[00:00:15] Speaker A: Dick Flax here with the podcast we call Talking Strategy, Making History.
Daraka is back with us. And we're going to spend the next episode, the one that we're doing right now, we're going to focus on the recent elections, particularly the Mamdani campaign in New York. What all these things mean. I think we both want to go a bit deeper in depth and with a broader historical context in understanding these results than what you might be finding online or on the media. That's what we hope for.
And Daraka has been already saying some things on his Facebook feed. And one thing you said, and welcome back, Daraka, was that you were excited to be teaching about Michael Harrington on the very day after Mamdani remarkable victory. So why that conjunction hit you is maybe a good place to get started.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Great. Well, it's great to be back. And yeah. So I mean, first off, just for listeners who don't know, Michael Harrington was a writer, organizer, activist, public intellectual who, you know, did most of his work in the second half of the 20th century and passed away, unfortunately in 1989. And he was sort of two very relevant points.
First, the founding leader and figurehead of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is, you know, the organization that in a, some might say much transformed or at least reinvigorated form, played a huge role in Mamdani's victory and nationwide acts as a sometimes problematic but sometimes quite effective left force in democratic politics. And then secondly, that he was the author of a book, very important book, the Other America, which was an expose of persistent and structural poverty in the United States that undermined our self image as the affluent society and as a society that had solved the economic question, the basic economic questions of production after World War II. And that book was very influential, both in terms of stoking a conversation about poverty and inequality, but also directly on the Kennedy and especially Johnson administrations and as a kind of justification or motivation for the war on poverty. So. So anyway, that's just the backdrop. I'm teaching a class on poverty and wealth in the United States, and we're reading the Other America, and we happen to be doing the kind of like intro lecture discussion about Harrington as a writer and the context of the book on the day that Mamdani was elected. And I think if you want to maybe say something about the role that Harrington played in the transition from the old Left to the New Left that you were, know, very much a part of, if you want to add that.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Before I, I. Yeah, because I assume part of what you meant when you said that that was an interesting convergence teaching about him on this very day is that he would have been quite excited and happy to see this particular election result.
And part of the reason, not only is a democratic socialist among his other attributes, Mamdani remarkably becoming mayor as a avowed and committed and open democratic socialist, which rarely has happened in American politics, but that this was the very kind of political activity that Harrington was devoted to trying to encourage among socialists among people on the left. The long standing avenue of expression politically on the socialist left in, in this country tended to be let's create our own party, let's oppose the two party system.
Harrington realized, and this is sort of fundamental to both you and my political thinking, that that so called third party perspective was a kind of dead end, but it was possible to build a majoritarian politics that was rooted in the socialist tradition and that that should be attempted. And here we finally have, decades after Michael first started to write about that, really a vindication of that strategy, at least in New York, at least at this moment, and by the DSA in particular in New York, which is. Mamdani not only identifies with dsa, we've had other politicians do that. He's avowedly carrying forward the project that he identifies with at least his, the kind of people that he works with in, within the DSA kind of framework.
And part of what we, you and I have commented on this before on this podcast.
ESA helped build this remarkable grassroots organization. Mamdani people were claiming that during the general election something like 100,000 people were volunteering, which is truly remarkable and which I don't think is necessarily an exaggeration at all because I think the evidence from every kind of evidence videos, as well as the election people's enthusiasm for him is beyond anything that I really am aware of in recent history for a politician and for a political campaign. It wasn't just, well, let's, let's, let's.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Put a pin in that because I don't think that if you thought about it for a while, you would necessarily hold to that because I think there are some parallels to, at least to Obama, also to Bernie, but more importantly, like you nailed it, that you know, Harrington is very much associated with the political strategy of transformation of the Democratic Party and building a strong socialist wing of it. And you know, not for nothing, the sort of national DSA and the factions in politics that are, you know, political tendencies that control the national organization, they don't like that politics. They have rejected it. And in fact, I mean going back to really the birth of Jacobean as a magazine.
Other things going on that we've heard from from David and others about the politics in dsa. There was a explicit and implicit moving away from Harrington's politics and a more an ambivalence about the Democratic Party. And now what we're seeing are all these, like, exciting victories. Mamdani. But also, I mean, it's a DSA mayor of Chicago facing down Trump as we speak. We've got AOC and the increasingly savvy and influential Left bloc in Congress. And then there's DSA folks in city governments and even state legislatures around the country. And as far as I know, even at the local level, like, even where there's nonpartisan elections, all of these electoral successes are folks who are running as Democrats or who are Democrats.
