“People who are doing pretty well but still feel aggrieved about their place in society” actually sums up a big chunk of the MAGA movement pretty well. The biggest factor distinguishing them from the upper middle class revolutionary LARPers is the rural-urban divide.
I'm perfectly happy to say MAGA are revolutionaries, too. They are also angry at the whole system and want to tear it all down.
I'm generally on the right but find myself more at home in places like this with Jeff because we're both on the "Actually, life is pretty sweet, let's try not to fuck with that" train.
I'd like so much to go back to arguing about little incremental policy stuff and just taking the whole society structure as table stakes.
I've been truly amazed at how much the MAGA wing has worked hard to incorporate the dumbest possible stuff from the leftists.
"I'm going to threaten to blow up the system even though there's a 99% chance I'll end up worse off, assuming I'm not shot as part of the revolution" is the kind of stupid I used to have to deal with from the leftists but lately it's been coming from MAGA more.
Largely it's that *threatening* to destroy liberalism is seen as a useful negotiating tactic.
Fuck that. MAGA is full of people that do productive work while over educated paper pushers and fake laptop job workers looted their economic opportunity while flooding the country with wage destroying illegal immigrant labor.
Trump believes in Civilization. So did Obama. Their presidencies (at least Trump's first one) were guided by this North Star.
"The United States is a country where..."
And your average 10 year old will never know the joy of an "old shirt" (they will fall apart before they flannelize). This is obviously not on-par with your example, but it is a loss.
Not really. Did blue collar work until age 20 when I fell for computers and took an entry level corporat job. Worked my way up in various IT positions to CTO... insurance, banking and health care... now CEO of two companies... a commercial mortgage company and family business food product manufacturer. Have a BA in business, and never completed my MBA as I was a VP at age 24.
I have family and friends in the middle class and blue collar, and also mingle with the educated upper class.
I am the first in my large extended family to earn a 4 year degree (oldest of that generation). Since then there are many younger relatives with more college including my younger brother.
My observation is that MAGA people are generally wiser, more pragmatic, more grounded, more objective... and basically better people.
Trump screams “con man” to me, and that was true before he entered politics. I don’t get how you don’t see it.
I also think he appeals to the worst in people. His policies hurt America, especially his tariffs and his immigration policy that is both needlessly cruel and incompetent and harmful to the economy.
But what stands out about your comment is that you have had so much success, and yet you still resent “paper pushers”. Why is that?
Many of the rank and file Chekists were actually former members of Okhrana. Because 1) they had the skills and the appropriate (lack of) ethics and 2) that made them reliable since if they ever stepped out of line the higher ups could always say "oh yeah, you served the czar at one point, didn't you?"
If Mamdani becomes Mayor, I wonder how long his policy proposals will survive contact with reality: he can’t raise taxes or eliminate bus fares or freeze rents or open city-run supermarkets without approval from legislators or the MTA. Which leaves the actual day-to-day stuff of mayoring (?), such as keeping the streets clean and safe and the school system running, dealing with municipal unions, and so on. Will a two-term state assemblyman be good at these things? Your guesses are as good as mine. (FWIW, before taking up permanent residency in MSNBC’s green room, Bernie Sanders was an effective Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, admittedly an easier gig.)
P. S. The kid in the Dall-E 3 image looks like a baby Khrushchev.
Interestingly the Austria branch of the 1848 revolutions was literally kicked off by bored university students who were like “fuck this, let’s go do a revolution.”
Also, when you say the “dastardly Arab” who makes Stephen Miller prematurely ejaculate, I keep picturing a banned Tintin album from Hergé’s quasi-fascist period - “Tintin in the harem of the Emirs,” or something.
'European Socialism was always dominated by college kids trying to figure out how to get the lower classes to behave the way Marxist theory said they should behave.'
is that the entirety of Western Europe is now democratic socialist and the first people to protest any of the system being dismantled are, in fact, the working class. The neoliberal FDP just got a total and complete ass whoopin' in the last German election. Just about every other party is some flavor of democratic socialism. I moved here from California over 20 years ago and stayed when I crunched the numbers and realized I'd have to spend my life on a merciless hamster wheel to have the same quality of life (if I was lucky) that I do here.
Also: So fuckin' what if it's bougie? That doesn't make it inherently bad.
