In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.

As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.

As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.

The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing the media in favor of a few limited public appearances across the city.

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Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.

Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.

Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”

It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”

The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”

That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.

“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”

Recognising Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomised by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”

Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy-mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.

There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighbourhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.

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For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighbourhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, supports community-led alternatives to public safety — a stance that very few working-class New Yorkers would likely support.

Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well received by these communities.

Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the centre to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.

In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”

The men, mostly from West Africa, are the latest arrivals at a 2,200-bed, male-only migrant center that opened two weeks ago. Some have come from other parts of the city, where shelters are closing down; others from out of state, with one telling me he was sleeping on the subway for two weeks until he heard about the new opening. “I was kicked out of the last shelter for getting in a fight, so I had to find somewhere new,” he says.

It’s conditions like these that have triggered a massive backlash among working-class communities of color in New York. The South Bronx, where I visited, saw a significant red shift in the 2024 election, along with several other neighborhoods in New York’s outer boroughs. This shift has prompted some soul-searching — and shape-shifting — on the Democratic side. Most notably, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rebranded himself from a pot-legalizing progressive to a law-and-order moderate in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City.

Given his clear frontrunner status, Cuomo’s “clean-up-the-mess” campaign has already attracted a number of key endorsements. And with the incumbent Eric Adams’s approval rating in the drain, it is likely that Cuomo will clinch the June primary (which would make him a shoo-in for the general election come November, in light of the city’s Democratic tilt). The question, though, is whether his hardened rhetoric will translate into real policy — or if, like Adams, he’ll find himself trapped between an angry electorate and an uncooperative party.

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New York’s migrant crisis is not over. An estimated 44,000 newcomers are still being housed and sheltered — the same number that the city’s entire homeless-shelter system served just three years ago. To date, it has cost the city nearly $7 billion (more than all emergency services combined). According to a poll last month, more than half of Gotham’s residents believe that the situation is “less under control” than it was four years ago, while 32% believe it is “about the same”. Just 9% believe conditions have improved.

It’s true that some shelters are closing, and 188,000 migrants have, according to the mayor, been “helped… to take the next steps in their journey”. It is not exactly clear, however, what these next steps are. No measures have been taken to track or monitor those who have left, and many have been found living in squalid conditions.

Some have crammed into apartments in New York’s outer boroughs, while others have slept outdoors, on trains, or in houses of worship. Last month, for example, the New York Fire Department discovered 70 migrants living in the basement of a Queens furniture store, followed by another discovery of dozens more living in a commercial space in The Bronx.

“They’re either on the street or selling items illegally,” Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the City Council, tells me. “They’re selling food illegally, they’re selling drinks in traffic, they’re on the expressway. And they commit crimes, because many can’t work.”

Holden, who represents a district that swung for Trump in last year’s presidential election, says that residents were tired of the “anarchy” during the Biden administration. Border crossings soared under the Democratic president, averaging two million per year between 2021 and 2023, the effects of which are still being felt today. “Everyone knows people that have moved out over the last five years,” Holden says. “They see the quality of life of their neighborhoods around the city dropping. Everywhere was affected but it hit the working people the hardest.”

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Then there are the shelters that still exist. The mayor’s office states that a total of 53 shelters will close down by June 2025, but new ones, such as the converted storage facility in the South Bronx, are still popping up. “No one told us this was happening,” Alejandro Lopez, a South Bronx resident, says, “so now we have hundreds of jobless men hanging around the neighborhood. It can’t be good.”

“I want them gone — all of them,” says another passerby. “All they do is bring trouble.”

Over the past three years, city leaders struggled to cope with the influx of migrants into their neighborhoods. From deep-blue neighborhoods like Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to more Trump-supporting areas like Staten Island, the message was the same: get them out. But as frustration grew, it created an opening for the ghosts of New York’s past to return.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor over sexual-harassment allegations in 2021, leveraged the crisis to quietly tiptoe back into the limelight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, he described the migrant crisis as a “tipping point” for Gotham, suggesting that the city was stuck in a “death spiral” — a point he doubled down on two months later. And in last week’s announcement video, he tapped into similar themes. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo said. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway … the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening.”

This marks quite the turnaround for a man who once proudly described himself as an “undocumented person”. In a decade as governor, Cuomo pushed or acquiesced to a raft of progressive measures to support illegal immigrants. In 2019, he strongly backed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and signed the New York DREAM Act, which provided illegal students access to state financial aid for college. That same year, he passed the Green Light Law, granting illegal immigrants the right to obtain driver’s licenses in the Empire State.

