New York City's Problems Are 6 1/2 Hours Away. Its Ideas Are Not.

Blake Gendebien, the dairy farmer who ran for Congress as the Democrat in NY-21, had a good line this fall about the socialists rising in his party.

"New York City's problems are 6 1/2 hours away."

Gendebien said it well. Ideas are not.

They travel through classrooms, phones and party primaries, and they arrive in Albany and Washington before they ever reach Gouverneur.

One of those ideas had a very good night on Tuesday. Asked by NPR how aggressive progressives in the House should be with their new power, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not hedge: "Tonight is a message to wield it as aggressively as possible."

I believe him. So should you.

What Tuesday was, and wasn't

Republicans lost this election, and they earned it. People are tired of high prices and an unpopular war, and conservatives who won't admit that have learned nothing.

But a vote against Donald Trump is not a vote for socialism. The new generation of the left is going to say it is anyway. That is what "aggressively" means.

Two ideas about you

Strip away the slogans and this is a very old argument.

Socialism looks at your life and tells you the system did this to you, and that someone with enough power will have to fix it. The Democratic Socialists of America put it plainly this year: "only socialism can solve decades of capitalist mismanagement."

Capitalism tells you something harder and better: what you build is yours. You can start the shop, buy the land, take the risk, keep what you earn and leave it to your kids. It promises no one an easy life. It promises that your life belongs to you.

Anyone who has run a family farm or a small business in the North Country knows this already. Nobody is coming to save a bad milk price. You get up and do the work, and when you win, you win. That is not cruelty. That is dignity.

The real danger

The danger is not the handful of socialists headed to Congress. Hakeem Jeffries may well ignore them, and President Trump still has a veto.

The danger is the belief behind them, and who is picking it up. Among voters 18 to 29, socialism's positive rating has climbed to 42%, up from 28% in 2018, in an NBC News poll.

Those young people are not fools. Rent, groceries and child care really are out of reach for too many of them, and conservatives should stop sneering about it. If a 25-year-old in Watertown can't see a way to own anything, a movement that blames the owners will sound like common sense.

So the answer can't only be no. It has to be: more homes, more employers competing for workers, more young families who own a piece of the place they live. Capitalism wins when people can see it working. It loses when it is only a lecture.

Why it reaches us

Nobody in this movement is out to get the North Country. They don't have to be.

We just live downstream. We live next to Fort Drum, and we hear "build, not bomb" differently. We live on an international border, and "abolish ICE" isn't a seminar topic here. We have towns arguing out their own future at their own planning boards, and we'd like to keep it that way. Rules written for somewhere else have a way of landing on a family farm here.

That's what those 6 1/2 hours can't protect us from.

The test ahead

Five socialists in the House are not a revolution. But a generation raised to believe that capitalism failed them can become one, slowly, one election at a time.

Mamdani has told us how they intend to use power. The North Country's answer should be just as clear: Let people build, own, work and keep what they earn. Then prove, in a Lewis County barn and on a Watertown paycheck, that it still works.

Quotes come from City & State and NPR, as well as the sources linked above.