Tom Suozzi, the Democratic congressman, likes to talk about his maternal grandfather, an Irish electrician who helped install the lights on top of the Empire State Building. And his father, who came to this country from Italy and was a navigator on a B-24 bomber during World War II, got himself into Harvard Law and then, after graduating, couldn’t get a job because no one would hire Italians. These two stories were his story, but really, it was the Democratic Party’s story—that of melting pots and labor unions and upward mobility and optimism leavened with grit, loss, sacrifice, and a belief in the promise of America.
It is also the subtext of Suozzi’s Promise to America, a pledge to push back against the leftist tsunami engulfing his party. Suozzi formally unveiled it last Thursday, two days after a slate of candidates backed by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic House primaries in New York City. The pledge includes support for capitalism, free speech, and America—and, just as importantly, opposition to socialism, purity tests, and a belief that the country is the root of all evil everywhere. He was launching it, he told me, because he thought his fellow moderates had been “asleep at the switch” in the face of the ascendant far left.
