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.)
One interesting depiction that caught my eye was the immigrant workers out in the field looked Northern European. I remarked about that to one of the guides, she said that in the 30s many farm laborers were Northern European migrants. Probably would not see that now.
No, the Coit Tower murals are not the ones mentioned in Tales of the City. Those murals—frescos, actually, though the character you remember saying the line about the WPA called them “muriels”—are at the Beach Chalet.
I can pretty confidently say you did not understand the whole show and its audience based on seeing that one scene, much less based on that one line.
The city of San Francisco owns Coit Tower. The federal government does not have the power to alter sites it doesn't own. Being on the National Registry is mainly symbolic for properties that don't generate income and thus don't stand to benefit from federal tax incentives, though it does sometimes make the site qualify for certain grants. (The church I worked for is on the National Registry, and a good friend was the historic preservation officer for the Virginia City Historic District in Nevada for a number of years.)
Thanks. I'll check 'em out.
Misconceptions banished, and thank you not calling me a totally presumptuous jerk.
(I was gonna try and dilute my claim down to "Sorta thing that would show on PBS rather on NBC", but come to think of it, I can't quite recall if it was PBS. And I do recall WPA art being discussed once on NBC, on Family Ties.)
To the point of Mamdani going for a higher office at some time, the most he can gain would be a Senator for New York. He was born in South Africa I believe.
Still, some of his actions, like asking for the people's vote should be emulated by the Democratic party.
The line you remember is pretty much a throw-away line; it maybe tells you a little about the character who said it and perhaps about how San Francisco is treated almost like another character (the reference is more about the personality of San Francisco than about the WPA per se), but it really conveys nothing about what the story overall is about.
Now, if you’d said that you knew what the stories were about simply by knowing they’re about a group of friends in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, that might have been believable.
Yeah, I didn't have any real idea what the story was about. More just "Aimed at the kinda people who would care about the WPA or at least find it an interesting thing to learn about."
I didn't know that some of the productions were British in origin. I did know the rather random fact that Armistead Maupin had once worked for Jesse Helms.
Armistead Maupin’s father was a lawyer in Raleigh, NC. His father’s law firm was a politically involved, conservative-leaning firm. Jesse Helms was the manager of WRAL-TV in Raleigh. (I remember his editorials at the end of the evening news on WRAL.) Maupin, who wrote for The Daily Tar Heel student newspaper while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, worked for a short time for Helms at the TV station after Maupin’s graduation in 1966, before Helms was elected to the US Senate in 1972.
Just to be clear, I knew the stories were about a buncha people living in SF, and I did not think the point was at all to educate the audience about the WPA. More like "Yep, that's the kinda dialogue you see on PBS shows."
Kinda like someone name-dropping the Group Of Seven on a CBC drama. I wouldn't expect to see that on CTV.
And, you know, I honestly wasn't thinking about your status as a tar-heeler when I mentioned Maupin's connection with Helms. But it's mentioned in Randy Shilts' book Conduct Unbecoming, and is in fact the only passage in that book I have read. (Maybe you see a pattern here?) Thanks for the info.
Right continent, wrong country.
I'm pretty sure Cuomo asked for people's votes, though I'm not going to subject myself to his advertising and find out.
What Mamdani did that was different was rely on earned attention instead of purchased attention. He made videos that went viral on TikTok and Instagram and spanked a candidate who spent a crap-ton of money on advertising. Democrats spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to reach young voters and low-information voters - they don't watch the news, never mind read the papers, but they've got phones and they consume algorithmic social media.
😱 Please! It’s “Tar Heel” (or if you must, “Tarheel”), not “tar-heeler.”
I know, I know. It was just a whimsically self-aggrandizing way of soliciting opinions on the accuracy of my impressions. I like to think I have a talent for extrapolating from isolated details to an overall work, so it's fun to test that out sometimes, and I assume there are people reading who like the work and are happy to talk about it.
re: "Tar Heel"
Okay, THAT one actually is slightly embarrassing. Because I personally love to privately snicker at clueless posers who try to use concepts and terms picked up via mass media but almost entirely alien to their actual cultural horizons. Sincere thanks for the correction.
