Cuomo vs. Cuomo: Which Path Should Pro-Democracy Forces Take?

We need to understand that the center is not always in the middle.

Illustration by Riley Levine

“Mario Cuomo went into public life to represent communities against public officials like Andrew Cuomo,” veteran Democratic political consultant and speechwriter David Kusnet said to me last week. As the author of the first biography of Mario Cuomo, I judged that one-sentence analysis to be spot on.

I have long thought of the second Governor Cuomo in an alteration of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s famous takedown of Sen. Dan Quayle in the 1988 Vice Presidential debate. In my case, it is: “I knew Mario Cuomo, Mario Cuomo was a friend of mine. Andrew, you are no Mario Cuomo.” Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa spoke the same thought out loud in the first New York City mayoral debate. To see Andrew Cuomo cozying up to Donald Trump and Mayor Eric Adams — who have both endorsed him — is, putting it too politely, disappointing.

The contrast between the two governors named Cuomo can help provide an answer to a major political question that has long been simmering: Should the Democratic party — and others in the pro-democracy coalition — be supporting “moderate” or “progressive” candidates? The emergence of Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as a Democratic nominee and likely winner of the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday has brought that question to a boil.

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In a major opinion essay on October 20, the New York Times editorial board argued that American politics “seem to be dominated by extremes” and “moving to the center is the way to win.” Where, though, is the center between right-wing authoritarianism and freedom and democracy? As the “Republicans” careen ever farther off the pavement, across the right shoulder, through the guardrail, into the ditch off the right side of the road, the “center,” if that is taken to mean the midpoint, is pulled from the middle of the road ever farther to the extreme right. Should Democrats, then, seek to be in the center by offering “Fascism Lite” as an alternative to full-blown fascism?

To echo Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 words, a house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation cannot endure, half-authoritarian and half-free and democratic. A party that tries to occupy the center between the two is doomed.

William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem, “The Second Coming,” has long been the go-to reference in times of crisis. Joan Didion employed it to great effect in pillorying the hippies of the late 1960s and that whole period. The alarm Yeats raised that “the centre cannot hold” speaks forcefully to us in 2025. The “rough beast” he envisioned has already been born. It could not be clearer that we are in a time where “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Where is the center in such a time?

Where is the center between the First Amendment and a government that seeks to control speech, assembly, and the media and is filled with Christian nationalists who want to establish a state church? Between the rule of law and a president who asserts, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States”? Between protecting the right of all citizens to vote and seeking to repeal the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander to an absurd degree? Between consumer protection, environmental protection, scientific and medical research, and countless other government functions and maintaining the social safety net created in the 1930s, 1960s, and since and striving to “Take America Back” to the 1920s, the first Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, or even farther? Between a president ordering the prosecution of anyone he does not like and equal application of the law? Between corruption on a previously unimaginable level and honest government? Between a fact-based examination of our history and making up a past to suit the ruler? Between government of the people, by the people, and for the people and government of the people, by an unchecked leader, and for the billionaires? And so on and on.

Where is the center between following the Constitution’s checks and balances and an utterly compliant Congress that amounts to, as Steve Bannon calls it “the state Duma”?

Where is the center between those who still reside in the world of fact and those who will make up absolutely any lie about their opponents and repeat it on an endless loop? Should we aim for the center between truth and out-of-whole-cloth lies? Perhaps Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” or Trump’s “As you know …” and “Many people are saying”?

We need to understand that the center is not always in the middle. It does not necessarily take two to polarize. The extreme right-wing movement has been planning since the 1970s the takeover that is underway this year. Whenever it moved the Republican party farther to the right, the center in a mathematical sense — the midpoint between two ends — was dragged in the same direction.

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Republicans have long been winning the messaging war. In the late 1960s and 1970s, they made “liberal” a term of approbation. Knowing that “liberal” had become a dirty word, Mario Cuomo told me he had come up with “progressive pragmatism” to describe his approach to politics and government.

“Democrats who win tough races,” the Times editors wrote last month, “work hard to signal that they are less progressive than their party.” What, though, does “less progressive” mean?

The term “conservative” has been hijacked by authoritarians of the radical right who completely oppose such conservative values as limited government, the Constitution, the rule of law, checks and balances, and reverence for what was good in the past. The MAGA movement is the antithesis of conservatism. It often appears that the only thing they want to conserve is the bloated fortunes of billionaires. Yet the media continue reflexively to refer to those who are working to alter the American government and society radically as “conservatives.” This is an enormous disservice to the public because it makes right-wing extremists sound mainstream and safe.

Similarly, people who have abandoned believing in a republic call themselves “Republicans.” Those who favor an authoritarian government call themselves “libertarians.” Many of those who call themselves “populists” do nothing for poor people other than point them toward other groups with little power to blame for their problems.

In contrast, Democrats still believe in democracy and progressives still believe in progress, though some who have adopted the latter name have gone to an extreme.

Painfully aware of how easy it has been for Republicans to tag Democrats with a word they make sound threatening, many major Democrats have been hesitant to endorse Mamdani, in large part because they fear the “socialist” label. Albeit often with trepidation, as Election Day nears, most of them are coming on board, as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jefferies did late last month.