'Indeed, as journalist James Ball recently noted in an interview with me, many “class” oriented anti-woke people who spend all of their efforts simply criticizing “woke” people for being out of touch with the working man, and highlighting various culture war crap as distractions from “real” problems of ordinary people… but they never, themselves, actually get around to addressing those “real” problems either. They don’t spend their efforts pushing for higher pay and better benefits, improved working conditions, increased job security, a stronger social safety net, more healthy communities, or anything of the sort. It’s “woke is bad” all day, every day… but, somehow, in the name of class.'
No, they are not democratic socialist. There is not a single democratic socialist country in Europe. They are Social Democracies. And I realize that sounds like splitting hairs, but Social Democracies are capitalist economies (private ownership and direction of the means of production) with high personal taxes and high social safety nets. The government may involve itself in a few industries, but the vast majority of industry is private owned and directed. Democratic socialism is elected socialism—the government that owns and directs the means of production is elected by the democratic process. Those are VERY different things.
Stop trying to revive socialism from the dustbin of history by calling things socialist that are clearly not socialist. Socialism has failed every single time.
You are right. I was wrong. I thought there was a distinction between democratic socialism and just plain socialism. My goal is not to try to revive anything from the dustbin of history.
Germany (where I moved to from California over 20 years ago) is - okay - a social democracy, but there are a lot of things that Americans would reflexively scream 'socialism!!!' about; universal health care, paid family time off, fixed rates for medical procedures, heavily subsidized to the point of free child care.
It's not an academic exercise for me. I find this system vastly superior and am frustrated by any and all attempts to make life better for everyday people in the US immediately met with hand wringing.
Remember democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington and they managed to survive!
Bernie's a good guy, or at least he used to be (I'm pretty sure the blackmailers eventually found something on him).
Germany currently arrests journalists for posting memes speaking badly of it's politicians. I'll pass. (There are a bunch of other reasons for passing, including Germany's status as a vassal state of America, with... as of about 2018 or so, more American soldiers in Germany than German ones -- it's hard to evaluate the country's finances when they're busy leeching off of America's military might, and of course the continued war against nuclear power by the Russian-funded Greens).
The only competitor to natural gas is nuclear power (use of renewables means the need to burn more natural gas, not less, because they require peaker gas plants which are much less efficient than "stable" natural gas plants that simply provide power, as opposed to "evening out the electrical grid from spikes and dips from wind/solar").
Woke is bad because people hate it, so you can't get elected if you're running with it (and so you can't fix the minimum wage to increase the number of our robot overlords -- I know what it means when the unis want to increase the minimum wage. They want to undercut their competition, and what better way to do it than making Joe McDonalds earn more?).
And if you don't run with woke... well, walk into a bullet, why don't you?
I'd say ending American Slavery is actually pushing for higher pay and better benefits, but that might actually entail agreeing with a fellow.
My point in quoting Al Gharbi wasn't that woke is good. I don't believe that. Just that posts like this one, that attempt to disparage or delegitimise a phenomenon just because it wasn't composed of the correct mix of classes don't really have an argument. John Ganz makes this point here https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-it-took-to-win:
'Now, the class stuff needs to be qualified a bit. I’m sure if you’ve seen the infographic from The Times that shows Mamdani doing best among voters making over 100k. This has led to the familiar right-wing attacks on the “luxury beliefs” and the supposed spiritual sanctimony of progressive voters winning out over their material interests. But this is misleading and, in many cases, deliberately propagandistic...Cuomo did well among the very rich and the very poor. Mamdani does well in the middle, which in New York, with its high cost of living, stretches well into the six figures. High-five and six-figure income includes a lot of unionized wage laborers, junior white-collar professionals, and small business owners. Say what you like about their feasibility, the major policy portions of Mamdani’s campaign were about cost-of-living issues, and he targeted a coalition that goes across cultural and racial backgrounds but were all struggling to build decent lives in New York.'
I'm no stats guru, but I suspect the fact that the income graphic Jeff shared used median instead of average makes Jeff's interpretation more plausible.
This seems like a much fairer analysis than OP. Cuomo's average individual donation was $700, as compared to Mamdani's $82. 96% of contributions to Mamdani were small donations; only 51% of Cuomo's were. Cuomo definitely captured the very rich, who would stand to pay more under Mamdani's plans (assuming he could get Albany to pass them).
