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.
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.