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Government is inherently neither bad nor good. It can be either a positive or negative force. Republicans and others on the right have long warned of the dangers of a powerful government and accused Democrats of being “socialists” and “communists.” Government can be, as it so often has been across time and place, used to harm people, as the “Republicans” currently in control in Washington are demonstrating. In trustworthy and competent hands, though, government can be very helpful to people.

Mario Cuomo may have said it best in his 1984 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco and repeated many other times: “We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need. … We believe in a government strong enough to use words like love and compassion, and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.” His presentation of the Democratic view of government was in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

“Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes,” Roosevelt said in his 1936 speech accepting renomination, “… Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” A better description of the difference between Democrats and Republicans today would be hard to imagine.

To be clear, I am not saying Mario Cuomo would vote against his son. He was too much a believer in family to do that. Nor would he be entirely comfortable with Mamdani. The first Gov. Cuomo called for “reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn’t distort or promise to do things that we know we can’t do.” But the son has strayed far from where his father was.

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Democrats believe in addition and multiplication; MAGA mathematics operates with subtraction and division.

What Democrats need to present is progressivism leavened with common sense — a promise to end the current American Nightmare and restore and expand the American Dream. The pro-democracy coalition should welcome everyone who opposes what Trump and his minions are doing to our country. Running “centrist” candidates committed to stopping MAGA authoritarianism in normally Republican areas is fine, but the coalition’s center must not be a “middle” that keeps moving farther to the right.

While the MAGAverse rants about the putative horrors of “socialism,” the Trump administration is stampeding the United States into state command and control capitalism — crony capitalism, monopoly capitalism, an oligarchy of fabulously wealthy men (and the occasional woman) that crushes the middle- and working classes.

Is socialism the alternative to that untenable kind of economy? The answer depends on how we define “socialism.” The evidence that state ownership of the means of production does not work have been obvious wherever it has been tried. For all its faults, a market-based economy is essential.

The model for the economic approach that we need to obtain the undeniable benefits of a market-based system while limiting its harmful excesses is to be seen in the political system that the Founding Fathers created in 1787 and is currently being dismantled by the Trump government. Though they did not put it in quite the same way, the American Founders understood the benefits and inherent dangers of democracy in much the same way as Winston Churchill later did when he said in 1947: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government — except all the others that have been tried.”

Though most of the men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had come to believe that democracy is the “least bad” political system, they were very mindful of its inherent flaws, including the threat we are currently experiencing of a demagogue misleading a large portion of the population. Accordingly, they devised a system based on democracy, but with a variety of checks and balances to rein in its tendencies to produce dangerous excesses.

We need to do the same with economic systems, accepting that capitalism is the worst form of economy — except for all the others that have been tried — and recognizing the necessity of the market as the basis of the economy while understanding the dangers inherent in that approach and establishing a system of checks and balances to rein it in.

Rather than choosing capitalism or socialism, we need capitalism and socialism—what is practiced in Nordic countries — places where Trump likes the skin color of the majority of inhabitants but not their economic systems. It is usually called “social democracy” or “democratic socialism.”

Alternate names we might consider include “social capitalism” or “economic constitutionalism.”

I outlined this approach in a piece for NPR in 2009 on the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 crash, the closing line of which is, “Just a spoonful of socialism helps the capitalism go up.” Given where we are now, with wealth and power so concentrated at the top, we may need a heaping tablespoon of socialism to blend into capitalism.

This method is essentially what was tried by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and others. It worked to create the largest middle class in world history in the period from 1945 into the 1970s. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan started to return the nation to the tried-and-failed doctrine of trickle-down economics of the 1920s.

Beginning in his 1982 gubernatorial campaign and 1983 inaugural address, Mario Cuomo became the most eloquent opponent of that approach, which has now brought us to an unsustainable top-heavy economy and a government pulling us into authoritarianism.

Reading or viewing the senior Cuomo’s 1984 keynote address is a good starting point for Democrats seeking to unify the anti-authoritarian forces and inspire the American people.

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Plainly, Mario Cuomo’s eldest son is not nearly as much of an embarrassment to his father’s legacy as Robert F. Kennedy’s most politically prominent son is to his, but the directions the two younger men have taken, especially recently, illustrate paths champions of democracy should not follow in the 2020s and beyond. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gone full MAGA and Andrew Cuomo is trying to move closer to that extreme rather than vigorously opposing it.

Democrats and the pro-democracy coalition should emulate the fathers, not the sons.

Robert S. McElvaine is Professor of History and Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters Emeritus at Millsaps College and the author of eleven books, including The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (Times Books/Random House) and Mario Cuomo: A Biography (Scribner). He is currently at work on a new book manuscript, “An Agreed-Upon Fiction – A New History of Power and Authority: How the Lie of Women’s Inferiority Arose, Shaped History, Fuels Authoritarianism Today — and How Exposing It Can Save Democracy.” He writes a column on Substack, Musings & Amusings.