OP says nothing of the $30 million Cuomo's PAC spending. Also, NY has closed primaries and so the primary sample is limited when you're making broad claims about income level and support.
I don't think it's possible yet to fully interpret how much of Mamdani's votes were an endorsement of his ideology or a rejection of Cuomo and big money.
Small dollar donations are no longer a reliable indicator of what you think they are, not when NGOs routinely lean on their employees to "donate to the cause" (after paying them from government/donated money). I tend to think unions are a lot less successful at this practice.
This seems to be a standard "hypocrite" argument. I don't think that's unwarranted, in this case. You can stand on the side of the "Diamond Age" and say "I really don't think being a hypocrite is the worst sin." (and it's very much not -- compare that with murdering children to satisfy your sexual appetites).
Thanks for this one. This seems to a worldwide trend: affluent student goes abroad to prestigious western university, which exists in a market economy country, somehow learns anticapitalist-socialism is the answer and exports bad ideas back home. Now, however, the roosters are fully cooked at home and coming for a city government near you.
I think it's the end result of ivory-tower thinking where ideas cannot be easily checked with reality. The ideas that spread the most are the ones that sound the best, not the ones that work the best. That leads to wild takes that play off our inherent cognitive biases, combined with huge amounts of justification when plans derived from those takes fail.
Socialism sounds great. It works terribly, because nobody acts how socialists want them to act. Meaning socialism either collapses or becomes authoritarian. But it has extremely strong moral arguments, sounds like an amazing utopia, and resonates on an instinctual level. Supply side economics just isn't as easily transmissible of a slogan as "freeze the rent".
This is succinctly put and more or less the core of it. It ignores human action and motivation and assumes that everyone is a hardworking angel who will contribute even if there are no incentives to. Sadly there are enough freeloaders that this doesn't work.
Thanks, Jeff, for calling out Chris Murphy in particular. I can't believe that people are now taking him seriously simply for spouting incoherent economic populism every chance he gets. And, of course, with yesterday's results, it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
I do have one quibble though. Your point that this outcome, because it is the result of hyper-weird, hyper-progressive urbanites that are localized... well I live in CA in a liberal college town and there is not really any space in views between the non-urban left liberal and these weirdos in the big city. These dopes are all brainwired or brainwashed to sing the same woke collectivist song while casting their ballot. Is Gavin Newsom really much different than Mamdani?
There's two different meanings of Socialism in play -- there's Socialism, meaning roughly "Marxism," that is as you describe a perennial favorite among college-educated upper quintile social justice enthusiasts; and then there's "Socialism," the word that the right wing uses to malign school lunch programs, Medicaid, and pretty much any use of government funds outside of pork-barrel defense projects and oil drilling subsidies.
The first form, because it exists mostly in the realm of highfalutin theory and indulges in a lot of big, empty promises about the future -- "don't worry, this will all be fixed after the Revolution!" -- is indeed unpopular among the working classes it claims to champion. The second form, exemplified in government social spending programs from the New Deal and to a lesser extent Great Society eras of American government, holds a great deal of appeal for the working classes when it is put into practice. Most Americans who don't have millions socked away for retirement are pretty happy that Social Security exists, for example, in spite of it being labeled "Socialism" when it was created and derided as such ever since by conservatives.
If the working class actually gets something from it, they appreciate it. Even if Fox News or whoever screams that it's Communism. What the working class have shown consistent disdain for is 19th Century pie-in-the-sky.
"Most Americans" no longer believe they're going to get a dime from Social Security. I sure as hell don't. Social Security is gonna be broke before I retire, and they're not going to put the non-existent money back in.
The working class is fundamentally conservative -- Social Security sounds good, because they think they'll get something from it (and when you don't have the money to contribute to your 401k, you -depend- on the government somehow magicking money out of the rest of the world). When they don't... I wouldn't want to be a Boomer then, oh, no.
The only thing I'd add and clarify here is that Trumpist populism has worked in pretty much the same way. There was a pretty prominent narrative that Trump rode a wave of "working class" resentment, but the data suggests he did best with people who were actually higher earners relative to their geography/demography. Maybe the lesson here isn't that socialism will trick your middle income people into thinking they know "class struggle", but rather that middle and higher income people are attracted to revolutionary rhetoric in a way that lower income people aren't because, as Jeff says, they have "too much fucking work to do." And, perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea that Mamdani represents a true shift. I don't think Cuomo is as intolerant a candidate as many do, and I think he could have done very well if the younger, savvy, and undeniably intelligent Mamdani wasn't running against him. The fact that Mamdani's policy proposals will almost certainly fail, or change substantially... well that's a different story.