As part of the first anti-Trump #Resistance, he issued executive orders opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and sued the Trump administration over policies like the Public Charge Rule, which aimed to deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits. Most famously, when he announced his opposition to the then-president’s so-called Muslim ban, he declared: “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices, because, as a New Yorker, we are one community, and the New York community is composed of all of the above.”

Yet the Big Apple in 2025 is vastly different from what it was when Cuomo left office in 2021. Public fatigue with traditionally liberal policies on immigration, public safety, and crime allowed Trump to expand his support across nearly every neighborhood, particularly in districts with sizeable migrant populations.

In The Bronx, for example, where there was (and still is) a big migrant presence, 27% of the borough’s residents backed Trump — almost three times the share in 2016. “Most migrants are good, hard-working people,” says Lisandra Martinez, who lives 10 blocks away from the new South Bronx migrant center. “But there are always one or two who cause problems. If the shelter closes, where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We are a close community, and I don’t want them doing bad things around here.”

This, in large part, explains Cuomo’s own transformation from progressive governor to a law-and-order moderate who now says that he will “work” with Trump. New polling shows that 81% of New Yorkers support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, versus just 16% who oppose it.

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But New York’s status as a sanctuary city, combined with resistance from progressive Democrats, has made even this straightforwardly popular initiative difficult to accomplish. Adams in recent weeks has endured heavy attacks from members of his own party for cooperating with ICE in deporting criminal illegal immigrants. Recently, he issued an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, which prompted calls by House Democrats that he was “selling New York out”.

The question then, is whether Mayor Cuomo would continue in the same vein as his predecessor. As governor, Cuomo was not afraid to take on the progressives in his party when dealing with relatively “safe” issues like taxing the rich, universal health care, and education reform. But on immigration, he marched in lockstep with the Left, even criticizing the ultra-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to do enough to protect illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And when de Blasio maintained that city law enforcement would not cooperate with ICE unless absolutely required, Cuomo went further by threatening legal action against ICE during Trump’s first term.

All of which casts doubt on Cuomo’s rebrand as a border hawk. If the Trump crackdown turns ugly, and ICE deportations accelerate, Cuomo may find it politically expedient to return to his previously progressive positions. Ever attuned to shifts in public sentiment (and among his own party), he will not want to be seen as bending the knee to Trump.

But it is not Cuomo or any political leader who will suffer as a result. As Robert Holden tells me, it is New York’s forgotten class: “My constituents are middle class, and the illegal immigrants are threatening their very existence. They’re making New York less affordable to live in and it’s driving people away. For the past four years we’ve been losing our city. We need to get it back.”

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. Of course, flying internationally is still a luxury, and complaining about it is a bit elitist. I really wish the US, and JFK in particular, would make an effort to meet global standards of air travel — but it was what happened after I left the airport that convinced me that America, and especially NYC, is broken.

After crashing at a friend’s house not far from JFK, I got up to take a 4:39am subway train to the Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan, so I could catch the first bus home. The train, to be fair, was on time. But it was filthy. The carriages were mostly empty, except for three or four homeless guys in each who were either sleeping or passed-out. The dozen or so of us who got on at the first stop chose our seats carefully, positioning ourselves close to each other, for safety, and as far as possible from the sprawled-out guys and their piles of trash and puddles of urine.

The train slowly filled at each subsequent stop, until it was standing room only. I was seemingly the only person on the train who didn’t have to be there. Ride a NYC subway from the outer boroughs at 4am and you’ll find that it’s jammed with overnight construction workers, office cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel employees — all coming from late shifts, or going to early shifts, carrying tool bags, hard hats, work clothes. The “help” coming in and out of the city. United in fatigue and quiet frustration with the squalor, with the unconscious men taking up multiple seats.

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I thought about Sofia, where the subways and buses — and other public spaces and resources — are so much cleaner, safer, and smoother. Where workers simply wanting to get to their jobs don’t have to deal with navigating the mentally ill, addicted and desperate every day. For context, the GDP of Manhattan alone is about nine times that of the entire nation of Bulgaria. But NYC’s problems only seem to be getting worse, especially for those who have the least. I don’t have to take the subway; I have the cash for an Uber. But I try to see, and to understand a little, the world as most people see and understand the world.

