Ross, I've enjoyed your reporting and writing about the NYC mayoral race, but I disagree with where you've landed here: I think AOC's embarrassingly hypocritical attacks on Yang while ignoring the actual democratic mainstream's identical statements (well documented by Greenwald), coupled with the resolutely absolute apathy of New York voters towards any of the so-called "progressive" candidates in the mayoral race show that this "new left" movement is just dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, and it's well past time to move on.
Sunrise throws Alex Morse under the bus for unfounded (and maybe even mildly homophobic) accusations?; the NYC DSA bumps black Marxist professor Adolph Reed from speaking for being too class-oriented?; the entire Squad's Twitter account is reactionary in ways that most Republicans could only dream of? - I could go on and on with examples of that movement fading into abject meaninglessness of the toxic poison pill variety. The hope of the class-based, left-populist Sanders' 2016 campaign was totally turned into a nasty experiment in identity politics and dense, rich Brooklyn yupsters bullying their way into the leadership of once useful organizations over the last 4-5 years. I was reading Streetsblog the other day, whose work I've (mainly) enjoyed over the years, and when faced with evidence that the entire city is now reacting to spikes in crime and murder, he writes it all off to not observing some of the finer points of the "defund" movement. Let's be honest, continued adherence to this platform could doom the entire Democrat project for a generation.
I know that nobody wants to hear this - and I'm sure I could be fired from a Brooklyn graphic design firm for saying so - but I think Andrew Yang may actually be the "progressive" candidate in the race, and the attacks on him - for the rote politicking or bland statements that all candidates actually trying to win office make - all seemed based on his having some different ideas from the mind-hive, or refusing to adhere to (honestly brain-dead) talking points.
The quicker we remove AOC and that narcissistic cult from left political parties, the quicker the left can actually "progress." In the meantime, we can watch the New York Times endorse the most non-controversial, identity-box-checking political candidates that are polling at around 2% and Teen Vogue will be the intellectual journal of the new "movement." Politics, yay!
The municipal elections will be decided on the issues of rapid recovery from the COVID recession and the rise in street shootings(and more than a few broken store windows). The "progressives" who figured they would sweep the field made their bets early and wrong. They will trail the field. Scott Stringer was their only chance and they stole away at the first sign of their having to answer a challenge. The female candidates sadly will suffer inordinately too. Real candidates with much to offer are lost in the crowd. Sad really.
The idea that Stringer was the progressive option was laughable. He's the most milquetoast, middle-of-the-road option possible: de Blasio Lite, at best. The reactionary New York voter — who is in a brief identity crisis supporting the new, reactionaries of the AOC variety after their long flirtation with reactionaries of the Giuliani and Bloomberg variety (but will move back to that latter group soon) — happily supported Yang, and then turned on him in seconds because the "new left" branded him not part of the "movement" is pretty telling.
Stringer being thrown under the bus because of a fairly flimsy, non-verified, non-verifiable accusation is pretty telling for a movement that is more and more explicitly anti-due process, anti-free speech, anti-working class, anti-liberalism, anti-democratic, and really anti-leftism (I think the "far left" scare talk is wildly inaccurate — and ineffective: this group finds the false label of "far left" to be a sexy identity). I should note here that I know accuser Jean Kim in passing, and she's really nice (or maybe I should say "enthusiastic"), but every time I've been around her, I get the feeling that she's an opportunist of the type that would do anything for a feature with her photo in the New York Times (like most people in politics, or in media, or in PR).
Over the last 20 years, privileged Brooklyn-centric millennials and zoomers used family connections to: co-opt and sanitize vital long-term independent art, music, journalism, literature and cinema movements; gentrify arty, poor and working class neighborhoods throughout the country, turning them into richer neighborhoods than most fancy suburbs; and ultimately destroy the counterculture, while created a new ruling, rich, technocratic creative class with a constantly shifting insider language, but disguised in a faux-boho uniform they appropriated.