Cuomo deliberately got elderly nursing home patients killed. Whether or not you think "that was warranted" or "that was a good plan, implemented poorly" or "failure to adapt to changing circumstances..." changes how you view his governance. I'm a lot more comfortable debating that than the trumped up (sorry, if you have TDS) charges intended to keep Cuomo from running for president.
Lenin himself was a minor noble from his father's work.
But yeah, people who are doing pretty well but still feel aggrieved about their place in society is prime revolutionary breeding ground.
Like I'm surprised none of the attacks on Mamdani were that he grew up in an apartment that was just given to his family for teaching at Columbia.
“People who are doing pretty well but still feel aggrieved about their place in society” actually sums up a big chunk of the MAGA movement pretty well. The biggest factor distinguishing them from the upper middle class revolutionary LARPers is the rural-urban divide.
I'm perfectly happy to say MAGA are revolutionaries, too. They are also angry at the whole system and want to tear it all down.
I'm generally on the right but find myself more at home in places like this with Jeff because we're both on the "Actually, life is pretty sweet, let's try not to fuck with that" train.
I'd like so much to go back to arguing about little incremental policy stuff and just taking the whole society structure as table stakes.
I've been truly amazed at how much the MAGA wing has worked hard to incorporate the dumbest possible stuff from the leftists.
"I'm going to threaten to blow up the system even though there's a 99% chance I'll end up worse off, assuming I'm not shot as part of the revolution" is the kind of stupid I used to have to deal with from the leftists but lately it's been coming from MAGA more.
Largely it's that *threatening* to destroy liberalism is seen as a useful negotiating tactic.
"Threatening to destroy liberalism?" Do you have some examples of that?
They took the most toxic left wing identity politics and flipped it around to white people and men.
It’s honestly more shocking that nobody saw this coming.
And education.
MAGA is full of low education/high wealth people who are aggrieved that their wealth doesn’t give them social status.
DSA is full of high education/low wealth people who are aggrieved that their education doesn’t give them a comfortable living.
Fuck that. MAGA is full of people that do productive work while over educated paper pushers and fake laptop job workers looted their economic opportunity while flooding the country with wage destroying illegal immigrant labor.
Good for the top 10%, not for the lower 80%.
Note, I am 1%.
Economic progress is everywhere.
The US is a country where it's reasonable for a working class person to own a whole house with a yard and a boat.
People really need to get how fucking insanely wealthy that is in the context of the whole world (even rich countries)
Yeah there are problems, some are serious. But maybe go read goose that laid the golden egg.
Trump believes in Civilization. So did Obama. Their presidencies (at least Trump's first one) were guided by this North Star.
"The United States is a country where..."
And your average 10 year old will never know the joy of an "old shirt" (they will fall apart before they flannelize). This is obviously not on-par with your example, but it is a loss.
And you’re kind of proving my point.
You’re in the 1%, but I’m guessing you got there through a blue collar field. And you resent the knowledge workers that you call “paper pushers”.
That’s as base MAGA as it gets.
Not really. Did blue collar work until age 20 when I fell for computers and took an entry level corporat job. Worked my way up in various IT positions to CTO... insurance, banking and health care... now CEO of two companies... a commercial mortgage company and family business food product manufacturer. Have a BA in business, and never completed my MBA as I was a VP at age 24.
I have family and friends in the middle class and blue collar, and also mingle with the educated upper class.
I am the first in my large extended family to earn a 4 year degree (oldest of that generation). Since then there are many younger relatives with more college including my younger brother.
My observation is that MAGA people are generally wiser, more pragmatic, more grounded, more objective... and basically better people.
Trump screams “con man” to me, and that was true before he entered politics. I don’t get how you don’t see it.
I also think he appeals to the worst in people. His policies hurt America, especially his tariffs and his immigration policy that is both needlessly cruel and incompetent and harmful to the economy.
But what stands out about your comment is that you have had so much success, and yet you still resent “paper pushers”. Why is that?
It's amazing how much of modern world history is downstream of Lenin's older brother's political activities and subsequent execution.
