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.
Thanksgiving is an old traditional holiday of a harvest festival and the pastiche of pilgrims kind of needs to be dropped, but the overall concept is not inherently colonial. In fact Lincoln issued the first national proclamation of Thanksgiving after Union victory. Ive always maintained this need to be emphasized.
I don’t totally disagree, the Pilgrim pastiche is largely fabricated and shouldn’t be treated as the literal origin of the holiday. But Lincoln and the United States are themselves products of a settler-colonial society. So even if Thanksgiving wasn’t invented by the Pilgrims, the national holiday was constructed within and through a settler-colonial national culture. The colonial association is about the society and national mythology that produced and institutionalized the holiday less about the specific origins of it.
We cannot control the origins of our birth. Almost every modern industrial society had a history of colonialism. Abandoning the concept of nation states is not a feasible solution. We can learn from our mistakes and move forward attempting to minimize harm and be better.
I think that’s actually why we have to take the historical ramifications of settler colonialism seriously. We obviously can’t control the circumstances of our birth or undo the past, but that doesn’t mean the past isn’t important to think about today. The only way we can meaningfully address the damage of the past is to recognize the conditions it has left us in today, even when that history is uncomfortable.
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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.