New York’s Deal with the Devil
New York is poised to make its own Faustian bargain—selling its soul for “free” perks and socialist promises that will cost the city far more than it can ever afford to pay.
By Stephen Soukup
November 1, 2025
One of the best-known legends in the Western tradition is the story of Faust, a brilliant scholar who becomes disillusioned with the limits of man’s knowledge and experiences and, as a result, sells his soul to the devil in exchange for extraordinary power, insight, and earthly pleasures. The German-speaking world is most familiar with the story as retold in an epic drama by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered one of the greatest works in all of German literature, while English speakers are likely most familiar with the version—“Dr. Faustus”—produced nearly two centuries earlier by Christopher Marlowe. Gen-Xers (like me) are, of course, most familiar with the version told in 1986 by screenwriter John Fusco, starring the Karate Kid himself as an aspiring blues guitarist and the great Steve Vai as the devil’s guitarist.
The moral of the story—in German folklore and in Marlowe’s telling—is that arrogance and craving for temporal pleasures and rewards are damning vices. They push man to make stupid choices, to underestimate his worth (and the worth of all humanity), and to risk full-blown tragedy for comparatively small gains. The contemporary terms “deal with the devil” and “Faustian bargain” are universally understood to represent foolish and ultimately destructive decisions made by those lacking foresight and wisdom.
Naturally, I mention all of this today for a reason—a couple, actually. First, residents of New York City go to the polls this coming Tuesday and, from all indications, are expected to make their own Faustian bargain. They are expected to elect the avowed Socialist and not-so-avowed-but-still-obvious Islamist Zohran Mamdani as their next mayor. They are expected to hand leadership of the financial center of the universe over to a Marxist, to turn the keys of the city in which the most horrific terrorist attack ever occurred to someone who campaigned with an unindicted co-conspirator on the first World Trade Center bombing, and to stake their collective future on the words and deeds of a spoiled, dishonest nepo-baby who has never had a real job in his life.
They are willing to do all of this in return for a few baubles: free bus rides, rent-controlled apartments, city-owned grocery stores, and an ever-higher minimum wage—and, of course, the social status that goes along with such virtue-signal-voting. Even if these policies were deliverable and not likely to unleash financial havoc, they would still be almost entirely irrelevant in the grand plan to “make NYC affordable.” None of them will do anything to help the city’s most vulnerable, those whom Mamdani claims to want to help. At the risk of mixing my soul-selling literary metaphors, one can’t help but be reminded of Thomas More’s line (delivered to Richard Rich), “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?”
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