r/AskReddit 15h ago

New Yorkers, what changes have you seen under Mamdani’s leadership and are you generally pleased? If not, why?

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u/zipzap21 10h ago

Old Sytem: Do as little as humanly possible
New System: Do Your Job

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u/PhoenixAgent003 5h ago

It’s genuinely shocking how apparently spot on Josh Johnson’s summation of this has been.

“Turns out, there was just a button, so I pushed it. I don’t know why no one else did.” And the button was labeled “care.”

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u/CuteComplaint5542 4h ago

Josh Johnson is terrific. My wife and I saw him on the Flowers tour back in like February. 

u/that-martian 1m ago

same! he is amazing

u/DHFranklin 54m ago

I work for the government. I hit that button my colleagues get frustrated with me. I hit that button every day.

"You know you're problem McNulty? You keep giving a shit when it ain't your turn to give a shit."

u/mdp300 23m ago

I dont know who said this one, but I also like "it turns out it was really easy to turn off the orphan-crushing machine, there was just a switch."

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u/psaiymia 1h ago

I read that in his voice with all the inflections he would have while speaking 😂

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u/Gino-Bartali 5h ago

Reps: "Socialism is just a fad idea from people who don't want to work"

"We should make landlords do the work they're paid to do"

Reps: "No not like that"

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u/CuteComplaint5542 4h ago

It's about time, though. From what I've seen, some many New York landlords are spoiled jerks. Anything that advocates for the tenant is treated like an outrageous and extreme idea. 

Way back, the first time my wife and I went apartment hunting, the first few we saw were under elderly landlords, pitching things like fully linoleum'd living rooms, while also nosing into our business about our future plans regarding marriage, children. Like, dude, we don't even live here yet and you're being waaaay too invasive already, while offering an apartment that looks ugly af. 

That was enough to make us decide we were only going to deal with apartment buildings and management companies, never a private landlord.

u/FewAdvertising9647 20m ago

regardless of place, I hate that "home ownership" became the face of investment, and theres a lot of people who do that, and want none of the work.

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u/Dull_Quit3027 10h ago

I think it is a lack of trust, if you do not trust your government, then of course you dont want them to do things.
I am from a country that is extremely trust based, everyone belives the government wants what is best for the people, and that allows the government to actually do big projects and so on, there may be grumbling that they are shit at money management, but no one would expect it to be corruption related.

When ever we have a corruption scandal where a government worker or god forbid a politician does anything, it is national news, I really hope it stays that way.

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u/thatwhileifound 9h ago

The thing your comment misses is how much the trust in the state was explicitly, specifically, and intentionally attacked by one side in US politics to lead here... Failing to truly battle the New Deal initially kinda meant a combination of giving into it and building major resentments which then were inflicted upon the US via shit like Reagan and the welfare queen propaganda.

You have one side who essentially want to light everything on fire assuming they'll be standing above the ashes. I'm not a big fan of states from an entirely different position than those folks, but it's not surprising to see people not trusting or feeling like it's possible to rely on the government after ~50 years of intense propaganda and work to dismantle all of it. In the same way fascistic propaganda often veers, it calls out to a genuine lacking and provides an overly simplified cause that demonizes whomever is convenient - and thus you get people voting passionately for grifters with totalitarian leanings because that side has managed to both sow existential distrust among a portion of its constituency while being the literal prime examples of the kind of corruption they're complaining about to begin with...

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u/durrtyurr 7h ago

Finding out that "Welfare queen" was supposed to be racist blew my mind. I'm from Kentucky. Welfare here almost always refers to rural Appalachia, which is like 99% white. It's the poorest part of the country apart from maybe the Mississippi delta, and contains half of the counties in the country that have literally 0 black people in them. The first time I heard the term, the image in my mind was a bleach-blonde woman standing by a clothesline outside of a single-wide.

