Andrew Cuomo and the Death of Centrism

Photo: Alex Kent/Getty Images

Zohran Mamdani has vanquished a demon. I am being somewhat literal. You do not have to believe in a supernatural definition of evil to feel, as I do, that there is something devilish about politicians such as Andrew Cuomo. Nothing about his time in public office suggests that he has ever felt empathy. When COVID struck, his capacity for self-interest allowed him to put on a show of pragmatism. He could deliver a televised briefing in credible style, and as Republicans spun out, grasping at conspiracies, his apparent respect for the tenets of science earned him a reputation that was always greater than his actual performance. Lingua Franca sold a “Cuomosexual” sweatshirt for hundreds of dollars. On Etsy, I saw mugs that said, “Shhh, I’m watching Cuomo.” Donald Trump was in power. The bar for competence had fallen so low that it plunged into hell, where Cuomo, snakelike, crawled over it.

For Cuomo, the virus was a magnificent opportunity. The shock of COVID briefly eclipsed his cynicism and its consequences for the people of New York. He was a centrist star with an enviable national profile. Hardly anyone seemed to remember — or care — that he first ran for governor on a pledge to break organized labor or that he’d once opposed attempts to raise the city’s minimum wage and raise taxes on the rich. His active involvement with the Independent Democratic Conference, which was composed of Democratic lawmakers who caucused with Republicans in Albany, had faded from view along with its sins. Before the IDC dissolved in 2018, it blocked major liberal priorities like the codification of Roe v. Wade, all with Cuomo’s help.

The Cuomosexual could and did ignore a lot, but her idol was unable to hide his true nature for long. In December 2020, sexual-harassment allegations hit the press, earning him the eventual condemnation of state and national Democrats. He resigned less than a year later, after Attorney General Letitia James released a 168-page report that substantiated the women’s claims. The report found that he cupped a state employee’s breast, rubbed the back of a female state trooper, and told another young woman that he was “lonely and wanted to be touched.” (Cuomo has denied all wrongdoing.) By then, we’d learned that he had covered up thousands of nursing-home deaths at the height of the pandemic. The following months and years only damaged him further, or so it initially seemed. He abused state resources to fulfill a lucrative book deal with Penguin Random House. He sued the women who accused of him of sexual harassment, which cost taxpayers millions, and his attorneys demanded their gynecological records and therapy notes. Then he decided to inflict his presence on New York City again, and centrist Democrats lined up to support him.

Though I expect nothing from the Democratic Establishment, I am still capable of disgust. One by one, Democrats who’d called for his resignation a few years earlier told voters he would be a great mayor. That he was necessary because he could stand up to Trump and defeat Mamdani, the socialist underdog. When Senator Kirsten Gillibrand endorsed Cuomo, I thought I might laugh. Here she was, the great champion for women, who helped push Al Franken out of the Senate for perversion and urged Cuomo to resign over worse, and suddenly she was talking to the press about “second chances.” The logic was transparent: Give the bastard a second chance so the left doesn’t get one at all.

So, the hysteria. Mamdani isn’t just a socialist; he’s young, South Asian, and Muslim, qualities that theoretically make him unelectable outside his district in Queens. But he gained in the polls, and as his critics grew desperate, they relied on familiar attacks. Use of the word “intifada” can only ever be antisemitic, and because Mamdani would not universally condemn it, he must be antisemitic, too, some claimed. Centrist pundits who drooled over the war in Iraq decided that he was either a terrorist sympathizer or too brain-poisoned by the left to lead. Though he did win over some liberal officeholders, the Democratic old guard made its antipathy clear, even if members did not call him a jihadi. A bipartisan furor spiraled, Mamdani received death threats, and I thought of the panic over the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

Cuomo fed on the smears, positioning himself as a friend to Israel and a serious administrator with the experience that Mamdani, a three-term legislator, lacked. Nothing worked, and Mamdani had routed him by the time I normally go to bed. I stayed up long enough to watch the cope seep in: A socialist could only win against a centrist like Cuomo, who was unusually weak. Or: Mamdani had run away from “wokeness.” And: The election didn’t mean anything, so let’s forget about it. Cuomo was certainly weak, but his centrism helps explain why. Democrats have insisted, for longer than I’ve been alive, that they have no choice but to triangulate: The American people are moderate in character and they will not tolerate radicalism, so Cuomo is the best the party can do. Soon, voters saw what that meant. Cuomo could barely disguise his disdain for the city he wanted to lead. He didn’t interact with voters and barely interacted with the press. He accused Mamdani, his most serious opponent, of rhetoric that excused “hate” and even “murder.” He had virtually no ideas because he thought he could coast on name recognition and a perception of pragmatism. On Election Day, he ranked himself and no one else in the field — not even Jessica Ramos, who torched her bona fides to endorse him.

Mamdani didn’t have Cuomo’s money or institutional support, which may have freed him to run a transformative campaign. He didn’t shy away from his racial and religious identity, or from backing trans rights, or from supporting Palestine, and he didn’t have to because those positions are not inherently at odds with a “kitchen-table” campaign. He ran on affordability and championed meaningful economic proposals like universal child care and baby baskets, plus a rent freeze for regulated apartments. He told the obvious truth, which is that the city is crushing everyone who isn’t rich, and proposed solutions. With the laudatory assistance of Brad Lander, he modeled a new and more collaborative politics in contrast to Cuomo’s narcissism. He took that optimism to the streets and to social media with what seemed like boundless energy, and he redefined pragmatism for a new age in city politics. Maybe it’s radical to let child-care costs drive families out of the city. Maybe it’s Cuomo and his backers who are out of touch with real people.

Cuomo offered voters nothing but a politics of disposability and fear. That’s his record, and also, that’s centrism. It lectures, it patronizes, it shifts blame to shadowy “groups,” by which it means unions, or the ACLU, but never AIPAC. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan thinks Americans are too stupid to know what the word “oligarchy” means, and somehow that makes her a truth-teller to some, not a snob. Thousands of people in red and blue states showed up to hear Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their national Fight Oligarchy tour, but Slotkin went to WelcomeFest, the new centrist confab, where she could repeat herself in the presence of like-minded elites.

I’ll give Cuomo credit for this much: The moral and intellectual rot of the Democratic Establishment is now much harder to ignore. It had a chance to show a little backbone, and it said no thanks, an act of cowardice that cost it further credibility. Although I don’t think the Democratic Party can run a Mamdani clone in every race, or that his exact platform would work in, say, rural Virginia, his victory does suggest a broad truth. People need to believe they have a future. That’s as true of the party base as it is for all voters. Anyone can look at the party and see that it’s sclerotic. What future can it ever offer us in the shape it’s in now? Give people a real alternative to gerontocracy or a millennial Chuck Schumer, and they just might take it.