Why Mamdani?

Friday, November 14, 2025

The recent election in NYC is both fully understandable and entirely baffling.  Understandable because who doesn’t want free stuff?  Baffling because there truly is no such thing as a free lunch – some one always pays.  The host wrote this week about how younger generations, generations without memory of the Soviet Union, do not fully understand the ramifications of the “free lunches” promised by Mamdani.  He has a good point, but I also think there are deeper concerns at play.

Two deeper concerns actually – aspiration and obligation.  Let’s start with the latter, obligation.  As I grew up it was inculcated into me that if someone did something nice for me, I owed them – not money necessarily, but something.  When we moved in here in East Tennessee our new next door neighbor arrived almost instantaneously with baked goods in a tin.  That tin has moved back and forth between the houses ever since – continuously.  Each party has felt an obligation to return the favor.  It has become a running joke.

But younger generations grew up with participation trophies and grade inflation and parents that wanted to make sure their children did not “suffer” as they had.    Growing up I was given a bicycle for Christmas when I was six years old – every bike I had after that was earned in some fashion, through chores, a paper route, something.

Even in church talk of Christ’s grace increased exponentially, while discussion of the price He paid lessened.  The sense of gratitude and the implication of an obligation to Christ for His sacrifice in generations younger than mine disappeared.  Bonhoeffer’s pet peeve of “cheap grace” took on a whole new guise.  Eventually, the church began to abuse God’s graciousness declaring sinful actions otherwise.

Then there is aspiration.  In a time when you get a trophy for showing up, a bicycle every year for Christmas and grade inflation virtually guaranteeing you will pass.  What is there still left to aspire to?  Covid saw this trend reach its nadir:

“Given the perfect storm of the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerated learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and optional test scores for admission, this shouldn’t be at all surprising,” said Robert Pondiscio, a former New York City public school teacher and researcher of K–12 education at the American Enterprise Institute.

“We are graduating kids who simply are less proficient at math and reading than they were a generation ago,” he said.

“Officials at UC San Diego also blamed grade inflation and the expansion of admissions from ‘under-resourced high schools,’ writes Nau. Schools are terrified of failing anyone. Not only is it expensive to pay for a student to repeat a grade, but the school opens itself up to legal action from an angry parent. Letting the child slide to the next grade is so much easier.

Note, the trend was accelerated by covid, but started long before.  What is there to aspire to when it all just falls in your lap?  We live in an age where the internet enables people to live in a comfortable shell, never challenged, never exposed to new things.  Not only is everything handed to them, they are never exposed to anything better to which to aspire.

It was my interesting, and sometimes good, fortune to travel to the Soviet Union in its later days.  I encountered many wonderful people.  But it was heart breaking in the sense that none of them really aspired to a better life than the one they had been allotted.  The Soviet system simply beat aspiration and ambition right out of them.

In the name of compassion, grace and love of these younger generations we have done the same thing.  We may have worn a velvet glove instead of an iron one, but it was the same thing.  The explanation for Mamdani does not lie in the younger generations – it lies with us, the older ones.  Yes, we failed to educate them, but worse we failed to build character in them – a sense of obligation and a desire to better themselves.