This same group is now destroying left politics, with the help of (faux)activist media. They've shed almost the entire working class, and minority voters are leaving the democratic party in droves. This "new left" was pretty effective in removing Bernie Sanders as a threat and trumpeting the ill-fated Clinton in 2016. (They accepted Sanders, after forcing Sanders to accept their illiberal tenets in 2020, which neutered him.) At this point, it seems like the most likely result in their efforts to smear Yang, if successful, will be the election of Eric Adams — who probably is the most retrograde of the dem candidates. I can only think that this is what they actually want: to permanently, angrily agitate for a neoliberal status quo.
Ross, your own views on Israel and Palestine reflect whataboutism. As an American Jew myself, I also once thought this was a clever and progressive stance. Rebuke Israel but also acknowledge the complexity, Hamas, asymmetry, blah blah. And telling me to go elsewhere for this debate doesn’t work either.
Ross, how much time have you spent with Palestinians? Have you been to the West Bank at all? Or more than a few hours on a birthright trip? As Edward R. Murrow said “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.”
There aren’t two sides here or many sides. These are war crimes.
With all due respect, how is Ross doing a whataboutism? What stance do you believe he should be taking that he didn't? He said he ideally believes in a single multiethnic democratic state but that is extremely unlikely. Based on what I gather from this article he is clearly against Israeli war crimes & West Bank colonization and for the maximal peace and prosperity for both peoples. I did not get the impression that he is pro-status quo in the region. I'm just confused about your comment.
Indeed. There's a media and Twitter movement to have all politicians make statements that would totally doom their chances in any large-scale election. The compelled speech of the damned. It's all a deeply conflicted aesthetics-disguised-as-politics scenario that ensures never winning, which would also explain some of their self-defeating messaging and sloganeering, seemingly designed to turn normies — or people with still-functional brains — off and never achieve any realistic goals).
Seems a little like irrevocably destroying the old liberal-democratic coalitions without attempting to build any new ones, don't it?
Can you imagine someone running for mayor of a major, diverse city (or for president for that matter) and ranting like Rashida Tlaib (who can often be as crazy/stupid/dangerous as Marjorie Taylor Greene to my mind) just did on the subject at hand? They be lucky to get .005% of the vote.
Ross, I've enjoyed your reporting and writing about the NYC mayoral race, but I disagree with where you've landed here: I think AOC's embarrassingly hypocritical attacks on Yang while ignoring the actual democratic mainstream's identical statements (well documented by Greenwald), coupled with the resolutely absolute apathy of New York voters towards any of the so-called "progressive" candidates in the mayoral race show that this "new left" movement is just dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, and it's well past time to move on.
Sunrise throws Alex Morse under the bus for unfounded (and maybe even mildly homophobic) accusations?; the NYC DSA bumps black Marxist professor Adolph Reed from speaking for being too class-oriented?; the entire Squad's Twitter account is reactionary in ways that most Republicans could only dream of? - I could go on and on with examples of that movement fading into abject meaninglessness of the toxic poison pill variety. The hope of the class-based, left-populist Sanders' 2016 campaign was totally turned into a nasty experiment in identity politics and dense, rich Brooklyn yupsters bullying their way into the leadership of once useful organizations over the last 4-5 years. I was reading Streetsblog the other day, whose work I've (mainly) enjoyed over the years, and when faced with evidence that the entire city is now reacting to spikes in crime and murder, he writes it all off to not observing some of the finer points of the "defund" movement. Let's be honest, continued adherence to this platform could doom the entire Democrat project for a generation.
I know that nobody wants to hear this - and I'm sure I could be fired from a Brooklyn graphic design firm for saying so - but I think Andrew Yang may actually be the "progressive" candidate in the race, and the attacks on him - for the rote politicking or bland statements that all candidates actually trying to win office make - all seemed based on his having some different ideas from the mind-hive, or refusing to adhere to (honestly brain-dead) talking points.
The quicker we remove AOC and that narcissistic cult from left political parties, the quicker the left can actually "progress." In the meantime, we can watch the New York Times endorse the most non-controversial, identity-box-checking political candidates that are polling at around 2% and Teen Vogue will be the intellectual journal of the new "movement." Politics, yay!
