When Manhattan became a monarchy and left democracy behind

For more than three decades, Jerry Nadler has represented Manhattan’s West Side in Congress. Seventeen terms. When he announced his retirement, he didn’t step aside and let voters decide who should come next. He chose for them. He endorsed his former aide and protégé, Micah Lasher, and then told the New York Times he didn’t believe New Yorkers would vote for a conservative.That’s not a transfer of power. It’s a line of succession.Manhattan has lived under a crown before. On Sept. 8, 1664, English forces seized the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and King Charles II granted it to his brother, the Duke of York. The island took his name. That rule ended with the Revolution, when the last British troops left Manhattan on Nov. 25, 1783. New Yorkers celebrated Evacuation Day for generations, because they understood what it meant: No one would inherit the right to govern them again. This is America. We don’t hand down public office like a family estate, and no seat in Congress is anyone’s personal fiefdom. Generations of immigrants came to this city because here you aren’t given your place. You earn it. They built businesses, raised families, and made it on their own.But this succession comes with a twist. The crown being passed down in NY-12 isn’t protecting the old order. It’s making way for a new one.Socialists have taken City Hall. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, backed like-minded candidates who won House nominations elsewhere in the city this year. His agenda of city-run grocery stores, sweeping new taxes, and free everything is reshaping New York’s politics and its finances.And Lasher has stood with it. He endorsed Mamdani for mayor. He hired the media firm co-founded by the strategist behind Mamdani’s campaign. He has offered little public resistance to the mayor’s agenda.It’s a strange alliance: the habits of a monarchy serving the ambitions of a revolution. The establishment that once checked radical politics now opens the door for it, then expects to be crowned for the trouble.That’s the real threat to democracy as we know it. Not a coup or a crisis, but a quiet bargain in which voters are told the outcome before they’ve cast a ballot.Lasher appears to believe the outcome is settled. With Election Day less than two weeks away, he has refused to debate me. A debate was arranged at the Murray Hill Neighborhood Association. He was invited and followed up with by email. He has not responded.Even NY1 has described this race as an effort to prevent a coronation. When asked for comment, Lasher’s campaign declined, which has become a pattern.I understand the strategy. When you believe the outcome is guaranteed, a debate is all risk and no reward. But I suspect there’s another reason. Side by side, the contrast between us would be impossible to miss. He isn’t too busy to debate. He’s afraid of how it would go.Don’t the voters deserve to hear from both of us, on the same stage, at the same time?They deserve to hear how he would address a city in which private-sector job growth has nearly stalled, while the comptroller projects budget gaps of roughly $9 billion a year by the end of the decade. They deserve to know where he stands on the rising antisemitism that has shaken one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, including this summer’s stabbing outside the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side. They deserve to know whether he still stands by his endorsement of Mamdani.And they deserve to compare his answers with mine.A debate isn’t a favor a candidate does for an opponent. It’s an obligation to the voters. That’s why, in Congress, I will introduce legislation requiring candidates for federal office to debate their opponents. If you want the job, you should be willing to make your case in public, on the same stage as the person running against you.Something is changing in this district. Lifelong Democrats tell me they no longer feel their party represents them. Some have said so publicly. They aren’t asking for a coronation. They’re asking for a choice.I’m offering one. I’m an economist who has worked at the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Israel, and an attorney who has worked on some of the most complex transactions in finance. I’m running because Manhattan needs someone who will fight for its future, not someone who assumes the job is already his.YOUR LANDLORD DOESN’T CARE IF YOU HATE TRUMP: THE BRUTAL COST OF REVENGE VOTINGSo I’ll make the invitation again, publicly. Lasher: any stage, any moderator, any format.New York threw off one king. It doesn’t need another. Democracy isn’t inherited. It’s earned, one debate and one vote at a time.Caroline Shinkle is the Republican nominee for New York’s 12th Congressional District.