New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) said Saturday that Democrats have lost sight of the important economic issues facing working-class Americans as the party works to rebuild itself after a devastating loss in the 2024 presidential election.
“The party, as a whole, has lost its focus on working people,” Mamdani said in an interview with MS Now.
“People want to know: What are you going to do for rent? What are you going to do for housing? What are you going to do for gas? What are you going to do for groceries? We have to have answers to that.”
Issues like housing affordability, the cost of healthcare and rising gas prices should be at the forefront of the party’s focus, according to Mamdani, rather than ideological battles that distract from what matters to most Americans.
Finally someone in the left that gets it.
I don’t want to vote left because of progressivism. I want to vote left because boss earns a dollar while I earn a dime.
For a long time I’ve been saying, leftist parties would have way more success if they focused on helping 90% of the population (the working class) instead of the minority 1%. They will help minorities the most by helping the working class anyway. They can’t help the minorities if they don’t get the majority’s vote.
I mean, in theory it’s not an either/or issue. You support your minority and women colleagues because you’re stronger as a collective than as alienated individuals. Progressive causes should synergize with labor actions, because bigotry is part of the divide-and-conquer strategy of the landlord class.
In practice, I see so many politicians and activists treating these as separate - even ideologically oppositional - issues. As though you have to choose between feminism and a fair wage. Or you need to be aligned with American imperialism against the Evil Foreigners if you want to be taken seriously on LGBTQ issues.
I don’t see a shortage of leftist groups advocating on behalf of the working class. But for the handful that do break away and champion some bourgeois pet issue, they’ll periodically get a windfall of cash and instant celebrity. And then I’ll suddenly get an earful about how Brianna Joy Grey talking about vaccine refusal or Adam Friedland interviewing Chet Hanks is the face of American Leftism.
There’s very clearly one of those the party will support to court left wing voters. Rainbow capitalism doesn’t achieve either.
For instance in Canada Trudeau was a very right wing politician but whenever he was getting bad press he would do something akin to “law that protects trans people now includes trans people” and it was just rewriting gender identity to trans.
The problem is not what policies I support.
The problem is aunt Ben that lives in the middle of nowhere. Who hates the gays and communists. But lives paycheck to paycheck.
The social left/social right split is about 50%. Some places higher, some lower. But there is a LOT of working people. And most of those will not vote against their own interests. It’s only when they have to choose between “not my best interest, but at least there won’t be drag queens in my son’s school” and “probably my best interest, but they also want to put drag queens in my son’s school. So they’re probably lying about the good things, politicians always lie”. They’ll choose the latter.
It doesn’t matter that there is no political party that wants to put drag queens in schools. It is only important that aunt Ben thinks that is true.
If you focus on the economy, and ignore the social left, will the left gain enough votes to have power.
Only when you have power you can slowly go for the social issues.
This is what the right has done in the US. They’ve been claiming they’ll bring the good economy, and just leave the social issues as they were before. Slowly the US economy has drifted rightwards. So much so that the only 2 parties are economic right. So now it is the time to turn the social right on. They went full fascism and are killing the minorities and whoever supports them in protest.
Just follow the same playbook. “We’re leaving the rules as they are, we won’t engage in discussions about culture wars”, “but we’re gonna tax the rich and give US citizens universal healthcare”. Once both parties are pro-universal healthcare, go for public transport, then anti-anti-union measures. And once the economy is leftwing enough, you can start with the culture wars.
The focus on labor should be first above all else. If you aren’t equal in labor rights you are never going to be equal gender or sex or race etc etc etc etc etc. labor must come first. The rest is implied through the labor fight.
Read Settlers.
It’s the other way around. We can - and have - enjoyed a kind of National Socialist economic equity, from the 1940s to the 1960s. A heyday for the white male working class. And then it was the introduction of PoC and women to the labor market that became an excuse to dismantle labor organizations piecemeal.
Because the predominant ethnic majority and the dominant gender could not stomach minorities and women in their union halls and labor groups, they were neatly pitted against their lower-caste peers (and their working class peers abroad) until the only “good” jobs remaining were for the police and their auxiliaries.
Without a unified proletariat, any labor rights you achieve are at best temporary and at worst illusionary. Gender and race and religious and national differences must be reconciled, or you’re always going to have a bolt-hole for capitalists to flee down. You’re always going to have a cohort that the public is trained to believe deserves oppression.
The US doesn’t have a leftist party, that’s the whole problem. The Democrats would be considered a center right party outside the anglo sphere.
Outside the US, still in the anglosphere.
I’m not talking about the US. My country has more than 1 leftist party. But they focus on the social-left side and forget about the economic-left one.