible 30 points, and Adams gained a similar 29 points. In other words, though voters might have been unsure which moderate candidate they wanted, they sure as hell knew they did not want Ms. Wiley.
One supporter of Mr. Adams, Janice Brathwaite, summed it up nicely: “She [Wiley] is someone who is against the policeman who is protecting me, making sure nobody is shooting me.” It does appear that way, Ms. Brathwaite. Democrats would be wise to notice that the American people are not so foolish as they seem to think and adapt accordingly.
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