To pin this all on one man is supremely America-brained - I trust you’re not trying to do that. This is a movement for our moment within our electoral space.
Yes, he is the candidate. No, he is not alone. His campaign and platform are both rooted in a different conception of how to do politics. And that is a story Americans need to hear. He offers us the chance to actually offer that to a majority of Americans, person to person. From a depth of Change in machinery that makes Bernie look like Biden. And it is about investing in Americans - all Americans.
It is not perfect, it is still limited largely to fit within the imagination of Liberals in the US. But we can finally shift the overton window so that the US has an actual Left party. And we might get to explore what that means!
I hope we can have a Leftist as “America’s Mayor” for this moment that needs an antidote to Fascism.
Which problem are we talking about?
Trump? Yeah…
The “Democratic” Party hasn’t had a real Primary for POTUS since 2008, maybe earlier.
2012? Obama was still in.
2016? “Superdelegates” were just party insiders explicitly allowed to put their thumb on the scale in the name of party loyalty. They used this to favor Hillary Clinton, a Goldwater-Girl who addressed the Senate in the mid 1990s and push for gun control by calling Black Children in Chicago “super-predators”.
2020? That primary was operation unite-against-the-popular-candidate.
2024? No Primary. Joe Biden would go on to have cancer, Kamala had a joke of a campaign, and both of those candidates cosigned a deeply unpopular genocide so hard that it was bipartisan.
We saw astroturfed “no kings” protests come and go.
Now, with Mamdani looming large over the political scene, I see Democrats rushing to pretend their party name isn’t just as ironic as another Conservative bill.
They will teach an entire Generation of their prospective political base that electoral political change is impossible.