Cheka Mate, determinists!
(Yes I know it was the Okhrana which was about as far as you could get ideologically but very similar tactically, but that's a shitty pun)
Many of the rank and file Chekists were actually former members of Okhrana. Because 1) they had the skills and the appropriate (lack of) ethics and 2) that made them reliable since if they ever stepped out of line the higher ups could always say "oh yeah, you served the czar at one point, didn't you?"
For the same reason I never saw people attacking others in SF for their “my place is rent-controlled” privilege
If Mamdani becomes Mayor, I wonder how long his policy proposals will survive contact with reality: he can’t raise taxes or eliminate bus fares or freeze rents or open city-run supermarkets without approval from legislators or the MTA. Which leaves the actual day-to-day stuff of mayoring (?), such as keeping the streets clean and safe and the school system running, dealing with municipal unions, and so on. Will a two-term state assemblyman be good at these things? Your guesses are as good as mine. (FWIW, before taking up permanent residency in MSNBC’s green room, Bernie Sanders was an effective Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, admittedly an easier gig.)
P. S. The kid in the Dall-E 3 image looks like a baby Khrushchev.
It seems like he’s ALREADY become mayor. The vibe in the air is as if the general is over.
If he ends up losing this moment will have been ridiculous in retrospect
Bernie Sanders was effective. "Lawn Gnome" Kucinich was an absolute horror show.
Interestingly the Austria branch of the 1848 revolutions was literally kicked off by bored university students who were like “fuck this, let’s go do a revolution.”
Also, when you say the “dastardly Arab” who makes Stephen Miller prematurely ejaculate, I keep picturing a banned Tintin album from Hergé’s quasi-fascist period - “Tintin in the harem of the Emirs,” or something.
The problem with this:
'European Socialism was always dominated by college kids trying to figure out how to get the lower classes to behave the way Marxist theory said they should behave.'
is that the entirety of Western Europe is now democratic socialist and the first people to protest any of the system being dismantled are, in fact, the working class. The neoliberal FDP just got a total and complete ass whoopin' in the last German election. Just about every other party is some flavor of democratic socialism. I moved here from California over 20 years ago and stayed when I crunched the numbers and realized I'd have to spend my life on a merciless hamster wheel to have the same quality of life (if I was lucky) that I do here.
Also: So fuckin' what if it's bougie? That doesn't make it inherently bad.
As Musa Al Gharbi recently pointed out in his Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/musaalgharbi/p/the-cultural-contradictions-of-the
'Indeed, as journalist James Ball recently noted in an interview with me, many “class” oriented anti-woke people who spend all of their efforts simply criticizing “woke” people for being out of touch with the working man, and highlighting various culture war crap as distractions from “real” problems of ordinary people… but they never, themselves, actually get around to addressing those “real” problems either. They don’t spend their efforts pushing for higher pay and better benefits, improved working conditions, increased job security, a stronger social safety net, more healthy communities, or anything of the sort. It’s “woke is bad” all day, every day… but, somehow, in the name of class.'
No, they are not democratic socialist. There is not a single democratic socialist country in Europe. They are Social Democracies. And I realize that sounds like splitting hairs, but Social Democracies are capitalist economies (private ownership and direction of the means of production) with high personal taxes and high social safety nets. The government may involve itself in a few industries, but the vast majority of industry is private owned and directed. Democratic socialism is elected socialism—the government that owns and directs the means of production is elected by the democratic process. Those are VERY different things.
Stop trying to revive socialism from the dustbin of history by calling things socialist that are clearly not socialist. Socialism has failed every single time.
You are right. I was wrong. I thought there was a distinction between democratic socialism and just plain socialism. My goal is not to try to revive anything from the dustbin of history.
Germany (where I moved to from California over 20 years ago) is - okay - a social democracy, but there are a lot of things that Americans would reflexively scream 'socialism!!!' about; universal health care, paid family time off, fixed rates for medical procedures, heavily subsidized to the point of free child care.
It's not an academic exercise for me. I find this system vastly superior and am frustrated by any and all attempts to make life better for everyday people in the US immediately met with hand wringing.
Remember democratic socialist Bernie Sanders was the mayor of Burlington and they managed to survive!
Bernie's a good guy, or at least he used to be (I'm pretty sure the blackmailers eventually found something on him).
