Making a Mayor

On Cynthia Ozick, Democrats' "soul-searching," and Zohran Mamdani's vision for New York

The title card from a 1928 educational film about stargazing in NYC. (PDR)

This morning I reread a story by Cynthia Ozick about an attorney named Ruth Puttermesser.

Poor Puttermesser. First her boyfriend walks out on her (“His gripe was that she read in bed too much; last night she had read aloud from Plato’s Theaetetus…”). Then the newly-elected mayor of New York replaces her boss at the Department of Receipts and Disbursements with his cronies from the Department of Hygienic Maintenance, people who know nothing about “the recondite, dim, and secret journey of the City’s money” of which they are now in charge.

The boss calls Puttermesser into his office. Her executive salary is too expensive for the Department now, he tells her. She’s not being fired (not right away, anyway). Worse for the passionate civil servant, she’s being demoted to a low-paying bullshit job with no clear responsibilities. From nine to five she’s condemned to waste time avoiding her colleagues, writing furious letters to the mayor, and imagining how it could all be different.

One morning, Puttermesser wakes up and spots a newspaper left behind by the boyfriend. “Advertising. Consumerism. Capitalism. Page after page of cars, delicately imprinted chocolates, necklaces, golden whiskey. Affluence while the poor lurked and mugged…,” she observes while walking around her apartment. Enough with all that. She sets the Times aside. Looking around the room she’s startled to find an unknown, naked woman lying in her bed:

She looked dead—she was all white, bloodless. It was as if she had just undergone an epileptic fit: her tongue hung out of her mouth. Her eyelids were rigidly ajar; they had no lashes, and the skin was so taut and thin that the eyeballs bulged through. Her palms had fallen open; they were a clear white. Her arms were cold rods. A small white square was visible on the tongue. The girl did not resemble Puttermesser at all…

And yet the girl is Puttermesser’s own creation, a golem—the first female golem (#girlboss)—constructed during a manic blackout in the night using the upturned houseplants’ soil, and given life by Puttermesser’s own breath as the confused woman speaks the name of God inscribed in Hebrew on its forehead. Unable to speak itself, the golem communicates by writing notes. It names itself Xanthippe after the wife of Socrates.

She asked Xanthippe: “Do you eat?”

The golem wrote, “Vivo, ergo edo. I live, therefore I eat.”

“Don’t pull that on me—my Latin is as good as yours. Can you cook?”

“I can do what I must, if my mother decrees it,” the golem wrote.

“All right,” Puttermesser said. “In that case you can stay. You can stay until I decide to get rid of you. Now make lunch. Cook something I like, only better than I could do it.”

Indeed, Xanthippe does many things better than Ruth Puttermesser could. It masters housework. It eats a ton and grows a few centimeters every day. It can’t get tired. Soon the golem realizes it can better serve its master by anticipating her desires. When Puttermesser is finally sacked, Xanthippe offers a plan it had been writing in secret. Puttermesser will found a new political party, the Independents for Socratic and Prophetic Idealism (ISPI) and challenge the mayor in the upcoming election. Puttermesser is skeptical and resistant to this idea. But Xanthippe has made up its mind, and Puttermesser can only watch as the creature, now wearing Puttermesser’s clothes and makeup, canvasses New Yorkers to get her name on the ballot, quickly collecting 14,562 more signatures than are needed.

On Election Day, Mayor Puttermesser wins in a landslide.

This story had been on my mind since earlier this week when I canvassed for Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman hoping for the same result (sans dæmonic intervention).

I was the first one to arrive at the designated street corner that night. It was cold. When the organizer showed up, she suggested we wait in a deli for the other volunteers.

HQ

In a few minutes there were six of us. We were blocking the beer and the ice cream. Someone kept knocking over the same mustard bottle with their backpack. Scripts and flyers were passed around. The organizer asked us to download a surprisingly well-built app on our phones, gave us a brief orientation on how to use it, and sent us out, to the cook’s unmasked relief.

