So, Democratic Socialist (ie. has politics a 70s liberal would have agreed with, but is less racist) Zohran Mamdani has won the nomination for Democratic candidate for New York city Mayor.

The best analysis I’ve read of this is definitely from Matt Stoller. He defines this win as a “system defining election”, that is an attempt to not just to change who runs a system, but how that system is run. Read the article.

I’ll point out here that there have been a few such attempts. Matt talks about Lamont’s challenge to Lieberman, where Lamont won the primary, then Lieberman won the election. That is what will be tried here: the oligarchical part of the party will align behind another candidate, possibly even the Republican one. Those who don’t will try to co-opt Mamdani and turn him into a centrist-left winger.

Mamdani is more radical than Sanders, he isn’t a Zionist, for example. But he’s basically suggesting policies than no Democrat in the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s would have found extraordinary.

What Matt calls system defining elections, I call sub-ideological revolutions. FDR changed the form of capitalism practiced in the US, so did Reagan and Carter. Mamdani, for all the screams from rich operatives like Larry Summers and various oligarchs isn’t a radical, any more than FDR was. He doesn’t want to switch to economic Communism (ownership of the means of production by the workers, or Soviet style central control), say, or a single party state. He wants real changes to how capitalism is practiced and some changes to who has power in Democracy.

Sanders in 2016 and 2020 was an attempt at a sub-ideological revolution or system defining election. This is why Obama intervened and lined up everyone behind Biden, a nearly unprecedented step.

So was Corbyn, except he got further, winning the Labour leadership. It’s not an accident that (and we have receipts, so don’t argue) Labour operatives actually sabotaged him in two elections to ensure the Conservatives won. They wanted the old ideology/system to keep running more than they wanted their party to win. And once he was removed, his successor, Starmer, purged the party of the democratic socialist left, and once in power doubled down on austerity and politics no different in substance, but actually more punitive, than those followed by the Conservative party.

Now the Reform party in the UK is coming on hard.

Be clear that sub-ideological transitions/system changes can be bad. Neoliberalism was a bad change. If Reform in the UK sets the new system/ideological norm, it will be awful.

This is one reason why I said that Corbyn was the UK’s last chance: if the left failed, the right would then get its shot, and what the right wants to do is beyond awful.

It’s why Germany is beyond hosed: doubling down on military Kenesianism (which won’t work in a corrupt neoliberal system) while cutting social welfare will just lead the new-right getting into power and their policies will make most people worse off, not better.

As for Mamdani, he’s a good sign. The fact that men went for him and so did the youngs is also excellent, because it shows that men and youngsters aren’t really “right wing” in any way that matters. Yet. What they want is change. If they are offered good change, they’ll take it, but they’re so desperate that if all that is on the menu is shitty change or the status quo, they’ll take shitty change.

This was obviously going to happen. I wrote years ago that we wouldn’t see real change till the mid 2020s at the earliest, because it required generational change as well.

Mamdani tells us that what sort of change will finally win in the US is not yet decided. It doesn’t have to be MAGA stupidity and meanness.

So if you want something better in the US, if you want a chance at a new New Deal, get behind Mamdani and people like him hard.

There still remains the question of if Mamdani can deliver even if elected. Will be be co-opted? Will he run into opposition from powerful enemies he can’t either overcome or use as a rallying call? Is he competent to create and run a new system like the one he’s suggesting?

But this is a chance because if Mamdani wins then improves New Yorker’s lives, he’ll be copied. And if you’re in a position to do something to improve the chance of it happening and then working, I suggest you do so.

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