The Times They Are a-Changin
Paul Craig Roberts
On the surface Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York supports my contention that American democracy has become riven with faction and left-wing ideology and has become dysfunctional. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/10/30/the-days-of-democracy-are-over/
Mamdani’s agenda of rent freezes, city-run non-profit grocery stores, more taxes on the rich, free subways, reduced police presence, and the rest of his promised handouts to the unproductive brings the redistributive character of US democracy to the breaking point at which the productive leave a city where public safety is declining along with the rewards to work and responsible behavior.
Will we see “Escape from New York” or on the other hand, perhaps Mamdani is just a political opportunist riding the rise of the woke era to personal riches from the kickbacks from the New York building trades’ profits from building his affordable public housing to fill the role of private-supplied housing blocked by Mamdani’s rent controls.
America’s founding fathers were aware of the dangers of faction that democracy brings, and they were aware of the tendency of mobs to seize property and of the tendency of females to make emotive instead of rational decisions. To hinder and to delay the impact of these destabilizing tendencies, the founding fathers restricted democracy to the judgment of male property owners.
As years passed the protective shields that made democracy functional were removed. The appointment of US senators by state legislators to insure that the senators represented their states and not the interests of national lobbies that provide campaign funds was removed, and the Senate, like the House, became subject to demagogic elections often determined by slander, fraud, and vote-buying. Weak men gave in and bestowed the vote on women. It made little difference for a long time, because men still predominated in societal institutions. But as Helen Andrews reports, in the US all societal institutions have now been feminized. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/11/05/societal-death-by-feminization/
The goal of excluding “toxic males” from societal decision-making has largely succeeded. The replacement of men by women has dramatically reduced the birth rate in all Western societies. As women choose career over motherhood, calls intensify for more non-white immigration to fill the gap from the declining white birth rate. If this trend continues, white ethnicities will disappear, as Jean Raspail predicted they would. It seems that my generation and perhaps the one that followed are the last to experience life in the context of Western civilization.
Over the course of my life I have watched the decline in the legal protections of defendants, and I have watched the rise of status-based privileges push aside equality under law. See, for example, my books, The Tyranny of Good Intentions and The New Color Line. These books had enthusiastic reviews from the right people and places, but failed to slow down, much less halt, the collapse of American society into disunity and status-based law.
New York, once the financial capital of the world, has fallen, according to the narrative, to the communist agenda of an immigrant-invader from Kampala, Uganda. But perhaps that is only Mamdani’s pose assumed in our woke era to gain access to wealth that comes from the political award of contracts. Regardless, the electorate’s choice of Mamdani shows a complete change in outlook and a Democrat Party that has moved outside the American tradition.
I remember when the Democrats’ political constituency consisted of the poor and the working class, now disparaged as “the Trump deplorables.” Today the Democrats’ political constituency is college-educated women and weak men who have accepted their subordination in the interest of a career. Whereas once Democrats focused on confiscating income and wealth from the successful (who were referred to as “fortunate”) and redistributing it to the unsuccessful (called “less fortunate”), they now confiscate the earnings and wealth of citizens to support immigrant-invaders. This and other such word tricks pushed the questions of merit and citizenship out of the picture. For women the issue was one of the caring against the hard-hearted. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/11/05/societal-death-by-feminization/
Today Democrat political constituencies are focused on redistributing the incomes of American citizens to illegal aliens. Not only do Americans who support themselves also support 42 million Americans who do not or who are gaming the system, they also support the 14 million immigrant-invaders that the Obama and Biden regimes policy of open borders imported into America.
While these devastating trends were developing, Wall Street and corporate executives exported American manufacturing jobs to Asia and Mexico, thereby dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that had made the US an opportunity society. Today the focus of the Democrat Party is on opportunity for immigrant-invaders. Democrats fight tooth and nail to prevent the federal government from deporting illegals. Indeed, Democrats want illegals to have voting rights, and Democrat judges have ruled that proof of citizenship is unnecessary in order to vote. Essentially, Democrats have no conception of the United States as a nation. Indeed, they are hostile to those who think that citizenship and the US Constitution have meaning, dismissing both as tools of white supremacists.
Where liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and leftists went horribly wrong was in assuming that government was an independent institution. The liberal-left imagined government as a moral institution that redistributed ill-gotten wealth from those who stole it to the deserving poor from whom it was stolen. The conservative-libertarian contingent saw government as a threat to private property, merit, and individual freedom. No one saw if for what it is: an instrument for political and material interests to use to further their agendas and their fortunes.
The “public interest” is a false narrative. No one serves any such interest. Government is a privatized institution that serves private interests. It is fought over because it can bestow on favored factions the incomes of others. The Party in control gets to hand out the money. That is the only important issue.
Today in America the welfare class supported by the work force is 25% of the size of the work force. If the Democrats win the battle over illegals, and Obama and Biden’s 14 million illegals are added to the 42 million welfare class, those dependent on the incomes of the work force rise to one-third the size of the work force.
With the advent of AI and robotics, the outlook for working Americans seems bleak. If the unemployment from AI predicted by experts is accurate, most of the US work force will be without jobs. Who then supports the welfare class enlarged by illegal immigration?
Elon Musk said that the advent of AI brings with it communism as the earnings of AI will have to be redistributed to the population in order that people will have the money to sustain their lives by purchasing the products of AI produced goods and services.
What we seem to be facing is a social revolution brought by technology. There is very little awareness and discussion of this massive challenge to human society. If it comes upon unprepared populations, the result will be chaotic, especially in the Western World where white ethnicities are demonized as racists and exploiters of people of color. The white populations will be the first to be exterminated in order to reduce the claim on resources.
In the Democrat mind, freedom today means the suppression of freedom. Freedom of speech is racist and hurtful. Freedom of protest and association is a plot for insurrection if it is done by aversive racists. Family values are suppressive of women. Citizenship is non-inclusive. A common language, mores, and history are suppressive of multiculturalism and diversity. Nothing that once defined an American is acceptable in the era of wokeness.
For all practical purposes, the USA is being erased.
The New York City Mayor’s constituency:
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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/11/06/the-times-they-are-a-changin/