He did not correct them when they said “mayor” with a hint of condescension, as if the city he came
from were a training ground, not a battlefield. Instead, he talked about boilers
that never worked in winter, about tenants who knew the names of every housing
court clerk by heart, about the arithmetic of three jobs and still not enough.
The staffers kept returning to “fiscal responsibility”; he kept returning to who, exactly,
had been deemed expendable for decades in the name of it.
In the months that followed, his test was not whether Fox News found a new chyron or whether donors cut off
a few wavering Democrats. It was whether the people who had chanted his name in crowded,
overheated gymnasiums felt any difference in their own hallways.
If the buses came, if the evictions slowed, if the sirens felt less like a threat, then
“socialism” would not need defending. It would simply be what had finally, concretely arrived.
