Excellent essay, full Shullenberger. Reading it, shakes loose some of my thinking, and gives me a lot to chew on. Among which, thank you for the Evans reference.
Leftist politics cannot achieve its goals by electoral politics so its success will always depend on managing the cognitive dissonance it must create and understanding that it is best resolved by a minimum, not a maximum, of persuasive justification.
<If Mamdani sticks to his economic populist pitch, that will be good for his campaign, but also good for democracy and political discourse more broadly,…>
As the libertarian political philosopher Jan Lester
points out, those who favor democracy have yet to produce a clear statement of what democracy is in order to compare it. Mamdani is just another leftist politician/greasy pole climber polluting the discourse with anti-market rhetoric.
<In my view, the problem with his most widely discussed proposals, such as pilot state-run supermarkets, isn’t that they’re particularly extreme; rather, it is that they’re gimmicky “one weird tricks”…>
This article was great but also done something very few writers have really done - explore the nuances of class and the petit bourgeois and their relation to power.
That being said, I do think everyone is spending way too much time on zohran. NYC is not even close to representative of the places Dems need to win and I think it’s concerning that he lost voters making under $60k.
It’s cool he won in an off year election against bad candidates. The question for progressives/the left, one they haven’t really solved in a 20 years, is can they win in r+4 places
Excellent essay, full Shullenberger. Reading it, shakes loose some of my thinking, and gives me a lot to chew on. Among which, thank you for the Evans reference.
Leftist politics cannot achieve its goals by electoral politics so its success will always depend on managing the cognitive dissonance it must create and understanding that it is best resolved by a minimum, not a maximum, of persuasive justification.
What is a leftist?
<If Mamdani sticks to his economic populist pitch, that will be good for his campaign, but also good for democracy and political discourse more broadly,…>
As the libertarian political philosopher Jan Lester
points out, those who favor democracy have yet to produce a clear statement of what democracy is in order to compare it. Mamdani is just another leftist politician/greasy pole climber polluting the discourse with anti-market rhetoric.
keep seething
More like observing than seething. Mamdani is the mouthpiece of seethers.
<In my view, the problem with his most widely discussed proposals, such as pilot state-run supermarkets, isn’t that they’re particularly extreme; rather, it is that they’re gimmicky “one weird tricks”…>
They seem to be both.
This article was great but also done something very few writers have really done - explore the nuances of class and the petit bourgeois and their relation to power.
That being said, I do think everyone is spending way too much time on zohran. NYC is not even close to representative of the places Dems need to win and I think it’s concerning that he lost voters making under $60k.
It’s cool he won in an off year election against bad candidates. The question for progressives/the left, one they haven’t really solved in a 20 years, is can they win in r+4 places
Taibbi catching a stray here is unnecessary & a touch prurient.
Keep writing about the bourgeoisie, old, petty, all of it.