Germany currently arrests journalists for posting memes speaking badly of it's politicians. I'll pass. (There are a bunch of other reasons for passing, including Germany's status as a vassal state of America, with... as of about 2018 or so, more American soldiers in Germany than German ones -- it's hard to evaluate the country's finances when they're busy leeching off of America's military might, and of course the continued war against nuclear power by the Russian-funded Greens).
Agree on the nuclear power problem, but doubt the Greens are funded by the Russians (the AfD, on the other hand, is: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/is-the-afd-funded-by-russia-kkXIKztMRFilyayMSQPbIg). To each their own. I like it here and I'm staying.
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/germany-nuclear-power-russia-putin/
The only competitor to natural gas is nuclear power (use of renewables means the need to burn more natural gas, not less, because they require peaker gas plants which are much less efficient than "stable" natural gas plants that simply provide power, as opposed to "evening out the electrical grid from spikes and dips from wind/solar").
Woke is bad because people hate it, so you can't get elected if you're running with it (and so you can't fix the minimum wage to increase the number of our robot overlords -- I know what it means when the unis want to increase the minimum wage. They want to undercut their competition, and what better way to do it than making Joe McDonalds earn more?).
And if you don't run with woke... well, walk into a bullet, why don't you?
I'd say ending American Slavery is actually pushing for higher pay and better benefits, but that might actually entail agreeing with a fellow.
My point in quoting Al Gharbi wasn't that woke is good. I don't believe that. Just that posts like this one, that attempt to disparage or delegitimise a phenomenon just because it wasn't composed of the correct mix of classes don't really have an argument. John Ganz makes this point here https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/what-it-took-to-win:
'Now, the class stuff needs to be qualified a bit. I’m sure if you’ve seen the infographic from The Times that shows Mamdani doing best among voters making over 100k. This has led to the familiar right-wing attacks on the “luxury beliefs” and the supposed spiritual sanctimony of progressive voters winning out over their material interests. But this is misleading and, in many cases, deliberately propagandistic...Cuomo did well among the very rich and the very poor. Mamdani does well in the middle, which in New York, with its high cost of living, stretches well into the six figures. High-five and six-figure income includes a lot of unionized wage laborers, junior white-collar professionals, and small business owners. Say what you like about their feasibility, the major policy portions of Mamdani’s campaign were about cost-of-living issues, and he targeted a coalition that goes across cultural and racial backgrounds but were all struggling to build decent lives in New York.'
I'm no stats guru, but I suspect the fact that the income graphic Jeff shared used median instead of average makes Jeff's interpretation more plausible.
This seems like a much fairer analysis than OP. Cuomo's average individual donation was $700, as compared to Mamdani's $82. 96% of contributions to Mamdani were small donations; only 51% of Cuomo's were. Cuomo definitely captured the very rich, who would stand to pay more under Mamdani's plans (assuming he could get Albany to pass them).
OP says nothing of the $30 million Cuomo's PAC spending. Also, NY has closed primaries and so the primary sample is limited when you're making broad claims about income level and support.
I don't think it's possible yet to fully interpret how much of Mamdani's votes were an endorsement of his ideology or a rejection of Cuomo and big money.
Small dollar donations are no longer a reliable indicator of what you think they are, not when NGOs routinely lean on their employees to "donate to the cause" (after paying them from government/donated money). I tend to think unions are a lot less successful at this practice.
This seems to be a standard "hypocrite" argument. I don't think that's unwarranted, in this case. You can stand on the side of the "Diamond Age" and say "I really don't think being a hypocrite is the worst sin." (and it's very much not -- compare that with murdering children to satisfy your sexual appetites).
I always feel like socialism is a movement for the broke, not the poor.
Thanks for this one. This seems to a worldwide trend: affluent student goes abroad to prestigious western university, which exists in a market economy country, somehow learns anticapitalist-socialism is the answer and exports bad ideas back home. Now, however, the roosters are fully cooked at home and coming for a city government near you.
I think it's the end result of ivory-tower thinking where ideas cannot be easily checked with reality. The ideas that spread the most are the ones that sound the best, not the ones that work the best. That leads to wild takes that play off our inherent cognitive biases, combined with huge amounts of justification when plans derived from those takes fail.