There’s a lot I could say about Mamdani and why I think he’s a strong candidate for mayor. A sharp critic of Eric Adams, Mamdani has used assembly hearings to bring public attention to the mayor’s hypocrisy and incompetence. He’s running on a populist, social democratic platform aimed at raising the quality of life in the city, especially for the working poor.

He talks about freezing the rent on rent-controlled apartments. You might think, as I did, that this would be redundant. Under Adams, the Rent Guidelines Board has increased the cost of stabilized units by over nine percent so far, the biggest jump since the billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s board issued a 12.5 percent raise. No other candidate for citywide office has argued for such a freeze in recent years, though many say they want to build more affordable housing, Mamdani included, but without plans to meet renters’ needs today.

He talks about opening up a chain of city-owned grocery stores to make healthy, low-cost food widely available. He talks about free, universal childcare. And when he talks about making the bus free for everyone to ride, it isn’t a pipe dream. As an assemblyman, Mamdani oversaw a pilot program that covered fares for nearly 50,000 commuters for one year. Here’s how he and State Senator Michael Gianaris described the results in The Nation:

The pilot firstly dramatically increased ridership. Across all five fare-free bus lines, the MTA reported a 30 percent increase in ridership on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, with 23 percent of riders reporting that they made the trip because it was free. It also provided clear economic relief to low-income riders. The highest uptick in new riders was from individuals earning less than $28,000.

Forty-four percent of riders took the free bus for errands and leisure, allowing them to more freely contribute to New York’s economy. And for [Bronx resident Cecily Blatch], the fare-free bus pilot gave her more freedom to pay for daily necessities. “This means I’ll take the bus more.… I’ll use this money to cover more bills.”

Safety in our public transit system has continued to be a chief concern for New Yorkers. Fare-free buses also offer us a compelling answer on how to deliver safer public transit. Across the five routes we made free, assaults on bus operators dropped by 38.9 percent. This strongly mirrors what happened in Kansas City: After introducing fare-free buses, security incidents dropped 39 percent from 2019 to 2020. By eliminating the fare-box, riders did not need to interact with bus operators, interactions that were often the source of altercations. J.P. Patafio, a TWU Local 100 vice president who represents bus operators in Brooklyn, put it this way: The “fare box is responsible for 50 percent of the assaults on my operators. Free bus service would make my bus operators’ job much safer.” The pilot had positive effects on the environment, too: Eleven percent of new riders used the bus instead of a car or taxi they used prior, thus reducing city-wide emissions.

I don’t pretend to know if these ideas, no matter how compelling, increase the likelihood that Zohran Mamdani will unseat Eric Adams. This is a primary contest, after all, and city Democrats excel at nothing better than infighting. That’s true of both ideas and strategy. There’s little indication that anybody’s learned from the tactical mistakes made in the last election when New York experimented with ranked choice voting for the first time. In the final days of that race, progressive (Maya Wiley) and establishment (Kathryn Garcia) candidates failed to realize who their friends were in time to put together a voting bloc that could beat Adams. Even if Adams upholds the time-honored Gracie Mansion tradition of becoming a Republican after winning as a Democrat, it’s not clear that the Democrat voters who stayed home during the presidential election would care. Suppose I’m wrong. Say to his delight Adams is voted out, free to be Trump’s I.C.E. director or ambassador to Turkey or whatever. What then? Just two days ago, in an op-ed for the Daily News, a pollster claimed that the frontrunner is Benjamin Netanyahu’s new war crimes defense attorney: Andrew Cuomo. For reasons not at all to do with their content, Mamdani’s views might never be considered by most voters, nevermind members of his own party.

To the extent that it has had a voice in the 21st century, the Democratic Party has now lost it. Within days of Trump’s reelection tons of articles were written (like this one and that one) about the need for soul-searching within the party. Calls for a new message have only intensified since his inauguration:

• The Washington Post (Feb. 5:) “Democrats focus on Elon Musk as they search for a message to fight Trump.”

