What were New Yorkers thinking? Consider the events of these past two weeks to see the irony of political juxtaposition. Last week the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger wrote that what we are now witnessing with the unraveling of Obamacare amid a tangled web of epic technological failure and hundreds of thousands of citizens losing coverage or experiencing skyrocketing premiums lies about all of the above some extending back to 2010 and new lies about the lies

is the failure of the very idea of progressive government. Not liberal government. Progressive government…. Forty years from now the millennials who in 2008 and 2012 believed in and voted for the progressive ideal — limitless mandated state-led goodness — can tell their grandchildren they watched it fall apart in 2013…. What made [Obamacare] peculiarly progressive were the mandates…. The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is: “You will participate in what we have created for you and you will comply with the law’s demands….”

[W]ith ObamaCare and its details touching so many people all at once it has become impossible not to recognize that [it] is an offensive ideological exercise not merely an entitlement program. By Mr. Obama’s own admission this law is the way he wants the world to work in theUS— whether in health education energy infrastructure or finance.

And yet ironically at the precise moment that the real-world implications of Obamacare’s progressive regime of enforced uniformity dictated by all-knowing mandarins have begun to hit home for most Americans my fellow New York City citizens will by the time these words are read likely have chosen as mayor someone who was endorsed by Obamacare’s father himself for the very reason that “[p]rogressive change is the centerpiece of Bill de Blasio’s vision for New York City.”

The real problem with de Blasio certainly isn’t his youthful dalliances with Marxists the focus on which was nothing but a gift to his supporters looking to distract the electorate and discredit his opponents just as crazed birther talk was a similar boon for Mr. Obama. Nor — despite enthusiastic endorsements of de Blasio by the likes of George Soros and the Nation — is progressive redistributionist economic policy necessarily what is most worrisome about the Big Apple’s next four years.

A Time magazine profile noted that “while serving on the City Council he frequently found himself on the wrong side of progressives in his district … and was sometimes blasted for favoring developers and real-estate interests over community concerns about congestion and quality of life” and quotes one Democratic operative’s assessment that he “is much closer to Machiavelli than to Marx [and] is not a left-wing crusader or ideologue.”

No the far more troubling aspect of his election is the one that emerges from a City Journal piece by Myron Magnet arguing that a mayor’s first and greatest responsibility is to keep his citizens safe in the streets and in their homes. Thanks to the leadership of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg and the strategic planning and hard work of their police departments over the last 20 years during which the annual number of murders dropped from 2200 in 1990 to 414 in 2012 today’s young New Yorkers along with the many residents who’ve moved here in these two decades hardly even know what urban crime looks like.

And they certainly know nothing of whatNew Yorkwas like before 1994 when menacing panhandlers and the chronically homeless were ubiquitous fixtures in a city marred by massive graffiti vandalized phones and buildings and cracked excrement-laden sidewalks; when the streets at night and the parks and housing projects always were ruled by drugged-out muggers and violent gangs.

Yet de Blasio has openly capitalized on the very complacency about crime that the city’s hard-won good fortune has bred saying that “[t]his election is not going to be about crime as some previous elections were. It used to be inNew Yorkyou worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?”

But “mugging” will very quickly come once again to mean the real violent kind if the mayor won’t courageously stand behind his police force and stand up to the racial hustlers the liberal civil liberties types and the New York Times none of whom care a whit that the biggest beneficiaries of the precipitous drop in crime have been the residents of inner-city neighborhoods.

Unfortunately — and I’d love to be proven wrong by post-election events — Bill de Blasio’s track record and positions don’t bode well on this score: his strong opposition to stop-and-frisk and muscular policing tactics his support for stifling oversight of police and replacement of the current police commissioner and his longstanding symbiotic relationship with ACORN the corrupt far-left community-organizing group that according to one Democratic insider had a “long-range plan since 2001 … to elect de Blasio mayor. De Blasio was a big ACORN project.”

Perusing the Orthodox media prior to the election all that seemed to matter was whether de Blasio as a long-time friend of our community would keep the gravy train rolling. But important as that may be all the gravy in the world won’t matter quite so much if the city were to return to the nightmarish state of violence and decline of a quarter-century ago.

BLURRY LINES An e-mail from theMuseum ofJewish Heritage which describes itself as dedicated to educating people “about the rich tapestry of Jewish life over the past century — before during and after the Holocaust ” arrived to inform me that on December 25 Joshua Nelson and his Kosher Gospel Choir will

return to the [museum] for two performances of a spectacular new concert featuring Nelson’s signature fusion of Hebrew tunes and gospel style. Nelson … will be performing songs off of his new album “Barechu” which will launch at the Museum that day.… Audience members can expect to hear soulful interpretations of such songs as “Lecha Dodi” “Adon Olam” among others….

I know what many readers are thinking just now and I fully concur: They can’t be serious can they? Unless this is some wag’s idea of a spoof this is simply nuts. A concert by a “Kosher Gospel Choir ” and on December 25 no less and in an institution devoted to showing people “the rich tapestry of Jewish life”?! Is there a greater blurring of the lines between Jewish and non-Jewish than this? Where’s their Jewish pride and sense of distinctiveness? And then they wonder why intermarriage is at 71% and large percentages of Jews no longer identify Judaism as their religion? And so on.

But I must admit that I keep somewhat current on the secular Jewish media and happenings in the world they serve and thus frequently encounter inanities on a par with that of the Kosher Gospel Choir. Yet whatever mussar I’ve learned —— with its emphasis on self-evaluation and internal consistency — might not have thus far impacted my middos development but has at least sufficed to cultivate within me an inner voice that upon reading of things like the Kosher Gospel Choir speaks up asking rather uncomfortably: “And what about you and your community?”

And so for example learning that nowadays even a December 25 gospel concert can be kosherized prompted that voice to muse: “Kosherize? As in taking a secular American institution like the ‘honeymoon’ and renaming it the ‘chassan and kallah vacation’ replete with bouquet-bearing greeters at the airport from which the lucky couple is whisked by limousine to a (presumably private) Hawaiian beach?”

After the recent Pew survey of American Jews showed steep non-Orthodox assimilation alongside steady Orthodox growth several commentators cautioned against Orthodox triumphalism. But we ought not to need any such cautionary note because evidence of assimilationist trends in our very own community — different in degree and kind from the non-Orthodox varieties to be sure but deeply injurious nonetheless — is all about us.

The secular Jewish media’s favorite descriptive word for us is “insular” and each time I see it I suppress both a laugh and a sigh. A laugh because their own form of insularity prevents them from seeing just how non-insular we are in many respects particularly with the incursions of technology. But also a sigh because that very same non-insularity can be a cause for a very real albeit subtle erasure of the lines that separate our Chosen Nation from all others.

Rav Nosson Wachtfogel ztz”l would relate that he possessed a direct tradition from Rav Yehoshua Leib Diskin that in the final war preceding Mashiach’s arrival all ehrliche Jews would be saved and that the definition of an ehrliche Jew is one who is separated from his non-Jewish surroundings and impervious to its influences.