The New York mayor's race shows just how desperate America's power brokers are to keep that power

There is nothing that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo brings to the New York mayoral race that New York City needs. We can skip the policy recitations, the dubious pandemic handling that he tried to sell as great achievement, his hostility towards reforms of almost any sort, and the notable flaw of not living in the city he now wants to run. That can all be gotten elsewhere. Of considerably more note is the sexual harassment scandal that forced his resignation: Cuomo was accused of serially sexually harassing or assaulting 13 women who worked with him over the span of nearly a decade, resigned in 2021, and has spent much of the time since grousing about how unfair the world was for forcing him into it.

And, as it turns out, not a damn bit of that matters because the moment Cuomo skittered back onto the political stage, corporate media, Democratic centrists, big-money donors and anyone else sweating at the thought that the ascendence of fascist government might require a bit of soul-searching or actual action on their part swarmed to appoint him the Most Obvious Candidate. A hopelessly vain centrist blob who has sabotaged more reforms than he's enacted, promises to maintain the status quo, and was gutted like a fish for his serial harassment of women whose jobs required interacting with him?

Sign us the fuck up, said the Chamber of Vain Centrist Blobs. Because it's either that or a Democratic candidate to the left of center, and if you've been paying any attention to national politics of late you know that the power-holders in this nation would rather burn the whole place down than risk any weakening of their own power.

Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a veteran lawmaker who was once the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, endorsed former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Friday.

Mr. Clyburn made the case that Mr. Cuomo was the right candidate to help Democrats fend off the ill effects of President Trump’s second term, when Mr. Trump is “challenging the pillars of our democracy.”

“The mayor of New York is uniquely positioned to play an important role in the future of the national Democratic Party,” Mr. Clyburn said in a statement, adding that Mr. Cuomo had the “experiences, credentials and character to not just serve New York, but also help save the nation.”

Clyburn is one of the most powerful so-called moderates in the Democratic Party, and having him vouch for the supposed "character" of a serial sexual harasser has been going down about like you'd expect it would.

Clyburn's endorsement is no doubt meant to be a thumb in the eye of anyone who still presumes grotesque behavior ought to have consequences. It also comes at a moment when the American public is angry as hell with their political leaders and the recklessness with which lawmakers are abiding the dismantling of large parts of government and democracy both.

Of all the interpretations of the donor and centrist pile-on in support of Cuomo, I find myself aligning with this one the most:

That's the catch, right there. It really doesn't matter whether Cuomo himself remains scandal-plagued and unreformed. The point is to thwart any larger left-of-center reform that might harm the possible influence of current powerbrokers. We can all agree that fascism is bad, to be sure—but curbing the lobbying power of the ultrarich, or moving to cleaner energy sources against the wishes of oil oligarchs, or holding even terribly important men accountable for criminal or amoral acts: Don't all of those things sound just as alarming?

I'll go farther than that, though. What we've been seeing in the Trump era is the widespread conservative revolt supporting racism, supporting sexism, and rejecting the societal norms that suggest being a shitty, horrible person ought to come with consequences. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Fox News drunk, made the purge of non-white, non-male top officers his first priority and the purge of military materials referring to non-white non-males his second. Robert Kennedy Jr. is a grotesque conspiracy hack who uses health disinformation as his primary grift. The administration has embraced white nationalism with vigor, and made damn sure their version is as cruel and hateful as possible.

But Trump's army of vapid chuds does not have a monopoly on any of these things, and too much of what passes as "moderate" Democratic speech draws from the same well. Anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotries are not uncommon, nor are apocalyptic claims about the danger of those sorts.

But there is one societal reform that has topped all others, in recent years, in its ability to impose consequences on the wealthy and politically ambitious both:

Me Too.

It is difficult to convey just how much the Me Too movement absolutely unraveled some of the most powerful figures and organizations in America. For the first time, serial rapists, abusers, harassers and general scumbags in actual positions of influence faced potentially career-ending consequences after decades of being entirely above such things. Corporate heads, powerful Hollywood figures, and longtime kingpins of the news desks all found themselves thrown out of their offices as companies scrambled to respond to literal decades of allegations from women finally emboldened to come forward. Roger Ailes; Harvey Weinstein; John Conyers: all of them fell.

I imagine that most of us, not being serial sexual predators with cash and influence oozing out our ears, can't really grasp how traumatic our elite classes found these developments to be. It is in almost all cases a given that the wealthy and connected in America simply aren't bound by the same laws as the rest of us, and the combination of money and threats has long been the preferred, and fabulously successful, means by which such figures cover up the non-criminal stuff. The idea that a Roger Ailes or an Andrew Cuomo could and would lose their careers for doing things that most other American workers could never have themselves gotten away with—it broke these people. It broke their brains, and in Andrew Cuomo's brief repentance followed by his own reimagining of himself as the victim we get a good look at just how warped and resentful the upper classes became after their comeuppance.

It's not that donors, media figures, and "centrist" politicians are willing to overlook the dozen-plus accusations of sexual harassment that led to Cuomo's resignation the last time around. A good chunk of these backers are probably keen on Cuomo because they're angry that their social peers faced actual consequences for bad behavior. That's not how America is supposed to work. You make a certain amount of money, or you get your name on the news channels a certain number of times, and you are better than other people. And America is not allowed to impose consequences on their betters.

So that is my interpretation of events. The new support for Andrew Cuomo, of all people, is part and parcel of the right-wing revolt against societal expectations of decency; it's the "centrist" and more elitist version of racism and sexism that asserts a pompous middle ground of "Well no, you shouldn't sexually assault your coworkers or send legal immigrants to foreign torture prisons, but we really oughtn't sweat it too much if it happens every once in a while. Doling out consequences for these things is just as disruptive to society as the things themselves, right?"

There are a great many experts on authoritarianism around who will tell you, and rather aggressively, that authoritarianism is not often defeated by inaction. It requires opposition; it requires presenting an alternative. Insofar as fascism corrupts the institutions meant to guard against it, those institutions themselves cannot be relied on once the corruption has taken place.

And that, in turn, means non-institutional action is required—which is precisely the sort of thought that turns institutional power brokers into hot quivering messes. They do not want to rally around the largest protests in U.S. history; they would rather those protests go away. They don't want to be a part of any movement they don't personally have the power to control, and if that means objecting to fascism and mildly-left-of-center reformist movements equally then not only will they do it, they'll send out press releases to boast about it.