By Warren H. Cohn, JNS
Appeasement is not a strategy; it is a surrender dressed up as political sophistication.
New York woke up in November to a political earthquake. Zohran Mamdani is now mayor-elect. For years, he tested how far he could push extremist rhetoric into the mainstream. And this week, some told him he could go all the way.
No one smoothed that path more than comptroller Brad Lander.
Lander has perfected a certain New York political aesthetic: soft-spoken, earnest, quietly dangerous. In his eagerness to win favor with the loudest ideological blocs, he embraced Mamdani’s worldview long before New Yorkers realized just how truly radical it was. He amplified him. He validated him. And now, as Mamdani assumes the most powerful office in the city, Lander is cashing in on the alliance by preparing his own run for Congress.
This did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because leaders believed that they could ride the tiger without ever being bitten. They believed that appeasing ideological extremism would protect them from its consequences.
History teaches the opposite.
Jews in Europe once thought their friendships, access and proximity to power insulated them. They thought that the ideology swelling outside their windows would not reach the halls they frequented. They were disastrously wrong. Appeasement is not a strategy; it is a surrender dressed up as political sophistication.
Lander’s embrace of Mamdani is the latest version of this delusion. He watched as the 34-year-old state assemblyman mainstreamed rhetoric that normalizes antisemitism, delegitimizes the State of Israel and casts the city’s Jewish community as a political inconvenience rather than a civic partner. He watched New York inch closer to an ideological cliff. And instead of drawing a line, he helped erase it.
Now the consequences have arrived.
Let us be clear: Mamdani’s ascent represents not a shift but a rupture. The guardrails that once protected New York’s pluralistic character are bending under the weight of his political movement.
And Lander, in his studied blandness, has made himself indispensable to that transformation.
New Yorkers may send him to Congress. He may join the far-left “Squad” in the U.S House of Representatives. He may even congratulate himself for being on the “right side of history.”
But when extremist politics turns inward—and it always does—the people who helped build it discover too late that they were never partners, only placeholders.
As I wrote when Schumer flirted with this same political current: When they come for us, they come for you, too. And with Mamdani now approaching a power that is all too real, that current is no longer theoretical. It will soon be the governing philosophy of the nation’s largest city.
Congratulations, Brad Lander. You helped make this moment possible. Now you get to live in the New York you helped create.