And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.

Eventually, that morning, a guy covered in old vomit and carrying a cane, his trousers only just above his knees, got onto the subway train, and went up and down each carriage, hitting every sleeping or passed-out guy on the legs, yelling at them to move on, to give the rest of us some space. Everyone else pretended it wasn’t happening, hoping it wouldn’t go south, focusing instead on the floor or their phones.

And nothing “bad” did happen, beyond a few raised voices and some pantomime air punches. We all got where we needed to go.

But having garbage-strewn subways that effectively serve as mobile homeless shelters is no way to run a public transit system. It isn’t fair on the riders who don’t have the money to avoid the subway. It also isn’t fair to the homeless, who are being encouraged — or at least not discouraged — to hang out on crowded trains, maximising the chances that bad stuff will happen. The Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case was a horrifying example. The death, on Sunday, of a man who tried to break up a fight on a Manhattan-bound subway train may be another. NYC’s authorities, even if they tried, couldn’t design a better system to provoke a nasty backlash against addiction, mental illness and homelessness.

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But this isn’t just an East Coast problem. Last May, city officials in Los Angeles proudly announced a new kind of bus stop to address rider complaints by providing “shade and lighting”. They called in La Sombrita — and were promptly and roundly mocked by Twitter users, who pointed out that it’s a sad provider of both light and shade. I mean, just look at it. At best it provides shade for one person, maybe. As for the light, I’m not sure how it is any different from your standard streetlamp?

And then there was the expense. It was claimed that each La Sombrita came to $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000. That process included junkets to foreign cities, to see what works, including Quito in Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.

I’m not saying LA shouldn’t be doing something about bus stops. While the city has a surprisingly extensive system, with clean and comfortable buses, the stops themselves can be pretty terrible: a pole by the side of a road under an underpass that reeks of urine, or a simple bench in the glaring sun. But that they came up with La Sombrita as the solution — and announced it so proudly — is depressing, and another revealing example of America’s much bigger problem: its inability to build nice things.

One of the forces that influenced LA authorities, though they won’t admit it, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a proper bus shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Port Authority: they don’t want people to sleep there. It’s something you see more and more in American cities: a locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population. A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” by less than 1% of residents.

I’m not saying those concerns aren’t well-founded. Benches become unusable if someone is sleeping or pissing on them. But removing them is a cowardly way to cope with a problem that authorities are otherwise not wanting, or able, to address.

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To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. If regulations massively limit both bottom-up and top-down solutions, and if those solutions are expected to protect against all sorts of bad behaviour, you end up building the least to mitigate the worst — building things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.

The high-regulation part of the US is usually couched in the language of safety, but it’s really about not allowing organic growth, which is messy — even though, people being people, it tends to result in things the majority really wants. Ecuador, by contrast, is a low-regulation (although low-trust) society: here, you get ad hoc, bottom-up solutions. If there is a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, without natural shade around it, riders rig an umbrella to a pole, or throw some old seats under a tree. In the US, such solutions would be dismantled within days.

But also, in places like Quito, bus stops attract street vendors, who come with umbrellas, making people feel safer by their very presence. LA has some of that, but it’s against the letter of the law, and vendors are constantly hassled with fines, or threats of shutdowns. My favourite taco place was closed down twice during my short stint in LA, for bureaucratic reasons. All this is to say that in Quito getting the bus is a much more pleasant experience than in LA — even though the latter city is roughly 10 times richer than Ecuador, and the latter has its own serious troubles.

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

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I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

It’s not that I’m worried about Americans moving overseas. That’s a luxury most don’t have — or want. I’m worried that authorities don’t feel compelled to provide citizens with towns and cities that work, and feel safe, and offer slivers of shade and corners that don’t smell of piss. But I’m also worried about the cultural forces that have got us here: that they allow the tolerably well-off to ignore the plight of those who are forced to depend on public services. The regulatory mindset is a problem that can be easily changed; the more pernicious part is that we are now firmly a low-trust society, and social trust impacts everything — every facet of life — and it can’t simply be legislated back. Like a ratchet wheel, once social trust comes undone, it spins quickly out of control, and getting it wound back is a long, arduous, and complex process.

I wish we could stop it from spinning too much further out of control, but I’m not particularly hopeful. The first step would be to realise that something is wrong, and right now a lot of people in the US seem determined to deny we have a problem. Why complain, when you can just order an Uber to avoid the subway?

