New Democratic Party forming?
True that.
Cut and pasted for new thread.
With the likes of Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic nomination for the NYC mayor. I am wondering if this may be the beginnings of the New Democratic Party.
When I look at the history of the party in my lifetime, I have seen it go from a southern reactionary party to a civil rights liberal party, to a centralist party. Now, with the nomination of Mamdani and Ocasio Cortez in Congress, could we be looking at a new chapter being written?
Maybe Democratic Socialist?
Comments
Or something more innately American, like "Democratic Farmer Labor"?
(No, not that exact name, but you get the gist of it. For the record, the official socialist party of supposedly more left-friendly Canada is the utterly centrist-sounding "New Democratic Party", which led me as a politically untutored child to some rather fanciful conclusions as to their political role models.)
Do you mean "a centrist party", ie. a party in the center of the political spectrum? As opposed to someone who advocates the centralization of state power, that latter being the way I usually hear "centralism" and its variations used.
Jeremy Corbyn is ONE possible template for how the career of an AOC or Mamdani might go across the pond. You're already seeing the same panic-mongering about antisemitism etc that you saw directed against JC, including the same intraparty backstabbing.
And no. I'm not some asshat Commonwealth type who thinks that the US of A always has to be at least as bad and likely worse than England. But Corbyn does provide a case-study from another anglosphere system, and everyone can draw their own conclusions about it.
While his platform is specific for NYC, Mamdani has some ideas that can appeal to Americans of his generation: affordable housing, green climate policies, taxing the super rich and large corporations, free child care,
Yes I think he is similar to Jeremy Corbyn.
Well, "...Farmer...", according to their website(where you actually have to search a bit for the full name). And, yeah, that's why I wasn't suggesting that name precisely. Plus, sad to say, I don't know how much point there is to trying to win farmers over to the left anymore.
And on that note...
Thanks to its Non-Partisan League, North Dakota is today the only government in the USA, state or federal, which operates a general-service bank. In my home province of Alberta, the United Farmers, a party rooted in the same American tradition as the NPL and DFL, also pushed for similar institutions, but a government-owned financial institution(not a bank per se, but close enough) had to wait for the kookier Social Credit Party to gain power in the 1930s.
That "bank" survives in Alberta to this day, beloved by a lotta the same rural conservatives who would screech about "socialism" if any leftist proposed one now.
I think that is a risk, but I think the politics of the Jewish communities in the respective countries, and the greater popular awareness of the plight of Palestinians, coupled with the hamfisted attempts from the Trump admin to smear anyone and everyone who isn't a Likudnik (or worse) as anti-semitic makes it less likely. Non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews seem to make up a greater proportion of US Jewry, and Zionism is tainted by association with Christian Nationalism and Evangelical eschatological fantasies.
I'd be really interested in any hard numbers that support that, or is it just that with by far the largest Jewish population outside Israel, the minority is a larger number to choose from in terms of voices?
I'd be interested to read some stats as well. Certainly, the conventional wisdom is that support for Israel is strongest in the USA, whereas Europeans etc are more skeptical, and one might assume this to be microcosmed in the respective Jewish communities as well.
Though it might be that BECAUSE the USA is more closely aligned with Israel, that paradoxically leads to ANTI-zionists being more vocal than across the pond? That would fit with the observation that in Israel itself, obviously the most pro-zionist country on Earth, criticism of Israel is much more free-wheeling than anywhere else, with respectable commentators using language that would get them branded "antisemites" in America or Europe.
I am not suggesting there will be more than two parties in the US, though it would be ideal, I am saying the Democratic itself will reform into a more socialist party.
The example I can give is up until 1968 the Democratic party was controlled by a conservative states rights movement made up from politicians in the South. Then a Peoples Party movement, made up of black leaders challenged the old system, to the point where they were able to discharge the all white delegation from Mississippi. After that, the party changed its primary system to be more inclusive of the people that were coming into the party. The new primary system caused the Democratic party to move more to the center after a brief progressive reaction.
Now that a new generation is coming up, I am thinking the party will reform to more of a socialist movement because that is where Gen Z is at.
The Hill has an excellent discussion on this possibility here.
I've struggled to find directly comparable data. The Jewish Chronicle has this from 2024:
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/british-jews-are-more-attached-to-israel-than-us-counterparts-vfwb79ir
I did look at the JPR website but couldn't find the polling referred to. Now the JC isn't a reliable source but it's unlikely they'd make this up out of whole cloth. There are obviously issues with sampling bias when trying to get the views of any population and worse ones when that population does not have agreed boundaries and reliable identifiers (and there are damn good reasons for the latter), but the data does suggest a stronger identification with modern Israel for British Jews than American ones.
The main reason I think Jeremy Corbyn is not a strong template for what could/might go wrong for Mamdani is that the UK Labour party has (or has had?) a reputation for anti-semitism that the Democratic party does not. This is not to say that he won't face such accusations; I think he'll face them because he's a Muslim, not because he's a Democrat.