And so the fact that Mamdani is really clear about being a Democratic socialist without apology, and also a Democrat and the Democratic nominee for mayor, and now in terms of New York Democratic politics, like a very powerful figure as the mayor of New York. So, yeah, so Harrington would have been ecstatic, I think, about this, and not also because it's in New York. And he was an adoptive, but very much a New Yorker and very engaged in New York politics and New York political life. So, yeah, so it was fun to be able to tell that story to students, to young people today about Harrington, about the project of injecting socialist politics into American liberal politics with this, like, exciting example in the news that, you know, all of my students were very happy about.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: And so one thing that annoyed me, listening to NPR and other, you know, places where the election was being interpreted and in some of the newspaper coverage and online responses, is nothing new for me. I'm often annoyed by what I call the shallowness of analysis.
And I thought I would like to get just for a second or two, some things off my chest about that part of what I mean by shallowness. There's an increasingly, to me, annoying tendency for the journalistic way of interpreting politics to talk about left, right and center, as if that was a way of understanding people's votes, that there's a left and there's a right and there's a center in the mass electorate, and people are moving in one direction or another, assuming that there's this ideological spectrum, and of course, there is an ideological spectrum, but most people, and I say this on the base of my extensive career as a. As a. As a social psychological researcher in political behavior, most people are not on that spectrum in any clear way. And to Think that the way to understand what is going on in simply left, right and center dynamics and who's winning the left or the right or the center or which is the correct place to stand if you want to get elected. All of that has only limited to me analytic value and it actually blocks a deeper understanding of political behavior. We don't have time for me to attempt to lecture boringly about what I think the right way is. But I rather think that people's voting behavior should, should start with the idea that they're trying to.
Most many people are trying to vote what they take to be their interests and it isn't. That may be odd because it looks like people are not voting for their interests when for example, working class people vote on what are called cultural rather than economic issues.
So that's where I wanted to sort of start here. I think that a portion of the Trump vote in 2024 and even before that of particularly working class voters was a protest vote. It wasn't about endorsing very much what Trump stood for, if he stands for anything in people's minds. It was a way of protesting and protesting the failure of the Democratic Party campaigning to speak to them or speak to their interests. And the reason I say that is because many people of that who I would interpret as having voted for Trump in the past seem to have voted in the various elections we're talking about, New Jersey and Virginia, for example, they voted for the Democratic candidate in ways that were under predicted by, by the polls.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: And I right, like in, in, in Virginia I think it was that all the voting districts shifted towards the Democrats.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: So even in red areas they won the state legislature.
In Pennsylvania, there was a remarkable overwhelming vote for the re election of Democratic Supreme Court judges. In Pennsylvania campaign, the Republicans spent a lot of money trying to overturn those people's reelection. In California, the results for Prop 50 were enormously surprising given that when the the thing was first proposed by Newsom, it was sort of barely going to win. What I think is going on is that people the protest vote for Trump worked. It actually was a rational way to vote because what people in a way were saying, hey, listen to us, look at us, see us.
And the result was that's what has happened.
The whole discussion after 24 about working class voters and what their interests were and so forth.
And strikingly in Virginia, the Republican candidate for governor, she ran on an anti trans advertising campaign that totally flopped and they spent a huge amount of money, as I understand it, on those kind of ads. And that's surprising because big deal was made in 24 about effective anti trans advertising killing Harris. Well, if we remember what that Harris ad, the anti Harris ad that everyone refers to, what it said was she cares about them, Trump cares about you. It wasn't simply an anti trans ad, although it's tried to appeal to that sentiment, but it really was about that very slogan, the actual meaning of it. Who cares about you?
People may have voted for Trump, not being sure cared about them, but they probably some people voted for Trump then as did working class voters in England vote for Brexit as protest against the failure of the party that says there. For them to have actually reflected their needs and their interests in their programs and in their campaigning anyway, that's to me a better explanation or better lead to finding an explanation than left, right shifting or simply high prices. High prices definitely mattered. Mamdani's genius in running his campaign was to start by asking working people and he personally went door to door, I believe.
What are the economic issues? What are the issues? The bread and butter issues that you're concerned with, the thing he things he ran on, freezing rents, free buses and childcare and subsidized grocery stuff that all came out of the direct linkage that he was able to make with what and his campaign was able to make with what people were saying were their were the actual problems they were experiencing.
So there's no doubt that the cost of living and the so called affordability issue is very important and it's very important to many different kinds of people precarious in many different ways, including the educated working class as well as the less educated working class. And Mamdani I think picked up on all of that. But I would say it's superficial to say it's only about high prices. This was a repudiation of Trump across the United States. And I think that's something a hypothesis to keep working on that people understand.
That's what I think. The Prop 50, Prop 50 wasn't about prices at all. It was about stopping Trump. That was no for sure.
