Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., suffered a primary defeat Tuesday to a moderate challenger who was backed by pro-Israel groups, NBC News projected, following a bitter and expensive race that exposed the party’s divisions over the war in Gaza.
The race between Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer in New York’s 16th District drew more ad spending — $25 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact — than any other House primary in history. Nearly $15 million of that spending came from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which backed Latimer.
With 68% of the vote in, Latimer led Bowman by a wide margin, 55.7% to 44.3%.
Speaking to a roomful of his supporters Tuesday night, Bowman conceded defeat to his “opponents,” most likely a nod to big-spending outside groups, but he vowed that the broader fight for “humanity and justice” would go on.
“This race was never about me and me alone. It was never about this district and this district alone. It was always about all of us,” Bowman said. “Now, our opponents — not opponent — may have won this round, at this time, in this place. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives.”
edit: also AOC won her primary so she is staying
In a closely watched primary, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, has emerged victorious, securing her position as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 14th Congressional District.
The 34-year-old progressive, known as AOC, overcame a challenge from 66-year-old investment banker Marty Dolan, who positioned himself as a moderate alternative.
I’m personally struggling with the idea of “democracy” being an ideal since I have grown to hate most people. I think the majority of people in America are simply not smart enough, nor have enough basic empathy for others, to be trusted to make good decisions. Someone convince me that some form of benevolent authoritarianism isn’t the solution.
I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don’t know how intelligent most people are. You don’t know how much empathy they actually have. You’re just like a channer writing monologues online about how “normies” don’t have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are “NPCs”. Society has hurt you and you’ve grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren’t superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.
It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish
I’m really enjoying this discussion, my question is, for imperial countries like the USA, wouldn’t the two mountains that need to be removed in this case be the Americans themselves? I can understand having little to no faith in westerners, but I will never lose my faith in humanity.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about population these days. Fascists obsess over white replacement, but maybe there is actually something to this. It’s obvious, but colonial projects tend to fail sooner when they have smaller proportions of “white” people. I think for instance that Korea never had more than five or at most ten percent of its population being Japanese during the colonial period, and the portion of Americans now living in the south is much less than 1% (which kind of negates this idea). Algeria was ten percent French, apartheid was officially swept away when South Africa’s population was ten percent white, and now Israel is disappearing when half its population consists of settlers. The USA however is about 70% settler, which makes it a much tougher nut to crack, since settlers almost always think of themselves as their nationality first and barely if ever conceive of themselves as workers.
I feel like this is a very boring answer, but it still needs to be given:
I think the main issue here is that you are starting from a lens of what borders on racial essentialism. The different historical examples you give have wildly different contexts (for example, the occupation of Korea being much more heavily military than the others you list, while white South Africans were overwhelmingly civilians – whatever else might be said of them). I think the greater through line here is the one that any Marxist would point to first: class. Fundamentally, these societies of brutally exploited underclasses were setting themselves up for revolt by the very fact of their exploitation itself. What sets the US apart from these societies then is not the racial divide (though of course US society is highly racialized and it factors in to things) but that it is not primarily the site of the exploitation it carries out, i.e. it is imperialist, and therefore is able to temporarily “circumvent” the consequences of the basic principles of social stratification that all capitalist systems are bound by.
As imperial decline accelerates, more and more of the population you identified as settler (idk where you got 70% specifically from, but that doesn’t really matter) is going to find themselves on the “brutally exploited” side of the above dichotomy, and from there, and with the necessary construction of dual power, it should not be difficult at all for them to be turned to the side of the colonized population as fellow exploited people.
So I believe that, in the framework of Mao’s metaphor, the American people are still our God, and the mountains are capitalism and imperialism.
I’m far underread for this discussion but I think for most americans the mental/superstructural blocks to over come are the structure of race and whiteness and the perception of everyone as consumers.
Common GS W.
That’s quite flattering, though expectations honestly terrify me
Benevolent authoritarianism is already the promise of liberal representative democracy. IMO the true problem is that people are alienated from politics after decades of neoliberalism being the leftmost position. If people didn’t feel like the entire institution of democracy was useless, I’m sure you wouldn’t see that level of detachment. Hell, just compare to Cuba where democracy is much more direct and people have much more input: it directly leads to a vastly larger portion of the population participating to protect their interests and their communities’ interests. Because they see their own civil participation in politics as an extension of their country’s revolutionary project. In America, the national political project is so transparently aligned with the interests of industrialists and billionaires that the best they can offer people is a negative promise, that we won’t do what the other scary guy is gonna do.
American political ideology is also just broken as fuck. Most people can’t even maintain a coherent set of beliefs let alone consistently vote base upon whatever incoherent beliefs they may have. Works out for the ruling class of course.
Join the pedagogy of the oppressed book club, starts July 1st
Incredible dedication to the Mayor Pete bit lol
A benevolent dictatorship is obviously the most effective form of government, the problem is that any dictatorship can be used for good or evil and no matter how benevolent your queen or dictator or whatever you call her is, she’s gonna die eventually and now you’re rolling the dice. If you get someone less benevolent, system’s a failure. If you get someone just as benevolent but less competent and they get deposed, system’s a failure. And that’s assuming that the system even survives succession rather than devolving into old-school feudalism or capitalist ‘democracy’ or ancap utopia or whatever in a power vacuum.
The only way to ensure a benevolent government remains long-term is by spreading the power out enough that the system can shrug off the deaths and retirement of individuals and keep going along some plan that exists beyond any one person
Okay, you say, so don’t have a dictatorship of one benevolent queen but rather of a benevolent group acting in the best interests of the people. And this has the same pros and cons, but both blunted. It’s good at what it does as long as the group remains truly benevolent, but any organization can decay and become corrupt and, in a sense, die just like our hypothetical good queen.
So if we just keep following the logic down, we end up at the idea that the group responsible for the wide-ranging decisions affecting everyone’s lives should ideally be accountable to, more or less, everyone. If the ultimate goal is for the government to act in the best interests of the people, it follows that it is the people who should be the best judge of how well the government is working. If it stops doing its job properly, it is the people who notice. So it should be in the hands of the people to correct it.
I’ve thought this way for a while, and part of it might be our experiences are with the American public, who are not known for their grasp on politics, let alone much else.
I think this is mainly due to lack of education, propaganda, and outright brainwashing by neoliberal interests. Hopefully, once those things are no longer in the picture, people can be trusted to do what is genuinely in their long term best interests.