The Democratic party should *not* take Mamdani's win as an indication that they should run lefty candidates all over the country. It's an indication that in state and local races they should run people who speak to the economic needs of the people in those individual places, which will mean running progressives in some places and moderates in others. It's the sharp campaign and the focus on issues that voters most care about that gave Mamdani the win. They should stop talking about the played out left vs right thing and re-brand themselves as the party who cares about the bread-and-butter issues that affect voters lives the most. They don't need a national candidate for several more years, and by that point perhaps they'll be a bit less divided and the way forward will be more clear.
If it had such a reputation it was because of the smears against Corbyn, not the cause of them. Corbyn's immediate predecessor was Jewish, and was the target of not-so-subtle anti-semitic attacks from the right.
The strongest evidence I saw for Corbyn being antisemitic was when he "liked" that photo of a mural portraying international bankers, but he immediately apologized and it was pretty clear to me that he hadn't really examined the image that closely and had likely just thought it was just a standard "capitalists are bad" thing.
It was a dumb thing to "like", since as a veteran of trotskyist or at least trotskyist-adjacent politics, he should have recognized an antisemitic caricature right off the bat. But I'm pretty sure it was just a synaptical snafu, not a malicious attack.
As I recall that particular story, it wasn't that he 'liked' the image it was that the artist had complained about the local council removing it and Corbyn had asked why it was removed without looking closely at the image. And the whole thing was a couple of years before he was leader and dug up later for the sake of mudslinging.
And we had 4+ years of this stuff, trying to create the impression of anti-semitism without any substance to back it up. There are signs of it being tried with Mamdani, but he has a couple of advantages. First up he hasn't been politically active all that long, so there aren't 40 years worth of speeches to mine for things to willfully misinterpret. Second, he's a much savvier media operator than Corbyn, who never wanted to play the game and wasn't much good when he tried. Third, whatever the whining from centrist dems just now, there's little point in fighting against him until he's next in a primary, whereas Corbyn's opponents within Labour could potentially remove him any time they could mount a challenge and were in any case willing to see a tory government rather than back him.
I have minor concern that Mamdani may be popular partly because Cuomo is seen as another old hack who has just gotten too skunked with the grime of city politics. It's not necessarily that we want a new party, but we want new people and perhaps a new organization. This may be effectively a new party, but it always has been so with the democrats, I think.
Far as Jewish folks go, for good or for ill, I'm not sure there's much use in trying to flatter Zionists anymore. We can say we'll be nice and we'll try to protect everyone as we can, but that doesn't include acting like war crimes aren't war crimes when they're committed by the Israeli regime. I am a bit worried about the inevitable onslaught of racist scaremongering, but I also have hope that a lot of us can rise above it.
And of course, I also worry that elections are moot because the machinery is already hacked by Leon.
If I wanted a general lesson? We should run honest, relatively young candidates who are motivated to do the work of politics regardless of where they're from as long as they know the people they are striving to represent. Mamdani seems to have managed to do that. Kudos to him!
Thanks. Yeah, I think our recollections are both more-or-less correct. According to wikipedia, there WAS an original meatworld controversy about the mural(ie. should it be removed?), but Corbyn's involbement in the debate was played out entirely on Facebook. Hence, my memory of it being just a like.
In his offending post, Corbyn compared the artist to Diego Rivera getting bullied by Rockefeller jr. to paint over Marx and Lenin, which seems laughably bombastic, given both the comparative quality of the murals under discussion and the political leanings of the artists.
In fairness, his praise for the artist was along the lines of "You're in good company, the same thing happened to Diego Rivera etc", not something like "This mural is the greatest synthesis of artistic skill and political insight since Man at the Crossroads." And, as I say, Corbyn clearly didn't know what he was praising.
Still, seeing Rivera's name and work linked with that of a conspiraracy-mongering crank was pretty cringeworthy. (And, yeah, I know there's some debate about how rational Rivera's own stances during Stalin vs. Trotsky were.)
I think you are talking about the murals in Coit Tower, San Francisco. See this article
First of all, note that Rockefeller was a Republican, tried and true.
Second. since Coit Tower is on the National Registry of Historical Places, will Trump try to remove the murals? And, if so I wonder how that would be received in SF.
Similar style, but no. Man At The Crossroads was planned for Rockefeller Centre, but cancelled somewhere along in the painting process, after Rivera refused to remove Marx and Lenin. You can find versions of it on-line, based, I assume, on Rivera's plans.
My understanding is that Rockefeller jr. loved Rivera's art, and I'm assuming he was aware of Rivera's politics and largely indifferent to them. According to the movie about Frieda Kahlo, it was more a question of Rockefeller being embarrassed about hosting such imagery on his building.
I think those murals(like some of Rivera's stuff) require a little context in order to get the political implications. If you showed them to Trump without explanation, he might just lump them in with mainstream realism, somewhere on the kitsch-serious continuum running from about Norman Rockwell to Edward Hopper.
And would anyone happen to know...
Are those murals referenced in the mini-series version of Tales Of The City? The only scene I've ever seen of that had a guy and a woman sitting at a table somewhere like a restaurant or something, and the guy makes a comment about the surrounding art, and says "Good old Mr. Roosevelt and the WPA."
(And, yes, I'm gonna be a totally presumptuous jerk and say that I think I pretty much understood the whole show and its audience based on that one line. Never read the books.)