I saw some, a very interesting thing that MSNBC did the night of the election.
There were huge lines of people after the polls closed in California. There were still a lot of people online waiting to vote after 8 o' clock and the polls had closed. And if they were online, they were going to be able to vote. And so they went up the line and asked people why they were standing online for this. And people said things that to me amazed me. One guy said we're voting for Our freedom here, this is what we're voting for.
Well, that's about democracy, that's about authoritarianism, that's about the fascist threat. And I think maybe we all underestimate the degree to which there are many people, ordinary folks who are not politically active on a day to day level, but are actually thinking pretty much the way we would hope they would think, but assume they don't have the time to think. But maybe they do have the time to think.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: We'll see because. Hold on, Dick, hold on, hold on. Because the, I agree that people, the horse race frame that the media likes, like has to put everything into, obscures a lot of what's going on. And I think that there's also a tendency on like across the political spectrum to try to read as much as we can out of, you know, off cycle elections because they're more interesting than polls for getting a temperature check or trying to really about trying to predict or game out future elections. Right. A lot of this framing is about like, well, what's going to happen then in the midterms, what's going to happen the next presidential. And a lot of that, yeah, is speculative and stupid. But I think we have to be careful in both directions. We have to be careful about getting too optimistic from these results either because what we, we don't have a test, a true test out of this election of like where Trump's base is and where a lot of Republican voters are in states where they are in the majority. What we saw was a series of blue states have elections in which like their side, the, the Republican side was unmotivated, didn't do tons of turnout and got beat and, and, and for sure some subset of the electorate moving over like, like I voted for Trump, I went to the Democrats because I'm mad at Trump because he didn't deliver these things or whatever. I mean, an open question of like what exactly motivated them. And I think you're, you're on, you're totally right that there's, there was soft support for Trump that was about protest and anger and, and disillusionment with the Democrats.
And those people seem to be from this election up for grabs. So. But more than that, I wouldn't, yeah. I wouldn't speculate based on like the votes in places like New Jersey and New York and California or even Virginia.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Thank you for reining in my romanticism, which is just.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Anyway, so let's focus on Mamdani because this is so remarkable for, for people, people like you and me and many other People on the left. I'm not romanticizing to say this.
It is truly remarkable that in the largest Jewish city in the world, a Muslim was elected mayor. And not only a Muslim, but a Muslim who was outspoken and principled in his critique of Israel. He apparently, at least a third of the Jewish voters in New York voted, voted for Mamdani. And that is a very important thing generationally, for those of us who care about what's happening to being Jewish in America. So that's one piece. The second is a. Oh, he's not just.
I mean, Dinkins was a previous mayor who actually was a DSA member, but nobody paid any attention to the fact that that was.
Was true of him. This is not just a guy who identifies with dsa. He came up politically through that avenue. And it's not the DSA connection that's I want to emphasize. It's that he says, I am, as you put it before, and this is really important. I am a Democratic socialist, and I am also a Democrat. I don't think I've heard that formulation quite as clearly as he has made it. He's. He's actually, I felt very good, and I may assume you do, too, because it validates the stance that you and I tend to take on where to be politically and what, what the political struggle is. He's saying, we Democratic socialists can claim the right to be in the Democratic Party, and they claim the right to try to change the Democratic Party. And that's exactly what this is all about. But the thing that. So now the question is, what. And he surprised me, actually, in his victory speech and so forth, by emphasizing his intention to deliver on the promises that were made.
There's, you know, always legitimate questions of how things that, that involve cutting into the way the profit system in the market economy works and challenging that. How, how effective can that be?
How much can he deliver? But he stressed wanting to being able to deliver.
So I, I wanted to spend a little time, if we could, trying to begin to unpack what that might mean. And I want to start with a couple of things just because. And then turn it over to you.
But the New York Times, one of the few really good journalistic services they did about Mamdani was after the election, they wrote a piece on the fact that he had spent time in the campaign talking to Wall street types and other elite corporate types who were opposed to him, including Blumberg.
Blumberg spent $5 million defeating Mumduck. But Mamdani sat down with him. I'm very impressed with that. Ability of Mamdani to do that because it was clear from the story that the fact that he did that blunted their ang. Their insanely, almost mindless anger at his being successful. They had to admit that the guy was able to sit down with them and listen to them and talk to them.
And I think he benefits by the way personally from the fact that he comes from this pretty elite background. His mother is one of the leading film directors coming out of India.
You know, they're a family of means. He has that history so he's comfortable in talking to people I would say of every, of every class level. And that's not it seems like maybe a minor thing, but I don't think so at this point.
