‘Snowcialism’: Where a Nor’easter Becomes a State of Emergency

During a snowstorm last month, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a “citywide travel restriction” closing NYC streets, highways, bridges, and tunnels to vehicular traffic, “including but not limited to commercial trucks, electric bicycles, scooters, and mopeds,” with exceptions for “authorized vehicles.” For one observer in Brooklyn, that seemed something of a stretch.

“The headlines’ freakout conceals the fact that this snowfall is within the range of normal for the northeastern United States,” wrote author Naomi Wolf (The End of America), who conducted some research. The snowfall was indeed a record for Providence, Rhode Island, but the last time it snowed that much in New York City was “five years ago,” and there’s more to it.

In 1947, more than 26 inches of snow fell in Central Park, and in 1888 21 inches of snow fell in 24 hours, leaving “snowbanks almost five feet high.” Wolf wondered if all that white stuff over so many years had ever prompted New York to impose a travel ban.

“The First Amendment guarantees Americans freedom of assembly, which freedom covers freedom of movement,” Wolf wrote, “but if you issue a State of Emergency, it means that civil law is suspended and you can impose unconstitutional restrictions.” As it happens, New York’s last unconstitutional travel ban came in 2020.

On June 24, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued Executive Order 205, directing the state Department of Health to issue a travel advisory for all persons entering New York from states with significant transmission rates of COVID. This type of restriction was not limited to New York.

In March 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered Californians to shelter in place, and police arrested a solitary paddleboarder at Malibu Beach for refusing to come out of the water. The paddleboarder’s freedom of movement had been taken away.

Gov. Newsom shut down businesses he deemed not essential and imposed draconian rules for gathering. The governor told people to “keep your mask on between bites,” but the rules did not apply to Newsom and his entourage, who partied sans masks at the upscale French Laundry.

Back east in New York, Mayor Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Naomi Wolf sees the travel ban as a part of the mayor’s effort to humiliate and “subjugate” the city. There may be something to it.

The mayor called for help shoveling snow, with a special condition. The shovelers had to produce “no less than five forms of identification in order to shovel snow,” according to David Spector of the New York Post, who proclaimed that “Snowcialism has hit The Big Apple.”

According to the NYC Department of Sanitation, to register as an emergency snow shoveler, applicants must provide “two small photos sized 1-1.5 square inches, two original forms of ID plus copies, and their social security card.” As Spector noted, the New York chapter of DSA opposes the ID requirement for voters. That brought quips of “This is Jim SNOW 2.0,” and such on the internet.

It is hard to find similar rules for snow shovelers across the U.S., though Naomi Wolf recalls that “the Bolsheviks also had the bourgeois shoveling snow in 1918.” Wolf finds a parallel in New York’s demand that property owners clear snow and ice from sidewalks, unsheltered bus stops, and so forth.

Wolf calls this “a completely new requirement for property owners, no matter if they are female.” The underlying principle has been in place for a long time. Politicians aim to “never let a crisis go to waste,” the same dynamic Robert Higgs outlined in Crisis and Leviathan, first published in 1987.

The crisis that prompts governments to expand power can be a war, a pandemic, or a natural disaster. As New Yorkers now realize, it can also be the normal amount of snowfall for the northeastern United States, so it doesn’t have to be a true crisis for politicians to make a power grab. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, the struggle against expanding government power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.