“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.
> People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
Alright, we'll take your frame, and simply say, "That's not liberalism. that's democracy."
Democracy which was used in quite a few countries to install dictators -- when folks say "No Kings" they ought to do so with an awareness that the US Government has used elections to install cruel, autocratic governments, whose cruelty is not simply to murder the old rulers, but also to murder any homosexuals they can get their hands on. (guess the country!)
Everyone saw it coming. A marxist overthrow pisses people off. The first Trump term had none of this. Aspects of the 2024 coalition are a response to marxists hijacking the 2020 election then spending four years taking a flame thrower to society. People get pissed off when others prosper from violence coupled with lying/cheating/stealing.
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.
Economic opportunity for the average American has eroded as we have allowed our Professional Managerial Class to export it to China and Mexico where those countries have rocketed forward in working class economic benefits at the expense of our own people.
The stupid argument I get from the educated class is that these working-class people just need to get educated to get a good job in the second-tier service economy... the same that is also being killed today with offshoring, automation and AI.
Economic progress is NOT everywhere. The US is nearly $40 trillion in debt, runs a $1.4 trillion dollar per year trade deficit, has declining life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, rocketing homelessness, an opioid epidemic, rising violent and property crime.
Anyone that claims that things are more good than bad and thus we should support the status quo are either intellectually dishonest with their hand in the PMC looter cookier jar or otherwise don't get out much to see the rest of the country from the comfort of their gated exclusive community.
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.
Okay....societal change isn't 100%. Maybe it was very fulfilling knowing how to reshoe a horse and have that connection with a living creature who cares about you and is also a vital part of your life.
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").
Kudos for engaging in a reasoned debate and give and take.
I would only add that those benefits may very well only be possible because they have been de facto subsidized by American defense spending. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the coming decade if Europe is actually required to budget appropriately for national defense.
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.
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 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.
Your historical account of European and South American socialism is enormously incorrect. Until the emergence of educational polarization and new social movements in the 1970s, Social-Democratic and Communist parties in Europe overwhelmingly had their base in the industrial working class. In France today, many working class towns that vote for Le Pen still have Communist mayors! In Latin America, the base of MAS, PT, MORENA, and many other socialist and left-populist parties lie in the poor. Even in the United States, the Socialist Party at its 1910s height was primarily a working class organization, which can be seen in Hillquit's 1917 campaign for mayor of New York and so on. The DSA and other socialist organizations in the west have an enormous problem at their center: extreme positions on cultural issues that drive polarization on educational lines. If anything, Mamdani's (insufficient) moderation from "the NYPD is anti-queer" to "I will not defund the police" explains his overperformance relative to other progressive campaigns among working class voters. The cultural libertarian radicalism among western socialist parties is a recent phenomenon, and when reversed - as in the case of the Social Democrats in Denmark - socialist parties can maintain a position of relative political hegemony with mass support.
Also frankly, the PMC are a class with genuine economic interests, as the Ehrenreichs observed. The idea that accountants making 70k a year and paying 3k/month in rent in Bushwick are 'elites' with an aristocratic character is absurd - especially given the funding apparatus and political machine behind Cuomo's campaign. Surely, by any standard, Bill Ackman and NYC Democratic Party bosses are more 'elite' than the average DSA member...
Yep. Mamdani definitely represents primarily urban educated people, many of whom are youngish and have their own sets of especially economic/financial grievances.
These are rooted in a generation or more of economic policy based in ‘unfettered’ competition, which has meant a ‘gig’ economy without provision for essential health and welfare benefits, career tracks, affordable housing, and devoid of worker protections even for the aspiring college educated worker.
Of course, these are the same basic economic issues that non-college-educated working class voters have experienced, except the latter don’t have parents with stores of savings, home equity, or inherited wealth to see them through tough times.
So, Mamdani was elected by educated voters but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t represent the interests of a far greater array of voters that have common interests in ‘making it in America.’
If memory serves me well, "progressive" replaced "liberal" sometime in the 80s as "liberal" had taken on a negative reaction and Democrats wanted to distance themselves from that connotation and started referring to themselves as progressives instead. Time passes and words change context once again.
AI is pushed by PMC globalists. corporate tech nerds and Wall Street... all that want Universal Basic Income and a two-class society where they, the PMC globalists tech nerds and Wall Street, can bank trillions instead of billions while the rest get just enough to survive.
AI will fuel more of this radical socialist youth vote as their fake laptop jobs evaporate.
The lost irony for these upset over-educated, under-employed upper class kids voting against the corrupt corporatist system for socialism, is that unlike MAGA voters that are also aligned in opposition to the corrupt corporatist system, the little upper class cretins previously voted to support and strengthen that system that they now vote to oppose.
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?
> People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
I'd say continually denying the results of an election and then ransacking the Capitol over it might be a tiny example.
Alright, we'll take your frame, and simply say, "That's not liberalism. that's democracy."