Tell you a little story here that when that my good friend Stanley Sheinbaum was a very wealthy LA progressive and he was a friend of Papandreou, Andres Papandreou, who was the socialist elected prime minister of Greece and Shimam had worked hard on getting that to be possible.
And as soon as Papandreou was elected, Sheinbaum was assigned the job of talking to international bankers.
Not to tell them they need, they should give Papandreou a chance.
In other words, it was felt right away that the need there has to be a way of getting some kind of modus for Bendi or I don't know what corporate proper term would be with ruling elites if you're going to challenge their power. It's not that I'm super happy with this but Mamdani seems to be able to do this pretty well. That's one point I wanted to get, get on the table but the more important thing is can, how can he deliver on what he is achieving? And I was just. I want to bring this back to you because you're the father, a parent of a two year old baby. Childcare is an important feature of your daily management of life. And here he is promising universal child care from infancy through I don't know what age, 5 years old or whatever for the people of New York and including playing a professional wage, a school teacher level wage to child care workers.
Now the estimated price of this is about $6 billion a year. But he has a way of paying for it, which is a 2% tax on everyone earning over $1 million a year. It's amazing how much money you can get out of a small number of people that way.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Well, it's not so small a number in New York.
[00:25:28] Speaker A: Well, that's right. So to me this, if this could be really Instituted. It's a major transformational reform in American daily life, I think. And I'm not the father of babies like you are, so that's part of what I was hoping you'd comment on. One thing I learned from reading something today. There's a long history in New York, dating back to the beginning of the Depression, of publicly financed childcare being a feature of life in New York.
And that was really intensified during the. During World War II, when there was a national security interest in getting women freed up to work and, you know, work when the men were in the army and all that. And some of that survived quite a bit after the war down to the present day. But it's not universal, it's not adequate, but at least there's a foundation in the city for this, so I'll stop there. And given the multiple things you might have to say about just that one reform. But people are assuming that's a monumental thing. But actually it's extremely popular.
And he has the good benefit of having the governor, who is not fond of raising taxes on the wealthy, but she does claim to favor the same goal of universal childcare.
So that's. Why don't we talk a little about that, if you want, if you can.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Well, let me back up to say, you know, I don't know what the. These conversations were with the Wall street guys. You certainly do have to have them if you're mayor of New York, and better him than me. And it is. There is a whole aspect of being, especially an executive elected official in the United States, that you have to have a whole set of interpersonal skills, abilities to communicate with opponents and enemies and so forth. And it does really seem, at least so far, that this. He's got it. He's got those goods. He's got those. That skill set, which is nice. Right. It's. It's one of my big critiques of American politics is, like, how much we rely on politicians to have totally contradictory skill sets.
And every once in a while, you do find them, you know, principled, good at mobilizing voters, strategic, charismatic, and a good policy mind. Maybe a law degree. Like all those things that we pile on that we expect people to. Yeah. Just have. Yeah. It's a big problem. So I agree with that a lot. And then, you know, his choice of issues of policy focuses, you know, like Bernie's, I think, back in, say in 2016 especially, you know, reveal a kind of genius and the kind of. One of the most basic pathologies of American politics at once the genius is that they are choosing issues that require the government to like, confront the market, to confront capitalism, to open up, you know, space in our imagination that markets aren't the end all, be all of everything and shouldn't run everything. So they're, they're really helpful, useful, strategic, structural in that sense and as exactly as you said, also like extremely popular, extremely beneficial to people's daily lives, which is something to then build on and you know, push back on right wing control over the narratives.
So yeah, universal childcare is right in that wheelhouse. And you know, as I've said before, yeah, being a parent has, if anything, driven me to the left or just, you know, reinforced all the reasons that I'm a socialist and believe in supporting people's providing for fundamental needs out of our social wealth, our collective wealth, because the expectation of on parents like continue to be in the phase of their life where they're earning money for retirement and contributing to society and running shit and being a manager, moving up in their careers or whatever, plus tending for, you know, these like wonderful but totally needy little beings.
What the burden that it places on parents, especially mothers, in order to just do basic social reproduction is just one of the big cruelties of capitalism. And anything that we can do to go in and alleviate that a bit, it's just huge.
So, yeah, it's a great thing. It's a great fight to pick right off of the bat and one that hopefully can be unifying for the Democratic Party in New York.
And then that gets to the like, why it's a, it shows like our pathologies and why we're, you know, why having a socialist flank in our politics is just so healthy, which is that we, part of American exceptionalism is believing that things that are totally possible are impossible. Part of the neoliberal turn, if you will, or the just the abandonment of like New Deal optimism or Great Society.
