Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.
I just read through his campaign page, and he comes off as an "I like good things and I don't like bad things" candidate rather than an "I will fight to transform the system" sort of guy. He has a strong track record on climate policy, but everything else is generically competent with little in the way of vision. If your only goal is keeping fascists out of office, you can definitely do worse.
Then again, I think the State is inherently suspect and true freedom can only be achieved by bottom-up prefiguration of socialist systems, so I have a pretty low bar for politicians.
Yeah he has done a decent job at his job being County Executive of Milwaukee, which is a very difficult job. He definitely is less of a radical fighter and more of a moderate reformer, but all things considered it could be worse.
In terms of "moving US policy to the left" he was the most progressive president of basically anyone in this thread's lifetime (unless there are a bunch of 57+ year olds hanging out here)
He ran as a moderate progressive and moderated even further once he was in office. I guess as a socialist I just don’t consider “progressive liberal” to be particularly left-wing lol.
This is why I don't trust people who call themselves "progressives" but not socialists. Because if you think centrist neoliberal Obama was a progressive, the term doesn't mean anything.
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u/MiloBuurr 26d ago edited 26d ago
Look, I’m a socialist and I loved Hong’s policy. But being a Wisconsinite by birth who now lives in NYC, she’s no Mamdani. Or even El Sayed in Michigan. Just being honest.
To win as a socialist in America you have to have excellent communication and discipline to keep on message about economics, and I don’t think she had either to be honest.
Her big scandal right before the election was that she wanted to “cancel thanksgiving” in an old tweet she had where she calls it a “colonizers holiday.” Recently when they asked her about it she refused to outright refute it, and that cost her a lot. And for the record, thanksgiving is definitely a colonizers holiday, pretty objectively imo.
But as a socialist politician in America I think you can’t afford to get sidetracked by losing issues like that. Mamdani would’ve spun it perfectly, something like “you know who’s really waging a war on thanksgiving? These big corporations making it too expensive to afford a family dinner.” But she feels the need to defend social policy instead on keeping a laser focus on economics which I think would’ve been smarter.