I grew up inside a political machine. My father and the friends he came up with ran the Brooklyn, N.Y., reformers love to denounce. In 2010, when a group calling itself the New Kings Democrats came to tear that machine down, I was one of the people defending it. I know what a machine looks like from the inside. I know how it rewards loyalty, protects its own and decides races before the voters ever do.
The insurgents had a case, and parts of it were true. Machines grow comfortable. They get closed and self-dealing and certain of their own permanence. The New Kings Democrats promised something better: transparency, accountability, power handed back to the people. They swore they would end bossism for good.
And remember exactly who they were. The New Kings Democrats were the early crew, the farm team for what would become this city’s Democratic Socialists of America before most New Yorkers had ever heard the name. Same meetings, same righteousness, same appetite for other people’s power. They simply had not picked the jersey yet.
This week, they proved they never wanted to end it. They wanted to own it.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hand-picked slate ran the table in New York’s Democratic congressional primaries on June 23. Brad Lander knocked off Dan Goldman in the Tenth. Claire Valdez took the open Seventh. Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Adriano Espaillat, the sitting chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, by roughly 2,000 votes in the Thirteenth. Three endorsements, three wins and a mayor who is now the most powerful political boss the city has produced in a generation.
The reformers did not kill the machine. They built a bigger one, and here is the part that should turn your stomach: It is more hypocritical than anything my father’s generation ever ran. The old bosses never insulted you. They knew they were a machine. They traded favors and protected their friends, and never once called it a moral awakening.
This crowd does all of it and demands applause for its virtue. They anoint candidates, crush dissent and hand out congressional seats like party favors while lecturing the rest of us about democracy. They have no problem with bossism. They have no problem with concentrated, unaccountable power. Their only problem, it turned out, was who held it. Now they do, and the speed limit is gone.
Make no mistake about what runs the party in New York these days. The Democratic Socialists of America is not some grassroots accident. It is the new machine—a credentialing operation that decides who is ideologically pure enough to advance and excommunicates anyone who steps out of line.
It swapped the clubhouse and the patronage job for the rose emoji and the purity test, and it is every bit as disciplined and unforgiving as the bosses it replaced. The one thing Tammany never did was insist that it was saving your soul while it counted the votes.
Look at how thin the mandate is. Barely 420,000 people voted in these primaries. A year ago, more than a million turned out for the mayoral race. A sliver of a sliver of this city just installed members of Congress who will each speak for well over a million constituents, in seats so safe that November is a formality.
There is no competitive general, no moderating center, no broad electorate to face. The smallest, angriest slice of the electorate won the whole thing. That is not a wave. That is a hostile takeover with a turnout problem.
The smallest, angriest slice of the electorate won the whole thing. That is not a wave. That is a hostile takeover with a turnout problem.
And these are not your father’s Democrats. They are not even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Democrats. This slate makes AOC look like a conservative, and she knows it. The radical of 2018 is the moderate of 2026. She didn’t move an inch. The ground moved under her.
Consider how they win, because the method gives the game away. Avila Chevalier ran on slogans and silence. Put a real question to her, and she vanishes—off the set, out of the room, unwilling to sit across from a reporter and defend a single position under pressure.
The old machine at least had to face the press. This one has learned it can win without ever answering a hard question. A press that can actually press a candidate is not an inconvenience. It is the check. When you can win a seat in Congress without once being made to answer for what you believe, the machine has already won, and the rest of us simply have not been told yet.
Then there is Lander, the chameleon. I have watched this man my whole adult life in New York politics. A few years ago, he stood roughly where Goldman stood; two Jewish politicians. Today, he is thrilled to fly to Washington and link arms with the progressive, anti-Israel “Squad.” His convictions are a weathervane. He becomes whatever the moment pays out, and the moment now pays out at the edge, so to the edge he goes, flag planted, insisting that he was there all along.
And presiding over all of it is the mayor. One week ago, Mamdani stood on a stage in Brooklyn, N.Y., called AIPAC “monsters” and railed about “millions in dark money.” He said the only thing that AIPAC fears more than democracy is an end to “Netanyahu’s wars,” referring to the prime minister of Israel.
He said it in the same week that a man was federally indicted for plotting to gun down AIPAC employees. Even after Jewish leaders from the Anti-Defamation League to the American Jewish Committee to elected Democrats all warned that this is precisely the language that gets people killed, the mayor did not retreat. He reached for cover, claiming that he was merely quoting the Marxist Antonio Gramsci. That is “the tell.” A man confident in his own words does not hide behind a dead theorist’s.
So here is the question New York City should be screaming. The loudest crusader against “dark money” and foreign influence is the same man who will not sit for one honest interview about his own movement. Who funds this? Who benefits? Which interests—from Doha to the donor class bankrolling this faction—quietly cheer a New York that turns on the Jewish state while their champion plays the tribune of the common man? A machine this comfortable with power owes the public those answers. It refuses to give them, and almost no one with a platform is demanding them.
I do not recognize this Brooklyn. I do not recognize this city. And I am afraid I am starting not to recognize this country.
I defended a machine once, and I will not pretend I did not. But the machine my father and his friends ran never lied to you about what it was. The one that won last night is younger, hungrier and far more dishonest because it does everything the old bosses did and calls it a revolution.
That is the difference, and it is the whole difference. A machine that admits it is a machine can at least be held to account. A machine convinced that it is a moral cause answers to no one. In the borough that raised me, that is what now holds the keys, and it will not stop at the seats it keeps acquiring.