Audacity has been like a Democratic Party that doesn't believe in left wing or, you know, progressive economic ideas, like just doesn't defend them, doubts them. And so, so what that means is even though we're the party that built the New Deal, that is full of popular, successful programs, full of policies that we, we, we fight to defend every day, or at least what's left of them.
Like we're afraid to propose new ones.
Like somehow we think history froze at some point in time. We built a welfare state, we built some workers rights institutions, we should keep them around. But like any kind of expansion or new thing is just met with all kinds of Skepticism. So if we do universal health care, it has to be riddled with market nonsense and be this overly complicated stupidity that was Obamacare. If we like the, the idea, yeah, so the idea of like providing child care that's good, that's professional, that's not low wage and like not a social dumping ground the way that healthcare has become, or elder care, like the idea that, that's bizarre and radical and you know, impossible. That's on us. That's just so absurd because of course it isn't. Of course it's not. Of course, course it's achievable. Of course the center of global wealth in the world can afford to take care of its children. It's just like it's an, the process of beating us down as a country and limiting our imagination such that we think of that as radical is, I mean, that's the work we have to do.
[00:32:35] Speaker A: So part of the conversation with the, with the ruling class elite or with the wealthy elite is it's not saying, don't worry, I'm not really a socialist. It's saying the reforms that we want to make.
It's absolutely crazy for you people to be hysterical about those. Don't you understand that universal child care would free, economically free people to work. Free, free them as consumers. Consumers in ways that would benefit ultimately the, the economic climate of the city that the, if you're interested in a well governed and a harmonious and a community in New York and even if you're interested in having middle class and working class people with more economic security because they become good consumers, all of those things are reasonable. To accept a 2% increase in your, in your income tax and he doesn't have to get their agreement to do that. But it's a way of blunting by, by not spending a lot of time but making sure that they can't simply hysterically build up this notion that what we have here is the beginning of Lenin taking over the Soviet Union or something.
And of course Trump and company are going to try to hysterically, you know, fan those flames. I don't want to spend a lot of time on that issue because we don't even know what, what is, is going on in, in those kinds of conversations. But I was, I thought it was remarkable to see that that was happening and that it was reported in the Times.
One thing I also was reported in the Times quite well was the appointment process that he's initiating in terms of building administration.
Many people I know, including liberal progressive older people in New York were saying how can he really run a city when he's 34 years old? Never run anything before. And the immediate staff he created, created for transition is quite remarkable. If all women and all women with remarkable governing experience in the city or on a national level who are highly respected folks. So he, it's, this is not spontaneous, immediate thing. He was planning this, he and his people very carefully who that who was going to be the transition.
And I assume they have quite a list of people who they want to place in key, key roles.
And so without having to spend a lot of time in the campaign defending his ability to govern, what he was implying was, look, there's a lot of talent that we can bring together and I am willing to bet there's a tremendous amount of eagerness within the city, including on the different campuses and so forth. How do we get into this government? This is an exciting opportunity for people.
And so that's another feature of it. I've been very interested in the housing issue, of course, here in Santa Barbara. I spent a lot of time on that and rent control in New York, New York is the, is the home long standing tenant protections, including rent control, a lot of ambiguity in the consequences of that. But there's something like 2 million people who live in rent controlled apartments. And he has promised to freeze their rents, which apparently the mayor, through the commission that he appoints can achieve that goal.
And again, it would not be the first time that that kind of rent freeze would be imposed in the city.
But together the more difficult thing is a large scale development of affordable housing in the city. De Blasio had a, who was progressive, had a housing program that to my eyes was pretty catastrophic because it gave. The way he was going to build the affordable housing was to give enormous incentives like no property tax for 20 years for developers who built affordable housing. And I don't know what came of that in terms of result.
I am not sure what Mamdani's plans are with respect to housing.
When I was growing up in New York after World War II, there was a vast public housing program and alongside it a sort of middle class oriented co op housing program that was publicly subsidized. My parents ended up living in one of those co op housing developments. Co Op city in New York people may know about it, has something like 75,000 people live in cooperative housing in the Bronx, in New York. So New York has again a history of public housing, social housing that's unparalleled in the, in the United States.
It's something to build on but, but of course the developer interests, which are super powerful in New York, I mean real estate interests are the governing capitalist sector in New York along with the Wall Street.
They of course always want to move in a different direction. So that's going to be a major battle. I don't have anything wise to say about it, but I hope that they have some strategy for getting there. It's going to be quite, quite, that's quite a struggle. And then these two interesting ideas of free bus transportation and government supported, publicly supported groceries are, those are more novel in terms of history in New York anyway.
And, but he says he hopes, expects to be able to deliver that.
