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The anti-Mamdani editorials, considered

The Washington Post has been even more hysterical than The Wall Street Journal.

Today marks the end of a distinct period in the editorial-page history of our three elite national newspapers: the Anti-Candidate-Mamdani Era of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. As of tomorrow, it will be succeeded on all three editorial pages by the Anti-Mayor-Elect-Mamdani interval, which will in turn be followed on January 1st by dropping the word “Elect.”

The Times has pulled back somewhat from its initial scathing take on Mamdani, due doubtless to its realization (“its,” in this context, probably means that of its publisher A.G. Sulzberger) that most of the paper’s younger readers and some valued subsets of its readers (those in academia and the arts) actually support Mamdani. Such considerations never concerned the Journal, of course, which appeared to operate under the assumption that an anti-Mamdani editorial or column a day would keep a Mamdani victory away.

I haven’t done an actual count, I confess, but I think the Post ran either a close second to the Journal, or perhaps even tied with it, in the frequency and vituperation of its anti-Mamdani columns and editorials. Today—Election Day—it ran both an editorial and a column predicting Mamdani’s Gotham gulags were lurking around the next corner, while the Journal ran two columns but no editorials.

Perhaps the most recurrent theme in all these editorials and columns was that Mamdani’s proposed 2 percent tax hike on that share of a taxpayer’s yearly income that exceeds $1 million would lead to mass millionaire flight from New York. Despite the abundant evidence that shows millionaires have not fled due to previous tax hikes of greater than 2 percent, the editorialists returned to this theme again and again. I haven’t read a single editorial in those papers that pointed out that the universal child care that the proceeds from that tax would fund addresses a much more pervasive threat of—and reality of—flight from New York: that of families with young children who can’t afford the costs of child care and housing in our largest city. Or that the flight of young people poses more of a threat to New York’s vibrancy than that of their elders (which description covers most millionaires). Or that the case for providing free universal child care and preschool to children ages 1 to 5—the most important years for their development—is at least as compelling as the case to provide free universal education to children ages 5 to 18, which we’ve done since the 19th century.

At the direction of owner Jeff Bezos, of course, the Post has sacked its former editorial staff and roughly 90 percent of its columnists and brought in a slew of right-wingers in their stead. In the last couple of weeks, the approach of Election Day has led its editorialists to unfurl their true colors, in many ways as doctrinaire right-wing as the Journal’s,but with cruder prose and a sterner refusal to consider opposing arguments or explanations. The Journal has a tradition of giving a weekly column to a centrist or leftist; its current centrist is William Galston, who has accurately chronicled the economic reasons why many New Yorkers—mistakenly, in his view—support Mamdani.

No such context has appeared anywhere on the Post’s editorial pages. Today, it ran an editorial asking why Mamdani was winning, and answered that question in this way:

Supporters of free markets have failed to articulately make their case in New York, and Mamdani’s success is a warning to business-friendly Democrats that they’ll have to do better. It’s not enough to say socialism is bad; defenders of the American system have to show why people’s lives are improved by economic freedom—and why many American failures are often the result of government intervention rather than a free market run amok.

This begs the question of why supporters of free markets have had so much trouble in New York, and why the prospects of public provision of child care and social housing are so widely embraced. The editorial completely ignores that Mamdani has run his campaign exclusively on an affordability agenda, in a city that is the capital of a world capitalism in which only the rich are thriving. It’s the dysfunctions of capitalism that move electorates leftward, not the absence or inadequacy of pro-capitalist argumentation (see, for instance, the Great Depression and the New Deal, knowledge of which has somehow eluded the new crew at the Post).

In case the Post’s editorial politics are still unclear, it ran another editorial today filled with dread that moderate Democrat Abigail Spanberger, the all-but-certain victor in today’s gubernatorial election in Virgina, might occasionally govern as a liberal. It warns her against raising any taxes to address the state’s needs, or, worse still, supporting the elimination of the state’s “right-to-work” law, which, it argues, keeps the state from “[t]aking away that right [to not be part of a union] from working people to decide for themselves.” That 70 percent of the public, in every recent poll, supports unions, but just 6 percent of private-sector workers have been able to unionize, precisely because employers and the courts have found ways to keep workers from the ability to decide for themselves, is not a matter that the Post editorialists believe worthy of their consideration.

For whom, exactly, are these Post editorials and columns written? Certainly not the residents of Metro Washington. Ninety percent of District of Columbia voters backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential contest (only 68 percent of New York City voters backed her), and the D.C. suburbs of Maryland and Virginia gave her overwhelming majorities, too. The Post, to be sure, is trying to cultivate a national digital readership, but surveys not just of Times but also Journal readers show those papers’ readers are disproportionately Democrats, and I strongly suspect that’s true of the Post’s as well. The paper’s Metro D.C. readership doubtless includes a vast host of policy experts who could provide alternative arguments to those the Post produces, a fair number of them actually grounded in fact, but none are permitted to appear on their pages.

We can be confident that at least one Post reader—owner Jeff Bezos—is a fan of the paper’s editorial pages, for reasons of both ideology and self-interest: I note that Amazon, of which Bezos is both the founder and the largest individual shareholder, has donated to Trump’s ballroom, one clear way to win our sultan’s favor. One might think that Bezos’s wealth—which Forbes magazine pegged at $215 billion when it released its annual World’s Richest Humans list this week, ranking him third after Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—might create a concern for appearances among the paper’s editorial writers that would deter them from writing pieces like last Thursday’s gem arguing we spend too much on food stamps. Not the folks at the Post, however: They’re happy to go full Ebenezer Scrooge.

–HAROLD MEYERSON

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