Socialism sounds great. It works terribly, because nobody acts how socialists want them to act. Meaning socialism either collapses or becomes authoritarian. But it has extremely strong moral arguments, sounds like an amazing utopia, and resonates on an instinctual level. Supply side economics just isn't as easily transmissible of a slogan as "freeze the rent".
This is succinctly put and more or less the core of it. It ignores human action and motivation and assumes that everyone is a hardworking angel who will contribute even if there are no incentives to. Sadly there are enough freeloaders that this doesn't work.
Thanks, Jeff, for calling out Chris Murphy in particular. I can't believe that people are now taking him seriously simply for spouting incoherent economic populism every chance he gets. And, of course, with yesterday's results, it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.
It’s the revolution of the bored “second sons/daughters” of the ultra wealthy. Not working folks as the data seems to show repeatedly.
It’s “eke”.
Reminds me of a favorite joke:
Despite her terrible fear of mice, she opened a pet store and managed to eek out a living.
This is good. Real good. Thank you.
I do have one quibble though. Your point that this outcome, because it is the result of hyper-weird, hyper-progressive urbanites that are localized... well I live in CA in a liberal college town and there is not really any space in views between the non-urban left liberal and these weirdos in the big city. These dopes are all brainwired or brainwashed to sing the same woke collectivist song while casting their ballot. Is Gavin Newsom really much different than Mamdani?
"[P]olitical movements tend to come from the educated upper class because everyone else has too much fucking work to do."
Ain't that God's honest truth.
The real goal is jobs administering the socialist programs.
There's two different meanings of Socialism in play -- there's Socialism, meaning roughly "Marxism," that is as you describe a perennial favorite among college-educated upper quintile social justice enthusiasts; and then there's "Socialism," the word that the right wing uses to malign school lunch programs, Medicaid, and pretty much any use of government funds outside of pork-barrel defense projects and oil drilling subsidies.
The first form, because it exists mostly in the realm of highfalutin theory and indulges in a lot of big, empty promises about the future -- "don't worry, this will all be fixed after the Revolution!" -- is indeed unpopular among the working classes it claims to champion. The second form, exemplified in government social spending programs from the New Deal and to a lesser extent Great Society eras of American government, holds a great deal of appeal for the working classes when it is put into practice. Most Americans who don't have millions socked away for retirement are pretty happy that Social Security exists, for example, in spite of it being labeled "Socialism" when it was created and derided as such ever since by conservatives.
If the working class actually gets something from it, they appreciate it. Even if Fox News or whoever screams that it's Communism. What the working class have shown consistent disdain for is 19th Century pie-in-the-sky.
"Most Americans" no longer believe they're going to get a dime from Social Security. I sure as hell don't. Social Security is gonna be broke before I retire, and they're not going to put the non-existent money back in.
The working class is fundamentally conservative -- Social Security sounds good, because they think they'll get something from it (and when you don't have the money to contribute to your 401k, you -depend- on the government somehow magicking money out of the rest of the world). When they don't... I wouldn't want to be a Boomer then, oh, no.
The only thing I'd add and clarify here is that Trumpist populism has worked in pretty much the same way. There was a pretty prominent narrative that Trump rode a wave of "working class" resentment, but the data suggests he did best with people who were actually higher earners relative to their geography/demography. Maybe the lesson here isn't that socialism will trick your middle income people into thinking they know "class struggle", but rather that middle and higher income people are attracted to revolutionary rhetoric in a way that lower income people aren't because, as Jeff says, they have "too much fucking work to do." And, perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic to the idea that Mamdani represents a true shift. I don't think Cuomo is as intolerant a candidate as many do, and I think he could have done very well if the younger, savvy, and undeniably intelligent Mamdani wasn't running against him. The fact that Mamdani's policy proposals will almost certainly fail, or change substantially... well that's a different story.
Cuomo deliberately got elderly nursing home patients killed. Whether or not you think "that was warranted" or "that was a good plan, implemented poorly" or "failure to adapt to changing circumstances..." changes how you view his governance. I'm a lot more comfortable debating that than the trumped up (sorry, if you have TDS) charges intended to keep Cuomo from running for president.
i think you used “eek” instead of “eke” towards the end there. unless that was a subtle joke, in which case please disregard.
I love this typo, because Mamdani is now the dog that caught the car - “oh, shit, what now? EEEK!”
Pretty sure he'll look less funny than Hamas did, when they caught the car. (Yes, it had a very bad ending, it was still funny at the time).