But this is all thread drift, so, to quote Wendy Torrance, over and out.
Did Jack Layton actually publically advocate dropping the "New" from "New Democratic Party", or was that just a rumour that circulated around?
That's a rumor.
Thanks.
I think at the time, I looked up the list, and there were not many parties with the one-word name "Democratic" which could be considered legitimately socialist. I can say with some authority that the Korean party of that name pulled in quite a few of the aging left-wing street fighters from the 1980s, but that's a pretty standard pattern for left-liberal parties everywhere, see eg. the career arc of Tom Hayden.
Kampala, Uganda.
This comment is really making Republicans climb the wall, while attracting Gen Z voters in key to his success in my book.
Of note, Mamdani got a good portion of the Jewish vote even through he is Muslim.
Not much danger of that. They seem to be taking it as an indication that they should stamp out any hint of progressivism before it spreads.
Why is it 25 Senators have already earned 90% or above on crucial votes by the Progressive score card kept by Progressive Punch? All Democrats, of course. Would not take but one new progressive senator to give progressives control of the Democratic Caucus.
Why can Progressive Democrats take control of Congress in the next mid-election? Look at Trumps Big Beautiful Bill.
Because the Democratic donor class doesn't like it (insert cursing here). What's fun is that Mamdani was massively outspent by Cuomo and still won. Harris outspent Trump and lost. Musk spent a lot of money in Wisconsin and didn't get his way. If earned attention is more valuable going forward than purchased attention (ads), maybe we won't need to overturn Citizens United to undo the stranglehold of money on our politics. (I'm feeling optimistic this morning.)
As to progressive candidates, may we have as many as we can get elected. But drawing a lot of conclusions from this one primary in New York City, a place very unlike anywhere else in the country, makes no sense.
A moderate won the Democratic gubernatorial primary in New Jersey. Mikie Sherill was a naval aviator, then a lawyer, then a Congressional rep. That district has been a Republican seat since 1984. You don't take seats like that by running progressive candidates - you run the Democrats you can get elected. But we're not talking about her and why she was elected, though I'd argue she's just as important as who might be NYC mayor. The lesson IMO is not to run progressives everywhere. The lessons are to run the right candidate for the particular seat and to stop thinking raising and spending a lot of money on ads is going to get someone elected.
In 2020 LA County elected a progressive district attorney, George Gascon, and he wasn't re-elected because he was too far forward of public sentiment. People were open to his ideas because of the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests, but that faded when the rank and file prosecutors in his office rebelled against his policies and when crime went up (not his fault crime went up, but trying to implement progressive policies in the DA's office when crime is spiking is a very hard sell). And now the county is facing a bunch of expensive lawsuits, some already settled, from prosecutors who say he retaliated when they opposed his policies, saying they were unlawful, mainly in their violation of prosecutorial discretion. One deputy DA says he sent armed investigators to her home with a notice saying she had violated policy when she gave an interview to local the local Fox channel (which is not as rabidly crazy as the national Fox News). Gascon's ban on three-strikes enhancements was ruled illegal, and the injunction was upheld on appeal.
The LA city council has 14 Democrats and one independent. In just the last few years, one pleaded guilty to a bunch of felonies, one was convicted, and a third has been indicted - all on various corruption charges. And there was a huge scandal a couple of years ago in which three Latino members were recorded in private conversations saying racist things about Black people and indegenous people from Oaxaca, Mexico.
So I'm not all misty-eyed about progressive Democrats.
Face it, there are unsavory people who while watch for a incoming wave and take advantage of it, be they conservative or liberal, even progressive.
But there is a beauty in our electoral system in that, in time, those people will often be voted out, or be put in check through the courts, or even impeached and convicted--as in the cases of a few judges in the past--just waiting for a sitting president to go through that experience.