[00:38:52] Speaker B: They're novel in a, in one sense for sure, but they're, they're not novel worldwide, globally.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: No, not right.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: And then, and also in New York there are, you know, for one thing, the, the cost, the, the inflation tweaked cost of, for public transportation has gone up and up and up. So you know, starting back down at zero.
Buses may have never been free in New York, but in 1950 their impact on a pocketbook for a working class person was much, much less than it is now. So like the ratio by which the transit programs are funded by users can go down even if it doesn't end up going down to zero.
You know, I guess that the point is in, in even if these things seem like offering off and on, there's possibilities of, you know, partial victories on them. You know, especially in like a first term that, you know, if, if communicated right, if, if he continues to have good communication, the excellent kinds of communication he has, you know, he should be able to get away with, so to speak, you know, not being able to achieve absolutely everything because he's going to have opposition to everything and it's politics.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: So, so I was, I said I was surprised by the emphasis on being able to deliver and that worried me because I think if, if there's going to be resistance to his program, political resistance, you know, capitalist class resistance in the state legislature which has a lot of power over New York as well as within the city, there's got to be grassroots movement to support this agenda. And I was happy to read something about that which, which I was going to highlight because again, it didn't, hasn't gotten much publicity. There's a new formation called the People's Majority alliance, led by your union, the United Auto Workers in New York, but a number of other unions, which. It was very encouraging to me that a bunch of the more progressive led unions were the backbone of this emerging coalition along with other progressive organizations, tenants, the tenants organizations, dsa, of course, that this is already established as a framework to build, continue to build the grassroots sort of army that was there for the campaign.
They're going to need this fundamentally, I think to, to keep going, to keep the momentum going. It can't, can't be on the mayor and his administration alone to deliver these things. It has to be, you know, a movement based strategy. And it looks like people are thinking about that. I don't know if you know anything more than what I've, what I've just said, but you know, people like de Blasio as mayor of New York did not really build that way. Obama dismantled his tremendous organizational grassroots.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: No.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: After he was elected.
[00:42:04] Speaker B: No, he didn't.
No, he didn't.
[00:42:06] Speaker A: He delivered it to the Democratic Party.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: No, he didn't. He didn't do either of those things. I. We've had this argument.
[00:42:12] Speaker A: Marshall G. Marshall Gans was extremely upset about what had happened to the thing he helped build.
[00:42:19] Speaker B: I know he was upset about it, but it wasn't that it was delivered to the Democratic Party or dismantled. It was neither. It was kept intact. It was moved into the DNC offices, but the DNC was basically like shoved out of the way and it became, was still controlled by the White House the whole time. It was, it was a beast of like neither genre. It was not controlled by the party. It was controlled by the White House, by the West Wing, by the President.
It was top down. It was not a membership organization that had any kind of like functional democracy. And it was where the West Wing when they needed, they decided they needed strategic work out in the field or protests against Republicans about stuff. Then they like sent out the call for everyone to do that. It was the worst of a community, top down community organizing model. It was anti party and it was like explicitly nonpartisan. It was nuts. So no, people keep remembering that wrong. And it actually brings me. So in terms of what's happening in New York now, there's a couple of different things. There's the formation that you mentioned, which came together formally right before the election and is like a coalition and includes different party groups or grouplets and unions and community organizations.
And it seems very serious. I can't tell exactly to what extent it's a, like a grassroots or mass organization and to what extent it's going to be like what folks in the, you know, nonprofit world call a table, just a sort of coordinating space for these groups. Either way, I think that's good. I Think that's needs to be done. But there's a second thing. There's this other thing that I saw that I don't know that very much about yet. And maybe you saw it, Dick. That's called our time, which is directly coming out of the Mamdani campaign as an organization too, to take the volunteer energy around the campaign per se. So people not like people who volunteered through their union or an existing group, but, you know, got involved in the campaign, the thousands of people who did. It's to be a space for them to continue to be engaged, help move the agenda, maybe shape the agenda, I'm not sure. And as with the Obama example ofa and the Bernie example and the Howard Dean example and the Elizabeth Warren example, every single time a politician creates an organization out of their campaign that stays an organization of and about the candidate, it.
It's bad. I mean, I just think the results are bad. So I'm a little worried that that's a mistake on a lot of. For a lot of reasons. And it begs the question to me, why isn't the push and the strategy to build up dsa, to build up the Democratic Party, to build up DSA in the Democratic. I mean, why isn't it a strategy to transform New York politics using the entities that Mamdani is already affiliated to, DSA and the Democratic Party, this like we're gonna create a third thing that's neither.
Yeah, it raises some. Some red flags, but precisely because of what happened with Obama, maybe we can.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Do a little exploration in the future of this podcast on that.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Yeah, there certainly lots of people I like who are involved in it, so we can talk to. For sure.