This was where some women, usually but not always older, rolled their eyes. Did an awkward joke, a bad date, or — as one memorable entry in the infamous Shitty Media Men list alleged — a “weird lunch” really constitute a form of harassment, let alone a cancellable offence? But other women, usually but not always younger, clucked their tongues: it was only because women kept putting up with such behaviour that men kept thinking they could get away with it.

At the time, the younger cohort appeared to the older like a bunch of hypersensitive harpies, retreating to the fainting couch at the slightest whiff of insult. The older, according to the younger, were cosying up to the patriarchy, in a desperate attempt to stave off their own irrelevance.

“We’re tough enough to take it,” said the Olds.

“It’s sad you think you have to,” said the Youths.

This early rift in the movement represented a deeper philosophical disagreement, about the nature and importance of resilience. The narrow question is, when does an annoying man becomes an evil harasser? The broader one is, when does a tolerable nuisance cross the line to become an intolerable transgression?

This question has been on my mind this week, for the most tragic of reasons. On 1st May, a 30-year-old man named Jordan Neely was choked to death on a crowded New York City subway train by a 24-year-old Marine named Daniel Penny. Neely, who was homeless and mentally ill, was reportedly screaming and confronting passengers; he was killed after Penny put him in a chokehold, while two other passengers held him down. Penny, in a statement released through his lawyers, said he did not intend to kill Neely.

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This incident was preventable. Long before his death, Neely was known to New York City authorities as a person who could not manage independent living, and who had been spiralling in recent years, desperately in need of help. For him to die on the dirty floor of a subway car, screaming and defecating on himself while three strangers held him by the arms, legs, and neck, he had to be first failed at every turn by a system that was supposed to shelter and protect him — not just from doing harm, but from being harmed by others when his mental illness manifested in frightening ways.

That Neely slipped through the cracks is not the only sign of institutional failure here. As ridership on the NYC subway has increased in the wake of Covid, so too have instances of violence, including several high-profile incidents in which people have been attacked or killed. New York City mayor Eric Adams was elected in 2021 on a campaign that promised to flood the subway system with uniformed police officers, to combat both crime and the perception that the subway has become wildly more dangerous in recent years.

To what extent this campaign could succeed is not clear. There has always been a baseline level of criminality and antisocial behaviour on the subway; sexual harassment and assault is so ubiquitous that brushing up against it is all but inevitable. I was groped, flashed, or masturbated at probably two dozen times during the seven years I spent living in New York. When a friend moved to NYC last year, I told her that she couldn’t truly call herself a New Yorker until she exited a crowded subway car to discover that someone had ejaculated on her coat. (I was only partly kidding.) It’s not that anyone thinks these things are okay; it’s more that they’re expected, a sad fact of life in a city of 8.5 million people, one of those things you cannot change and hence have to find a way to put up with. You look away, you shrug it off, you don’t let it ruin your day because if you did, it would ruin all of your days.

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Here is where the notion of resilience enters in. New York City residents have perhaps a higher tolerance than most for antisocial behaviour in public places, on the subway in particular. Warm and dry, with a captive audience, it attracts all kinds of colourful personalities: panhandlers and performers, pickpockets and preachers, as well as people like Neely who are in the grips of something darker. Until recently, it was standard practice to meet the arrival of one of these people on a crowded carriage with downcast eyes and silence; there was a tacit agreement that you neither react to nor acknowledge the transgressor. That agreement remained in place as crime rose, and as NYC saw a marked increase in behaviour that, even if it started out as merely weird, could — and did — escalate rapidly to violence. In 2022, for instance, a video did the rounds, of a woman begging for help while a deranged man hauls her around a train car by her hair.

But if it was difficult to know exactly where a tolerance for breaches of decorum became apologia for criminal harassment, it was even harder to identify, after Jordan Neely’s death, where the tacit agreement to tolerate becomes a duty to intervene. How do we know when to stand by, when to step in, when to look away, when to be afraid?

Here, one might have expected that many of the same voices who argued so vehemently against the notion of resilience in the midst of MeToo — the ones who believed that the solution to harassment lay not in teaching women to be assertive, but in teaching men not to abuse — would now demand zero tolerance for male aggression on public transit. If you argue that a woman can be traumatised by bawdy humour in the office or awkward come-ons in a bar, surely you would agree that she’s entitled to be fearful when trapped underground on a metal tube with an erratically-behaving stranger twice her size.