• The New York Times (Feb. 2): “‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump.”

• CNN (Jan. 22): “Democrats grapple with their own message in Trump 2.0”

It’s too early to judge this process a success or failure on the basis of electoral success. Even so, “soul-searching” doesn’t seem to capture what’s going on here so far.

Earlier this week I received an advanced copy of Abundance, a much-hyped book by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson, which will be published next month. In a nutshell, the duo argues that many of the aims liberals agree are worth achieving—transitioning to clean, renewable energy; improving public health; ensuring affordable housing for all—have not been realized because there’s too much regulation and too little focus on growing the supply of goods that taxpayers are essentially buying. Klein and Thompson say we need to rip up the environmental review forms and send in the hydraulic cranes. Installing more solar panels, getting more medicines to market, building decent apartment buildings—all this needs to happen at speed and at scale.

I may write more about this book later, so for now I’ll just say this: As a work of advertising, there could be something to it. Klein and Thompson are trying to unify as many left-wing factions as they can, from conservative Democrats to eco-socialists, around as basic an idea as possible. That’s respectable. The problem is it’s not enough. Former Pete Buttigieg advisor Lis Smith may be right that the Democratic brand is in the toilet. That isn’t because there aren’t enough blue-tied polyglots on TikTok. It’s because nobody knows what most elected Democrats believe anymore. If Zohran Mamdani’s campaign continues to gain momentum, it’ll be because this charge won’t stick to him.

Suppose the messaging gets sorted out. What would the society evoked by it really look like? Here’s a view of things when Mayor Ruth Puttermesser is in charge of New York:

Lost wallets are daily being returned to their owners. Now it is really beginning—the money and credit cards are always intact…The subways have been struck by beauty. Lustrous tunnels unfold, mile after mile. Gangs of youths have invaded the subway yards at night and have washed the cars clean. The wheels and windows have been scrubbed by combinations of chemicals; the long seats have been fitted with velour cushions of tan and blue. Each car shines like a bullet. The tiles that line the stations are lakes of white; the passengers cherish their own reflections in the walls.

…Except for fire engines and ambulances, there are no other motored vehicles. Little girls dare, between buses, to jump rope in the middle of the street. Some roads, though, have been lushly planted, so that lovers seek them out to hide in one another’s breast. The tall grasses and young maples of the planted roads are haunted by pretzel sellers, hot-chestnut peddlers, hawkers of books in wheelbarrows. The children are often indoors after school, carpentering bookshelves. The libraries are lit all night, and the schools are thronged in the evenings by administrative assistants from the great companies, learning Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese. There are many gardeners now, and a hundred urban gardening academies. There is unemployment among correction officers; numbers of them take gardening jobs. No one bothers to drag the steel shutters down over storefronts after closing. The Civil Service hums. Intellect and courtliness are in the ascendancy.

And of course, it can’t last. Just as Xanthippe became dissatisfied with cooking and cleaning, soon it realizes that even Mayor Puttermesser cannot put its talents to maximum use. The golem begins to act on its own ideas. (Xanthippe even makes an indecent proposal to Puttermesser’s prodigal boyfriend…) The master-servant relationship falls off balance, and cracks begin to emerge in the utopia they created together.

The Puttermesser administration got by on, yes, an inexhaustible giant made of dirt and spit, but also on the strength of its imagination. Elsewhere, Ozick writes that “Imagination is more than make-believe, more than the power to invent. It is also the power to penetrate evil, to take on evil, to become evil, and in that guise it is the most frightening human faculty.” Here Ozick is talking about the essence of literature, but I think she’d say that political imagination is equally frightening.

I’ll leave it there; this newsletter is called Placeholders, not Treatises. Most posts will be shorter than this one, and they’ll focus on books and art as well as politics. I’m working on a few pieces for, well, real publications right now that I can’t wait to share with you, too.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoy learning about books and politics and want to help keep this newsletter free for everyone, consider subscribing for $5/month.