[00:46:03] Speaker A: I mean, you know, the New York Democratic Party was a horror, horror show until all this came along.
[00:46:11] Speaker B: And it continues to be a horror.
[00:46:13] Speaker A: Is the last gasp of that. I mean, the way he's behaved in all of this.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: But we should change that. Like there's a socialist mayor, you know, and a giant grassroots army like it. One of the things that it should do is fix that fucking New York Democratic Party, which is, yeah, probably the worst in the country.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: Maybe Nancy Pelosi's retirement is intended in part on her as a signal to some others, like Schumer, that their time is coming, has come as well.
[00:46:44] Speaker B: That would be great.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: So I would like to get just a little bit into the one final piece which has to do with the Jewish question. As we've talked about it on this program quite often. The Anti Defamation League had the. I'm going to use A Yiddish word, the chutzpah, which means cold blooded nerve in this case to establish a Mamdani monitor once he was elected, claiming that they needed hold him accountable on questions of antisemitism.
And they are.
If there's any single established Jewish organization that's responsible for the weaponization of anti Semitism against the left in the United States, it's the ADL who's played that, that role for a long time.
They are I think upset by the degree to which they, that has all been co opted by Trump, that they, they know that that feeds anti Semitism, not, not opposes it. But nevertheless here they are continuing to beat this drum in New York.
It is really important for people to realize and maybe people do, but I, I, to me it's exciting that you have the first step that that was obvious was, was Mamdani and, and Brad Ladner, the prominent progressive Jewish candidate for mayor, embracing each other in the primary. Ladner is fully into the Mamdani campaign.
I think I've heard that he's actually going to run for Congress rather than be in the administration.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: He's running for something, you're right, he's running for.
[00:48:29] Speaker A: But nevertheless he is a highly credible progressive Jewish voice within that whole structure that has been very helpful along with Jewish organizations, Jewish progressive organizations that are very active in New York and so including people I'm quite connected with in the magazine Jewish Currents.
And so it's really an opportunity. It's not just a battle against big odds within the Jewish world. The fact that the younger generation of Jewish voters in New York were enthusiastically for Matthani is to me a great sign for, for the Jews. It's good for the Jews to have a Muslim mayor helped by Jewish voters to get elected. It is, that is a big breakthrough. It's positive just on that, that ethnic and religious level.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: Well, I can't speak for the Jews, but I definitely think it's good for America. Like it's good for how we deal with the issue of Israel, Palestine. It's good for.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: So I just wanted to point that out.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: Kumbaya.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't, I don't know how. I mean I was appalled to see like a thousand or so rabbis signed a statement attacking Mamdani. It's so evident when you just hear him discuss these issues that he's somebody with a very strong understanding of, of many of the issues that are important to the Jewish communities. He actually got the support of some Hasidic Jewish communities in New York because he went there and talked to them about their need for protection, you know, and concern about their safety, things like that. I don't know what else he said to them but, but that was.
[00:50:20] Speaker B: Well, one of the things that Lander pointed out, I, I saw him quoted in an article that was really good was that, you know, no Jewish politicians in New York have spent as much time in mosques as Mamdani has in synagogues and temples and community Jewish community meetings and so forth. And you know, even when I'm arguing with people online or whatever who have taken either a hard, just salacious, you know, racist Islamophobic line against Mamdani or some, you know, sort of mealy mouthed, liberal polite version of it that like all of the arguments against Mamdani or, or the arguments that allege that he's an anti Semite or soft on anti Semitism, it's always guilt by association or, or just, you know, when it's not just a bold faced lie about something he said or didn't say, but it's always like he has not denounced some person who he is vaguely affiliated with and that proves that he's not good enough. Or it's like it's just a sort of delegitimation of his position on Israel and Palestine and saying that it trying to continue the isolation of any position that isn't pro Israeli in American politics.
Whereas his, his position, even if I don't share it, is like very normal. I mean it's very common. It's not a, outside of the main, you know, it's not outside of the, what should be a tolerated set of disagreements within the Democratic Party about it. And then the last thing I would, you know, say is that the, if we're going to beat fascism in the United States, we really, really need everyone, including Jewish voters to like see who the fascists are and who the threat is. And it's not Mamdani. It's not, it's not even, it's not the pro Palestinian movement with Tucker Carlson and the, you know, Swift, I don't know, it's not rehabilitation but habilitation of outright, you know, Holocaust denying, Jewish hating, you know, anti Semites in the Republican Party. It is an astounding failure of groups like the ADL to be like, we're gonna put someone on staff to watch this Muslim guy who gives way more concrete, explicit, grounded and informed answers to how he would combat anti Semitism in New York than any random average Democrat does. But because that Democrat says like, I'll always stand with Israel, you can bomb the fuck out of Palestinians like they're, that's fine. But a guy who's like serious about fighting anti Semitism in his community because he does not agree with Israel is viewed with suspicion. And that's just, that's broken.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: That's completely very well said. And I'm just add historically that the weaponization of the charge of anti Semitism was effective in England in destroying Jeremy Corbyn's leadership in the Labor Party and that whole faction of the Labour Party. It was, did a lot of damage to Jesse Jackson when Jesse was running for president.
