By Zaldy Dandan – Variety Editor
WHY is it that so many educated people in one of the world’s greatest cities elected a mayoral candidate who promised change by peddling some of the oldest yet still unrealized campaign promises known to humanity?
Politicians have been promising to make life easier and more affordable since ancient Rome — and probably even before that. The results, however, have been depressingly consistent: they make things worse, or invent new problems altogether. Surely if the self-evident “solutions” offered by our would-be saviors were truly “effective,” we wouldn’t be facing the same problems again, right?
But then again, not many of us have the time or the willingness to learn more about history — or even basic economics. This is why, through all these years and all over the world, self-proclaimed saviors and agents of “change” keep winning elections more often than we realize.
As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels pointed out in their 2016 book, “Democracy for Realists,” the “great majority of citizens pay little attention to politics. At election time, they are swayed by how they feel about ‘the nature of the times,’ especially the current state of the economy, and by political loyalties typically acquired in childhood. Those loyalties, not the facts of political life and government policy, are the primary drivers of political behavior.”
In her cover story for The Spectator World’s latest issue, author and lawyer Heather MacDonald effectively dismantled the intellectual and economic foundations of the incoming New York mayor’s campaign pledges. “A city,” she writes, “that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.”
MacDonald also noted that “Running the Leviathan that is New York City government is not an ideological project; it is an enormous management challenge. [The mayor-elect’s] assembly staff in 2021 consisted of four women. He will now be overseeing a 300,000-strong public workforce and thousands more private and nonprofit contractors. Putting him at the top of Gotham’s government is like parking someone who cannot read music in front of an orchestra and expecting him to conduct Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring.’ ”
In politics, however, a “fresh face” with (supposedly) “new” ideas is always a hot commodity.
Diogo Costa, the president of the Foundation for Economic Education, has a less harsh assessment of New York’s mayoral election result. Young voters, Costa said, “were not trying to elect a Marxist. They aren’t ideological socialists, even if they are semantically so. What they wanted to elect was a hacker, someone who seemed to find shortcuts in a system that feels rigged.”
He added, “Young people’s socialism isn’t about revolution or seizing the means of production. It’s about the price of groceries and homes. Young New Yorkers voted for socialist policies because they are simple — dangerously simplistic — answers to real pain…. Young people aren’t throwing the capitalist baby out with the bathwater. They’re trying to cheatcode a game
that appears rigged against them. They’re right about the problem. We need to be clearer about the solution.” He is referring to economic growth, free markets, innovation, and human flourishing.
Human history has consistently shown that these work. But most of us are not convinced. We prefer to believe those with easy answers, especially if they validate our convictions — i.e., biases. And as Bryan Caplan has noted in “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” these include an anti-market bias — a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism. This bias, alas, “is not a temporary, culturally specific aberration. It is a deeply rooted pattern of human thinking that has frustrated economists for generations.”
So why is it, you may ask, that “democratic socialists” do not win elections all the time? Simple. Because once in power, they do not make things better — except perhaps for their cronies and top supporters. Usually, moreover the ones who tell the voting public to “kick the bums out” are the bums whose turn it is to be kicked out in the next election. Many voters are impatient. Perhaps not coincidentally, in every election, many candidates for office tell voters that it is “time for change,” and it is “now or never.” And then they’re surprised whenever voters turn against them in the next election.
Here in the CNMI, the campaign season is already underway, even though the election is still a year away. As someone who has written about so many CNMI elections, let me assure you that you have not heard a single new campaign promise from anyone — and perhaps never will. But not to worry: there is always another election.
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