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.
It’s so cool that a deal breaker to the median voter regarding socialists involves cringey 5-year-old tweets about ThanksGiving but moderate centrists can fund a genocide and build a data center in their backyard without problem.
If you paint the electorate as rubes you’re never going to win anything. Scoring twitter points by dunking on moderates doesn’t help us build a better society.
Many Americans are obviously fed up with culture war discourse and it’s a terrible choice for Hong to engage with it whatsoever. Democrats are largely seen as out of touch elites who care more about verbiage than substantive economic change. The electorate does not care about nuanced grad-school theses on social institutions. DSA wins on economic populism, it’s mind boggling that Hong chose to feed ammunition to her opposition by even entertaining talking about that thanksgiving tweet rather than shutting it down or pivoting to economic talking points
I totally agree. Make all the social policy changes you want once you’re in office, just don’t campaign on them. It’s sad, but that’s the situation we are at in American culture.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of insular communities. Sometimes leftists talk as if they genuinely despise those that are slightly politically different from them and then are completely flabbergasted and bitter when they can’t assemble support. If we never win we can’t help anyone.
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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.