Oh, Noooooes!

     I'm still hearing a little freakout over New York City's Mayor-elect.  Thing is, he's not the first socialist to get himself elected mayor of an American city; he's not even the first one to win in NYC, and the city's still there.  Wikipedia's got a list, starting with John C. Chase in 1898.  There's a whole clutch of them in the early decades of the 20th Century, food for thought if you're pining for "the good old days."*

     Milwaukee had a nearly unbroken fifty-year run of them, from 1910 through 1960: that's two World Wars and a Great Depression.  I'm sure they all said and did things that I'd disagree with (not an unusual distinction among politicians) but the city survived and even thrived.  (It took heavy lifting to interrupt the string: a Democrat-Republican fusion candidate won and served from 1912 to 1916.)

     U. S. mayors do not serve in a vacuum.  They're working in concert with a legislative body and a court system; everybody in town knows where their office is and can look up their number, and all it takes is a faltering trash-collection system, faulty sewers or a botched response to a bad snowstorm to get them tossed out on their ear in the next election.  We vote mayors in, we vote mayors out, and when they lose, they hand over the keys and combination for the safe to the next officeholder in due order. 

     Mayors from one of the major parties are closely watched by their political opposition; Mayors who have expressed leanings towards the edges of one or the other big parties get even more scrutiny (this is where most of the recent socialists fall, being both Democrats and DSA members) and mayors affiliated only with a third party (or none at all) can expect to get it from both sides.

     So I'm not worried.  There are plenty of people and groups to do the watching and start yelling if he goes off the rails, and they're already on the job.
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* They weren't quite as halcyon as some people like to claim, and you can chop your own wood or shovel your own coal for a winter if you'd like to find out for yourself.  My parents grew up on the trailing edge of that technology, and even through the rosy-hued spectacles of childhood, it didn't look that great to them.  Even spending time in the disused attic of a house that had been heated by coal is a marked education -- pun intentional.  Coal soot takes considerable scrubbing!