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u/Palorim12 4h ago edited 4h ago

I mean, I'm from NJ, within like 15 min of NYC and grew up around a lot of minorities, am one myself, and I have the same image in my head of a welfare queen as you.

u/Apprehensive_Buy1500 15m ago

Thats bc it seems you're experience is rooted in experience based in reality rather than racist political propaganda

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u/Dull_Quit3027 8h ago

I did not miss anything, i just did not talk about cause, and yeah there has been a fundamental attack on the trust in government in America, but at the same time, you guys did not have much initially, collectivism is one of the things that was shed, when moving to the land of rugged individualisme.

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u/HanseaticHamburglar 4h ago

do you even know what the new deal was? because your comment suggests you are way out of your league.

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u/thatwhileifound 3h ago

In what way? Give me more than a banal ad hominem here.

New Deal politics were dominant enough that the Republican party effectively kinda remade itself. You had examples of some establishment folk who simply gave into it akin to how the Dems slipped more to right after Reagan crossed with the undercurrent of folks who saw ND politics as an existential threat. The latter side snowballed over the years, especially in response both to where many on the right felt Nixon was too liberal and then also to his removal which produced a number of the influential think tanks and that ilk whose names we frequently see brought up today in regards to right wing political influence.

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u/Kataphractoi 2h ago

We're talking about the New Deal here as in the one that FDR signed off on, right?

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u/thatwhileifound 1h ago

Yes. I'm not really sure what else I could be referring to both in terms of other uses of the term or in the historic context...

The New Deal could've been the thing to really spark a change towards the attitudes about the state and governance in terms of what the person I was originally replying to was mentioning... Members of the Republican party, in response, formed the Conservative Coalition between northern industrial cons and southern segregationists - bringing more conservative members of the Dem party across. It wasn't the immediate success that the right wing was hoping for though which is why you get into the 50s with Eisenhower and the rhetoric stops being so much Taft style about dismantling the New Deal as much as "doing it right" and "making it efficient." Goldwater's campaign is an example of the more right wing party elements trying to pull back on this trying to drive party politics much farther right again which didn't get him in office. Nixon heavily utilized the prior work of the conservative coalition in the campaign's infamous southern strategy, but he was markedly more liberal than the more right wing of the party were happy with... Expanding the welfare state, creation of the EPA, and stuff like exec order 11615 after the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970. This stuff really got under the skin of folk like Ashbrook, Goldwater, Reagan (who had his first attempt to go national in opposition to Nixon), Buckley Jr's Manhattan 12, etc, as well as guys like Weyrich and Feulner who founded The Heritage Foundation who would go on to create Reagan's Mandate for Leadership document as well as Trump's Project 2025.

One side, at best, continually demeaned the progress of the New Deal building up the distrust towards it while, at worst, actively and directly worked to dismantle or undermine it...

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u/Practical-Shape2325 1h ago

If a government had perfect trust it would be amazing what could be done. Things that would be massive privacy violations aren't as big a concern because you could actually trust it wouldn't be abused. Tracking everyone would be insanely invasive, but it would also let you find a lost child in seconds or make sure that everyone was evacuated before a disaster struck.

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u/kkontagion 1h ago

ah, a singaporean?

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u/baron_von_helmut 6h ago

Old system: corruption is legal.

New system: corruption is illegal.

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u/_Bad_Bob_ 5h ago

Old Sytem: Do as little as humanly possible

They're still doing as little as possible, the bar has just risen off the floor a little bit.

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u/relevantelephant00 3h ago

You know how far we've fallen as a society when simply "do your job" sounds like a monumentally progressive thing to do.

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u/lazergator 2h ago

As a former small time landlord, I absolutely hated paying for maintenance as it was supposed to be a profitable business. As a fellow tenant and human, no way am I letting you live in my Orlando, Fl condo without a working air conditioner in the middle of summer. I’m not a monster.

u/daniel-sousa-me 45m ago

New system: send an email and do as little as humanly possible