The municipal elections will be decided on the issues of rapid recovery from the COVID recession and the rise in street shootings(and more than a few broken store windows). The "progressives" who figured they would sweep the field made their bets early and wrong. They will trail the field. Scott Stringer was their only chance and they stole away at the first sign of their having to answer a challenge. The female candidates sadly will suffer inordinately too. Real candidates with much to offer are lost in the crowd. Sad really.
The idea that Stringer was the progressive option was laughable. He's the most milquetoast, middle-of-the-road option possible: de Blasio Lite, at best. The reactionary New York voter — who is in a brief identity crisis supporting the new, reactionaries of the AOC variety after their long flirtation with reactionaries of the Giuliani and Bloomberg variety (but will move back to that latter group soon) — happily supported Yang, and then turned on him in seconds because the "new left" branded him not part of the "movement" is pretty telling.
Stringer being thrown under the bus because of a fairly flimsy, non-verified, non-verifiable accusation is pretty telling for a movement that is more and more explicitly anti-due process, anti-free speech, anti-working class, anti-liberalism, anti-democratic, and really anti-leftism (I think the "far left" scare talk is wildly inaccurate — and ineffective: this group finds the false label of "far left" to be a sexy identity). I should note here that I know accuser Jean Kim in passing, and she's really nice (or maybe I should say "enthusiastic"), but every time I've been around her, I get the feeling that she's an opportunist of the type that would do anything for a feature with her photo in the New York Times (like most people in politics, or in media, or in PR).
Over the last 20 years, privileged Brooklyn-centric millennials and zoomers used family connections to: co-opt and sanitize vital long-term independent art, music, journalism, literature and cinema movements; gentrify arty, poor and working class neighborhoods throughout the country, turning them into richer neighborhoods than most fancy suburbs; and ultimately destroy the counterculture, while created a new ruling, rich, technocratic creative class with a constantly shifting insider language, but disguised in a faux-boho uniform they appropriated.
This same group is now destroying left politics, with the help of (faux)activist media. They've shed almost the entire working class, and minority voters are leaving the democratic party in droves. This "new left" was pretty effective in removing Bernie Sanders as a threat and trumpeting the ill-fated Clinton in 2016. (They accepted Sanders, after forcing Sanders to accept their illiberal tenets in 2020, which neutered him.) At this point, it seems like the most likely result in their efforts to smear Yang, if successful, will be the election of Eric Adams — who probably is the most retrograde of the dem candidates. I can only think that this is what they actually want: to permanently, angrily agitate for a neoliberal status quo.
Ross, your own views on Israel and Palestine reflect whataboutism. As an American Jew myself, I also once thought this was a clever and progressive stance. Rebuke Israel but also acknowledge the complexity, Hamas, asymmetry, blah blah. And telling me to go elsewhere for this debate doesn’t work either.
Ross, how much time have you spent with Palestinians? Have you been to the West Bank at all? Or more than a few hours on a birthright trip? As Edward R. Murrow said “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.”
There aren’t two sides here or many sides. These are war crimes.
With all due respect, how is Ross doing a whataboutism? What stance do you believe he should be taking that he didn't? He said he ideally believes in a single multiethnic democratic state but that is extremely unlikely. Based on what I gather from this article he is clearly against Israeli war crimes & West Bank colonization and for the maximal peace and prosperity for both peoples. I did not get the impression that he is pro-status quo in the region. I'm just confused about your comment.
TLDR A 2021-era tweet does not work in 2021
Indeed. There's a media and Twitter movement to have all politicians make statements that would totally doom their chances in any large-scale election. The compelled speech of the damned. It's all a deeply conflicted aesthetics-disguised-as-politics scenario that ensures never winning, which would also explain some of their self-defeating messaging and sloganeering, seemingly designed to turn normies — or people with still-functional brains — off and never achieve any realistic goals).
Seems a little like irrevocably destroying the old liberal-democratic coalitions without attempting to build any new ones, don't it?
Can you imagine someone running for mayor of a major, diverse city (or for president for that matter) and ranting like Rashida Tlaib (who can often be as crazy/stupid/dangerous as Marjorie Taylor Greene to my mind) just did on the subject at hand? They be lucky to get .005% of the vote.