Give them a vision

Zohran Mamdani, democratic socialist, won the Democratic NY primary last week. Unsurprisingly, this instantly triggered all the Islamophobe bigots on the right wing, including Charlie Kirk (“What’s happening in New York City is an insurgency against the West.”), Laura Loomer (“NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0.”), Vickie Paladino, an NYC council member and Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogle (as someone said online, he’d be outraged if NYC officials started lecturing Tennessee about who should be in office).

As I’ve written about elsewhere, the bigots consider all Muslims liable for 9/11 in a way they’d never consider, say, all white people liable for America’s history of lynching. Plus he favors free daycare and other programs that would actually help non-billionaires and for a lot of right-wing (and some non-right-wing) jackholes that’s unAmerican.

You’d think that a young liberal popular enough to beat sexual harassing shitbag Andrew Cuomo — a man who had a rep, lots of money and political connections — would be good news for Democrats. According to the Associated Press it’s “a serious setback in their quest to broaden Democrats’ appeal and move past the more controversial policies thatt alienated would-be voters in recent elections.” With the exception of Bernie Sanders, everyone interviewed says Mamdani’s radicalism will sink the party, not just in New York but everywhere.

As Oliver Willis says on BlueSky, “the Mamdani thing is showing you how limited the range of acceptable opinions actually is in America. republicans can be a stone’s throw away from endorsing genocide and thats fine but one guy goes slightly to the left of dem party orthodoxy and we’re right in the middle of Soviet Russia” Which may be the reason Hakeem Jeffries’ response to Mamdani winning and drawing lots of new, young voters out is to criticize his politics. A rabbi offers some perspective.

As I blogged about recently, the media tends to define election issues on Republican terms. Gore was inauthentic and a liar, whereas Yale-educated rich kid George W. Bush was an authentic Texas farmer and man of the soil. In 2004, draft-dodger W was the brilliant war leader; John Kerry was the guy who faked his injuries to get a purple heart. In 2016 it was emails, in 2024 it was trans people, violent crime (never mind that it was at record lows) and supposed record-setting inflation.

Beyond that, the media also sides with the centrists within the party. They represent more money, a lot of them have been around longer and they fall within the media’s Overton Window: they’re not going to shake things up too much or disturb the social hierarchy. To paraphrase Brazilian Arcbishop Dom Helder Camara, they might give the poor more bread but they won’t ask why the poor don’t have any bread. And many centrists are against all that icky identity politics stuff: they may not like Republican policies on gays, women or immigrants but they don’t want to stand up and oppose them.

And if a lot of voters happen to have bigoted ideas about gender or race? Well we need to respect those views to win them over. Never mind that the working class includes blacks, gays, trans people and women, we should throw them under the bus to win back white, working class men. Jacobin and Erik Loomis (who is not a centrist) make a similar argument: Republicans win over people with traditional concepts of masculinity (among other unpalatable attitudes). To win, we have to “meet the people where they are at.” Which is the same thing some Democrats have tried for years — compromise on abortion and “culture war” issues and they can win over the right-wing working class!

Only it’s never worked and then we wind up with people wondering why Dems don’t have clear principles. While a lot of Democrats are fighting FOTUS, a lot would sooner lash out against the left than the right wing. Or frown disapprovingly on Republican behavior without the discomfort of opposing it.

Maybe Mamdani won’t win. Maybe he won’t be effective. But he stands for things (free day care, opposing Israel’s genocide against Palestine) that would make people’s lives better. He’s envisioning something better than we have now. We need more of that.

Tangential to that, here’s a quote from Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, courtesy of slacktivist: “The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”