[00:53:54] Speaker B: He also didn't do himself some favors. I mean to be honest.
[00:53:56] Speaker A: No, no.
I mean they, they tried to damage Tom Hayden when he was in the state legislature and running, running for office.
Tom and Jane were criticized from, from a progressive point of view because they tried to handle the critique of them by maybe going overboard in support of Israel at that time.
[00:54:20] Speaker B: I didn't know about that.
[00:54:21] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's been a long standing project I think by people including the wealthy donor types within Jewish world to try to move the American Jews out of the liberal Democratic Party camp and into a more conservative place.
So far that has not worked electorally and, and I think it's backfiring once again. I hope so.
So I just thought I would add this be.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a big part of this whole dynamic.
[00:54:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
So what's the final word for today?
[00:55:01] Speaker B: Well, I hope because I always feel like I have to swoop in and be Captain Downer. I do want to emphasize like I think the, the Mamdani election is just great. It's huge news.
I think there's a tendency out there among some to sort of manage expectations or emotions or, or something or just straight cynicism sort of talking down its importance. And I think that's silly. It's just a big deal that a 35 year old, 34 year old Muslim socialist was elected mayor of New York City. And like so far seems like he wants to be really serious about doing a good job at it. All of this is just really wonderful and inspiring and great and let's do it more. And then I think maybe to go all the way back to your first point, this, the journalistic tendency to try to say okay, there were, there was a handful of elections in the United States, moderate Democrats won some of them and progressive Democrat won another. And this progressive Democrat didn't win and that moderate didn't win in terms exactly as you're saying, of trying to like game out the Relative strength of those factions I think is a fool's errand in with so few elections at the same time, like we don't. Nothing was.
It didn't settle that question. I don't think this election at all. And, and we have to be able to going into the primary, both continue to have that fight, that factional battle, that contest. We just do.
While also, you know, like boosting the whole team.
And in that I think we've had another election cycle where actually the left, at least the left in the party. So people like AOC or Madani now have been way more responsible about, you know, being rah rah, pro Democrat, anti Trump and also moving their agenda in the party. And then we've seen a right wing in the Democratic Party that like openly schismed with the party to try to back to back Andrew Cuomo an absolutely disastrous piece of shit of a human being. And that's not party discipline, that's not anti fascism, that's not responsibility.
And you know, we need to hold them accountable within the party, within the coalition. Our right flank is far more dangerous as a sower of division than the left is right right now. I don't think that's always true, but that's definitely true right now. So those are my takeaways.
[00:57:42] Speaker A: That's a very good take. I would just add one take thought which is that to me the division is better understood as Democrats who are happy to further corporate interests as a part of their primary reason for acting versus those who understand that the party works only when it is the party of working people and of the people's party.
That's the battle. It's not right or left because I think people who are defined as centrist or moderate can embrace a program and a language that is not, that is anti corporate. The anti corporate power, put it that way.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Okay, we'll have to. We'll have to argue about that next episode.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And so thanks a lot. For those who are tuning into this.
We. We will be welcoming your support at
[email protected] TSMH where you can, we can get some bonus stuff as well. I've been doing programs on the radio with a lot of music about Mamdani and about many other relevant things that we put up as bonuses periodically for you to have for your own use and listening pleasure.
And we'll be back again, all things being equal, when we're ready to be back. Take care folks.
[00:59:17] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:59:41] Speaker C: Walking through story of streets fighting for what's fair and right Leading change with steady hands Making every voice shine bright Housing rights for every people over profits.
[01:00:01] Speaker A: Rain.
[01:00:05] Speaker C: Standing up for workers rights Breaking through the chains Standings are familiar Outside the skies are getting courage and conviction strong so Hanma Danny will be our mayor.
Every neighborhood deserves people Equal chances Equal.
[01:00:48] Speaker A: Care.
[01:00:52] Speaker C: Education, transport Resources shared with flair Unity across the FL Progress state.
[01:01:15] Speaker A: Working.
[01:01:16] Speaker C: Class democracy lighting up our way.
