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Democrats Are Already “Moderate.” It’s Not Working.
(jacobin.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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politics
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I'll spot you that Corbyn was centre-left back in 2015. The current Starmer government is indistinguishable from the Tories (in no small part because a bunch of the New Labour Starmerites are literally just Tory transplants) who occasionally stake out positions to the right of Farage's fascist Reform platform.
But hey, at least you've got "Your Party" now. As soon as they stop suing each other, anyway.
Part of the problem with modern politics is that its so tied up in the News/Social Media cycle that running on "the same old idea that was as good then as it is now" is seen as bad politics. You can't just come out and day "We should hire more doctors for the NHS and pay their lowest level staff better wages" or "We need strong labor unions in the country again in order to claw back surplus value from the employer class" because that's old boring socialist slop. You can't even have a Mamdani-esque "We're going to have government run grocery stores that trade basic staples at cost of production to fight inflation" without being heckled as a radical marxist who flunked economics.
None of that gets the national media jazzed up. The only way to get people (in national media) excited is to talk about the latest Tech-Thingy and insist New Tech is going to be the panacea for all your problems. And then, every time a New Tech thing comes out, you pivot to that and insist its going to bring about the cost cutting (ie, lower wages and higher capital costs) reform everyone secretly desires.
That's the only thing that qualifies as a "Big Idea" in the eyes of national media reporters. So that's the tail our political dogs are told to chase. Forever. Nevermind that it never seems to fucking work, save to enrich a few special interests in the tech industry.
Yeah I get depressed when I see the news or politicians mention AI, as if it will solve every problem. I think LLMs can genuinely be useful but we should be realistic about them.
You mentioned Mamdani. I think what's interesting about him is that he is polling well - he could win the election, even with his big ideas. So maybe there is an appetite for big ideas from the left. Which I guess is why there have been quite a few people interested in Your Party (but yes, whether they can stop bickering and function together is yet to be seen).
He's captured a moment within the city when every single other person running sucks enormous amounts of ass. I suspect he'd get flattened by a '00s era Bloomberg or a '90s era Giuliani. But the political scene in NYC has been hollowed out. Running for office is a thankless task. Governing is an even more thankless task. Getting a job selling bitcoins to public pensions and high frequency trading tickets to the next Taylor Swift concert via some weird wholesaler app is significantly more lucrative.
Guys like Adams, Sliwa, Cuomo, and Mamdani are what's left after you've stripped state and local politics of anything except the cheapest form of bribery and the most naive form of ideological optimism.
I think I'll take naive optimism these days. It seems better than doom, gloom, and billionaires trying to own everything, while charging you more and more for essential goods and services.