One does not require the meteorological insight of a professional forecaster, nor the dialectical subtlety of a tenured socialist, to savour the exquisite farce now playing out across the five boroughs. New York City, that self-appointed capital of resilience and reinvention, lies under a historic February blanket—eighteen to twenty inches of the stuff, depending on which meteorologist you trust and how much they have invested in the narrative of 'unprecedented.' The year is 2026. The mayor is Zohran Mamdani, sworn in a mere two months earlier on a platform heavy with the usual progressive freight: equity, dignity, solidarity, and the cheerful assumption that human nature can be gently nudged toward the light if only the incentives are calibrated correctly.
The Emergency Snow Shoveler programme is not some wild-eyed innovation cooked up in a Brooklyn co-op. It is, we are repeatedly assured, long-standing. Citizens of goodwill have for years been invited to present themselves at Department of Sanitation garages, armed with two forms of photo identification, a Social Security card, photocopies of the foregoing, and presumably a notarised affidavit confirming that they have read the small print. In return they would receive $19.14 per hour to begin with, rising, after the first forty hours of the week, to $28.71. A rate, one notes, that in calmer weather might have purchased a serviceable oat-milk latte and a single subway ride, but which, in the teeth of a blizzard, proved about as magnetically attractive as a vegan cheese platter at a Trump rally.
The result? Zero. Zilch. Not a single taker at multiple garages in Queens and Brooklyn. The depots stood as empty as a campaign promise the morning after the election. One pictures the scene with a certain Beckettian purity: a lone official in a hi-vis vest, stamping his feet, checking his clipboard, perhaps permitting himself a quiet, unprintable observation on the civic spirit of the people who had, after all, voted the present administration into being. No queues formed. No hardy souls materialised, glowing with the inner warmth of communal endeavour. The snow continued to fall, the ploughs—2,300 of them, including 700 salt-spreaders—laboured on, and 2,600 sanitation veterans worked twelve-hour shifts, but the supplementary civilian army refused to materialise.
Enter the frantic revision. By Monday the rate had been 'increased'—the word 'frantically' belongs to the conservative commentariat, but it will serve—to a flat $30 an hour, with $45 after forty hours. The arithmetic had been adjusted with the speed normally reserved for correcting a tweet that has already gone viral for the wrong reasons. One can almost hear the late-night huddle in the mayor’s office: spreadsheets flickering, aides murmuring, someone suggesting that perhaps the dignity of labour required a slightly higher numerical expression of esteem. The mayor himself, addressing the cameras, maintained the necessary tone of calm urgency. Code Blue remained in effect. The city was mobilising. New Yorkers could still walk into any DSNY garage before 8 p.m., show their documents, and begin earning what was now, by the standards of the original offer, a small fortune.
Two months. That is all it has taken. Two months since the swearing-in, the photo opportunities, the ritual invocation of hope and change. Already the honeymoon is not merely over; it has been buried under drifts deep enough to conceal a double-decker bus. The conservative chorus on X (still the coliseum of choice for public blood sports) has responded with the glee of schoolboys who have discovered that the headmaster’s trousers have fallen down. “Marxists who voted him in are all lazy freeloaders.” “Never in the history of leftism has a lefty volunteered to do anything.” “They expected free handouts, not to be asked to work for them.” The pile-on is merciless, predictable, and—let us be honest—rather enjoyable in the way that all spectacles of exposed contradiction tend to be.
Yet the deeper comedy lies not in the partisan jeering but in the structural absurdity. Here is a political philosophy that has spent decades insisting that $15 an hour is barely enough to keep body and soul together in the Apple, that every form of labour possesses an inherent dignity that must be honoured with appropriate compensation, that the working class is the very engine of history. And when history, in the form of twenty inches of snow, actually asks a few members of that class to pick up a shovel for nineteen dollars and change, the engine stalls. The response is not outrage at the paltry sum but a polite, collective, metropolitan silence. One is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism would take too many evenings; in this case it appears to require too many freezing mornings as well.
The bureaucratic garnish only improves the joke. Prospective shovelers must produce multiple forms of identification—requirements described, without apparent irony, as 'long-standing'. Federal law, we are told, demands it for payroll purposes. Fair enough. Yet the same administration that treats voter identification as a threat to democracy suddenly discovers that shovelling a fire hydrant is a transaction requiring the full panoply of bureaucratic proof. The right, naturally, has seized on the contrast with the enthusiasm of starving men spotting a dropped sandwich. “ID to shovel snow but not to vote?” The hypocrisy is not imaginary; it is simply the usual progressive distinction between sacred rights and secular chores.
Nature, of course, remains magnificently indifferent. The blizzard does not read manifestos. It does not care that the mayor is a democratic socialist or that the opposition is crowing. It simply falls, compacts, freezes, and waits to be moved. The city will clear its streets eventually—partly with union labour at union rates, partly with the newly incentivised civilians who will, one assumes, now materialise once the price has been adjusted to something approaching the market rate for voluntary discomfort. Sidewalks will be the responsibility of property owners by 8:30 p.m. or fines will follow. Life will resume its customary rhythm of complaint and litigation.
In the meantime we have been treated to a small but perfect parable. A progressive mayor discovers that even in the people’s republic of New York, the people retain an obstinate preference for central heating over civic virtue at bargain-basement prices. The right discovers, yet again, that its darkest suspicions about entitlement culture are not entirely without foundation. And the rest of us—those who merely watch from the warmth of our armchairs—are reminded that human nature has a way of resisting even the most elegantly drafted policy. Snow falls. Wages rise. Garages remain, for a while at least, empty.
It is the sort of episode that would have delighted the late PJ O'Rourke: elegant, ironic, and fundamentally human. The world turns, the drifts deepen, and somewhere in Gracie Mansion a calculator is being worked with the quiet desperation of a man who has just realised that ideology and meteorology obey different laws. The snow will melt. The spreadsheets will be filed. And New York, being New York, will survive—slightly poorer, slightly wiser, and no doubt already preparing the press release for the next inevitable storm.