But, no: instead, many of the people who once insisted that men who slid into DMs deserved the complete destruction of their professional reputations became passionate advocates for toughening up when it came to dealing with volatile people on public transit. Coverage and commentary from the Left downplayed the possibility that Neely’s behaviour was frightening; instead, he was “acting erratic“, or “houseless and crying for food“. One viral tweet suggested that tragedy could have been averted with “a dollar and granola bar”. The New York Times guide to navigating similar scenarios on public transit took it a step further, imagining someone like Neely as a wild animal it is everyone else’s duty not to provoke: “Don’t make eye contact — especially prolonged eye contact, which might be perceived as threatening.”

Meanwhile, threads proliferated mocking the notion that New York’s subways might be a dangerous place: “I’ve safely ridden the subway for 23 years and my child has never been menaced by a half naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy,” wrote Elizabeth Spiers, a founding editor of Gawker and journalism professor at NYU. This is a remarkable sentiment, and not just because of its stunning reversal of the MeToo-era catechism that allegations should be believed. Less than a year ago, Spiers was among those advocating for the suspension without pay of journalist Dave Weigel after he retweeted what some perceived as a sexist joke, owing to the way this was allegedly received by his female colleagues (“[Every] woman who works with you thinks you’ve telegraphed publicly that you don’t respect women.”)

To sum up: a man who reposts an off-colour joke is advertising his innate misogyny, to the point where women should feel uncomfortable sharing a workplace with him. But an agitated and clearly unstable man announcing to a crowded subway car — as Neely reportedly did — that he’s been pushed to the brink and is ready to die, or go to prison for life: why in the world would you find that menacing?

This sudden rediscovery of the merits of resilience would have been almost refreshing, if not for the whiplash of its promotion by people who up until very recently were arguing that a tweet made them unsafe. There’s even something to it: the ubiquity of certain kinds of boundary-challenging behaviour in big cities makes it not just impractical but impossible to treat every incident of one-off harassment from a stranger as if it’s the end of the world. And of course, once you’ve survived a run-in with the mystery subway ejaculator, sexist microaggressions are unlikely to faze you: cultivating resilience is how we learn to recognise that a situation can be both genuinely alarming but not materially unsafe, or to make peace with the fact that many things which make us uncomfortable should nevertheless be allowed.

Suggested reading

MeToo lost me the love of my life

By Lionel Shriver

But this mindset was considered anathema during MeToo. With trauma allegedly lurking just around the corner of every heterosexual encounter, distrust became the default. Not just the default, but celebrated — “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter,” intoned Vox‘s Ezra Klein, in a proto-MeToo celebration of this new, terrified paradigm for intimacy. The idea, of course, was that women already felt that fear, living as they did at the eternal precipice of victimisation by the patriarchy; in a truly equal society, everyone would be scared.

Of course, today’s 180-degree pivot to brash fearlessness is identitarian horse-trading: MeToo is out, BLM is in. The dynamics of any conflict must be considered along these lines, and the narrative must be massaged accordingly. This was true in 2020 when a white woman called the police on a black man who threatened her in a public park; it is true now, as piety demands that the behaviour of the black, homeless victim of this terrible tragedy must not be scrutinised in any way. On the Left, that is; the Right has spent the past few days waving Neely’s criminal history in the air, singing “He Had It Coming”, in an absolute spectacle of ghoulishness.

In the end, neither the malicious glee from the Right nor the aggressive minimisation from the Left are treating this case with the sensitivity it deserves. The truth is, eyewitnesses did report that Neely was behaving in a threatening way, and other people on the train were calling 911 well before his confrontation with Penny, suggesting that whatever was happening, it was a cut above the ordinary subway madness that New Yorkers are usually so good at ignoring. But it is also true that the tragic conclusion of this incident seems, at least in part, like the result of a cultivated fragility — the kind that results when you encourage people to view every uncomfortable situation as a trauma in the making, every unpleasant interaction as a precursor to a far worse harm, every upset as an offence for which there must be consequences. That mindset, so ubiquitous in the wake of MeToo, so popular among progressives in general, says that no breach of decorum or moment of discomfort is too insignificant to ignore. It must be registered. It must be punished. It’s nothing more or less than a call for constant vigilance. The thing about that: when you demand vigilance, you get vigilantes.