Democracy which was used in quite a few countries to install dictators -- when folks say "No Kings" they ought to do so with an awareness that the US Government has used elections to install cruel, autocratic governments, whose cruelty is not simply to murder the old rulers, but also to murder any homosexuals they can get their hands on. (guess the country!)
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.
Everyone saw it coming. A marxist overthrow pisses people off. The first Trump term had none of this. Aspects of the 2024 coalition are a response to marxists hijacking the 2020 election then spending four years taking a flame thrower to society. People get pissed off when others prosper from violence coupled with lying/cheating/stealing.
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.
Economic opportunity for the average American has eroded as we have allowed our Professional Managerial Class to export it to China and Mexico where those countries have rocketed forward in working class economic benefits at the expense of our own people.
The stupid argument I get from the educated class is that these working-class people just need to get educated to get a good job in the second-tier service economy... the same that is also being killed today with offshoring, automation and AI.
Economic progress is NOT everywhere. The US is nearly $40 trillion in debt, runs a $1.4 trillion dollar per year trade deficit, has declining life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, rocketing homelessness, an opioid epidemic, rising violent and property crime.
Anyone that claims that things are more good than bad and thus we should support the status quo are either intellectually dishonest with their hand in the PMC looter cookier jar or otherwise don't get out much to see the rest of the country from the comfort of their gated exclusive community.
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.
Okay....societal change isn't 100%. Maybe it was very fulfilling knowing how to reshoe a horse and have that connection with a living creature who cares about you and is also a vital part of your life.
I'd rather have a Kia.
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").
Kudos for engaging in a reasoned debate and give and take.
I would only add that those benefits may very well only be possible because they have been de facto subsidized by American defense spending. It will be very interesting to see what happens in the coming decade if Europe is actually required to budget appropriately for national defense.
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 always feel like socialism is a movement for the broke, not the poor.
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.
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 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.
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).
Your historical account of European and South American socialism is enormously incorrect. Until the emergence of educational polarization and new social movements in the 1970s, Social-Democratic and Communist parties in Europe overwhelmingly had their base in the industrial working class. In France today, many working class towns that vote for Le Pen still have Communist mayors! In Latin America, the base of MAS, PT, MORENA, and many other socialist and left-populist parties lie in the poor. Even in the United States, the Socialist Party at its 1910s height was primarily a working class organization, which can be seen in Hillquit's 1917 campaign for mayor of New York and so on. The DSA and other socialist organizations in the west have an enormous problem at their center: extreme positions on cultural issues that drive polarization on educational lines. If anything, Mamdani's (insufficient) moderation from "the NYPD is anti-queer" to "I will not defund the police" explains his overperformance relative to other progressive campaigns among working class voters. The cultural libertarian radicalism among western socialist parties is a recent phenomenon, and when reversed - as in the case of the Social Democrats in Denmark - socialist parties can maintain a position of relative political hegemony with mass support.
Also frankly, the PMC are a class with genuine economic interests, as the Ehrenreichs observed. The idea that accountants making 70k a year and paying 3k/month in rent in Bushwick are 'elites' with an aristocratic character is absurd - especially given the funding apparatus and political machine behind Cuomo's campaign. Surely, by any standard, Bill Ackman and NYC Democratic Party bosses are more 'elite' than the average DSA member...
Yep. Mamdani definitely represents primarily urban educated people, many of whom are youngish and have their own sets of especially economic/financial grievances.
These are rooted in a generation or more of economic policy based in ‘unfettered’ competition, which has meant a ‘gig’ economy without provision for essential health and welfare benefits, career tracks, affordable housing, and devoid of worker protections even for the aspiring college educated worker.
Of course, these are the same basic economic issues that non-college-educated working class voters have experienced, except the latter don’t have parents with stores of savings, home equity, or inherited wealth to see them through tough times.
So, Mamdani was elected by educated voters but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t represent the interests of a far greater array of voters that have common interests in ‘making it in America.’
Exactly !
If memory serves me well, "progressive" replaced "liberal" sometime in the 80s as "liberal" had taken on a negative reaction and Democrats wanted to distance themselves from that connotation and started referring to themselves as progressives instead. Time passes and words change context once again.
And now it seems liberal is cool again 😆
Funny that, eh? Time heals all wounds , even the self inflicted ones.
The "proletariat" knows that AI is coming for their jobs. They're hoping the actual proletariat will do something about it.
AI is pushed by PMC globalists. corporate tech nerds and Wall Street... all that want Universal Basic Income and a two-class society where they, the PMC globalists tech nerds and Wall Street, can bank trillions instead of billions while the rest get just enough to survive.
AI will fuel more of this radical socialist youth vote as their fake laptop jobs evaporate.
The lost irony for these upset over-educated, under-employed upper class kids voting against the corrupt corporatist system for socialism, is that unlike MAGA voters that are also aligned in opposition to the corrupt corporatist system, the little upper class cretins previously voted to support and strengthen that system that they now vote to oppose.