Mayors such as New York’s Zohran Mamdani show leftwing ideology can go hand-in-hand with effective governance
A trio of Democratic socialist victories in mayoral contests in three of the largest cities in the US has unleashed a new wave of hope on the left of the party. Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson took office in New York and Seattle, respectively, this year. Janeese Lewis George is set to follow in Washington DC.
As momentum around leftwing candidates appears to build, focus will turn to Los Angeles over the coming months, where another member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will attempt to continue this winning streak.
The common criticism of democratic socialism is that its proponents put their ideological interests before matters of effective governance. But after a string of high-profile wins, supporters are hopeful that Mamdani and others will prove the two can go hand-in-hand.
It’s not just messaging, they really are getting stuff done.
How despicable of them! They’re just doing that to make honest, hard-working oligarchy patsies look bad.
Meanwhile Jeffries is literally on record stating he’s fighting for the Democratic party.
Not American people. Not his constituents. “His” party.
Mamdani has a lot of explaining to do on how he’s going to reconcile things with his party, he said.
It is beautiful to see competent people getting heaps of stuff done.
Jeffries and Schumer are shitting down the sides of their legs over the prospect of Democrats possibly doing anything useful for Americans.
As a European, I will never understand how, having primary elections, this hasn’t happened decades ago.
It’s because most Primaries are carefully controlled by the party leaders. Yes, there are requirements that are open and technically anyone with the correct paperwork/signatures/whatever else can run. But the people who control the two major parties locally have a lot of influence, and can make the job easier for theor preferred candidates.
Combine this with a dynamic where most general elections are already decided for one party or another, and this means the general election is basically a formality. In Congressional elections, you have gerrymandering that ensures that districts are drawn to drive certain results. But even in these Mayoral elections, you have the same problem because Republicans have abandoned the cities, and most cities here lean Democratic.
You might ask about third parties, but our FPTP system screws them over, too. There is just enough influence from the minority party to mean that a third-party bid that takes 25% of the vote might just hand the election to the minority major party, making all that effort on the part of the 3rd party counterproductive.
Our 2 party system is not formalized in any document. It is a result of how our electoral systems are structured. But that makes it even harder to reform, because we have to reform lots of little things (and a few big things) all at once.
The Republicans didn’t abandon cities so much as living in cities require living with rules that are made to make things better for everyone. This requires governing. The Republicans didn’t abandon cities, they abandoned governing.
There is lots of money in politics here in capitalism land, and unfortunately propaganda works. It very much works :(
It works so fucking much.
Because the wealthy used their capital to seize the means of democracy. The same thing is happening across every liberal “democracy”, with varying degrees of success.
Education.
Corrupt politicians siphon money away from public education to create an manipulatable class to consume their propaganda.
They own all of the means of communication, so they make sure everyone is consuming, by and large, the same shit.
They hedge the bet that enough people are dumb enough to keep listening to them.
Because most larger elections are decided by the Electoral College. Which is separate from the popular vote, yet holds more power/sway for a candidate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College
The has nothing to do with these local races and the reason why it hasn’t happened more often is exactly what happened during mamdani’s run; dems undermined him at every turn and republicans pushed support for his opponents. The uniparty threw everything they had at him, and normally that works.
Like with the Platner controversies, it sort of seems like people are wising up to the bullshit and voting for the candidate anyways, against the wishes and efforts of the party. Normally that amount of coordinated repression has a significant effect. The ad money alone is normally enough to bury a campaign; sprinkle a hint of scandal and most up-and-coming campaigns fail. For some reason, now, it’s just not working
Yeah I guess they figure that the scandals don’t matter for Trump so they may as well not matter for the guy that’s gonna do good stuff for them
Electoral college is only for the prez/vp ticket
I didn’t know that much. I guess I misunderstood the wiki article. Thank you for clarifying that for me.
Who knew that actually doing the job and serving the people that elected you would result in a positive results?!
… that the people want done.
