Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., suffered a primary defeat Tuesday to a moderate challenger who was backed by pro-Israel groups, NBC News projected, following a bitter and expensive race that exposed the party’s divisions over the war in Gaza.
The race between Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer in New York’s 16th District drew more ad spending — $25 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact — than any other House primary in history. Nearly $15 million of that spending came from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which backed Latimer.
With 68% of the vote in, Latimer led Bowman by a wide margin, 55.7% to 44.3%.
Speaking to a roomful of his supporters Tuesday night, Bowman conceded defeat to his “opponents,” most likely a nod to big-spending outside groups, but he vowed that the broader fight for “humanity and justice” would go on.
“This race was never about me and me alone. It was never about this district and this district alone. It was always about all of us,” Bowman said. “Now, our opponents — not opponent — may have won this round, at this time, in this place. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives.”
edit: also AOC won her primary so she is staying
In a closely watched primary, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, has emerged victorious, securing her position as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 14th Congressional District.
The 34-year-old progressive, known as AOC, overcame a challenge from 66-year-old investment banker Marty Dolan, who positioned himself as a moderate alternative.
Devil’s advocate for a sec… if elections can be “bought” because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can’t work?
I mean, if we can’t trust the masses to make good decisions in elections how can we trust them to make good decisions in a post-revolutionary system? Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution or can people actually convert to our side en masse?
Devil’s advocate for a sec… if elections can be “bought” because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can’t work?
Dig in just a bit deeper here: These are people who live in New York, a state notorious for being unfailingly Democrat and also unfailingly conservative in its governance. The fact that some people have become disillusioned with elections that, their whole lives, have probably demonstrated very little change, is understandable and not a symptom of the average person somehow being simply inadequate for very basic tasks.
Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution
Mao was a radical democrat (lowercase d) and both the successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution are connected to that. Though there was direction from the top, ultimately the events that I assume you are referring to, like the Four Olds Campaign, were carried out on a grassroots basis by young activists, sometimes constructively and sometimes not. It was in many respects a battle of the progressive elements of society against the reactionary elements, one that the reactionary elements ultimately won by holding out until Their Guy took over the country, since the progressive or would-be-progressive forces were too disorganized in themselves to succeed at anything but being a force of chaos that gave reactionaries a solid causus belli for police crackdown.
At scale this was not at all Mao dictating his socialism to the common people and then beating it into them when they resisted (though some of his followers certainly did, and this mostly failed).
The Cultural Revolution is a very fraught topic, but you are doing Mao a disservice by essentially accusing him of “commandism”, an error that he was very much against.
Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, no enemy can crush us while we can crush every enemy and overcome every difficulty.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm
I’m personally struggling with the idea of “democracy” being an ideal since I have grown to hate most people. I think the majority of people in America are simply not smart enough, nor have enough basic empathy for others, to be trusted to make good decisions. Someone convince me that some form of benevolent authoritarianism isn’t the solution.
I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don’t know how intelligent most people are. You don’t know how much empathy they actually have. You’re just like a channer writing monologues online about how “normies” don’t have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are “NPCs”. Society has hurt you and you’ve grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren’t superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.
It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.
…We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory. We should fire the whole people with the conviction that China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people. There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them anyway?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we too, will touch God’s heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can’t these mountains be cleared away?"
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish
I’m really enjoying this discussion, my question is, for imperial countries like the USA, wouldn’t the two mountains that need to be removed in this case be the Americans themselves? I can understand having little to no faith in westerners, but I will never lose my faith in humanity.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about population these days. Fascists obsess over white replacement, but maybe there is actually something to this. It’s obvious, but colonial projects tend to fail sooner when they have smaller proportions of “white” people. I think for instance that Korea never had more than five or at most ten percent of its population being Japanese during the colonial period, and the portion of Americans now living in the south is much less than 1% (which kind of negates this idea). Algeria was ten percent French, apartheid was officially swept away when South Africa’s population was ten percent white, and now Israel is disappearing when half its population consists of settlers. The USA however is about 70% settler, which makes it a much tougher nut to crack, since settlers almost always think of themselves as their nationality first and barely if ever conceive of themselves as workers.
Benevolent authoritarianism is already the promise of liberal representative democracy. IMO the true problem is that people are alienated from politics after decades of neoliberalism being the leftmost position. If people didn’t feel like the entire institution of democracy was useless, I’m sure you wouldn’t see that level of detachment. Hell, just compare to Cuba where democracy is much more direct and people have much more input: it directly leads to a vastly larger portion of the population participating to protect their interests and their communities’ interests. Because they see their own civil participation in politics as an extension of their country’s revolutionary project. In America, the national political project is so transparently aligned with the interests of industrialists and billionaires that the best they can offer people is a negative promise, that we won’t do what the other scary guy is gonna do.
A benevolent dictatorship is obviously the most effective form of government, the problem is that any dictatorship can be used for good or evil and no matter how benevolent your queen or dictator or whatever you call her is, she’s gonna die eventually and now you’re rolling the dice. If you get someone less benevolent, system’s a failure. If you get someone just as benevolent but less competent and they get deposed, system’s a failure. And that’s assuming that the system even survives succession rather than devolving into old-school feudalism or capitalist ‘democracy’ or ancap utopia or whatever in a power vacuum.
The only way to ensure a benevolent government remains long-term is by spreading the power out enough that the system can shrug off the deaths and retirement of individuals and keep going along some plan that exists beyond any one person
Okay, you say, so don’t have a dictatorship of one benevolent queen but rather of a benevolent group acting in the best interests of the people. And this has the same pros and cons, but both blunted. It’s good at what it does as long as the group remains truly benevolent, but any organization can decay and become corrupt and, in a sense, die just like our hypothetical good queen.
So if we just keep following the logic down, we end up at the idea that the group responsible for the wide-ranging decisions affecting everyone’s lives should ideally be accountable to, more or less, everyone. If the ultimate goal is for the government to act in the best interests of the people, it follows that it is the people who should be the best judge of how well the government is working. If it stops doing its job properly, it is the people who notice. So it should be in the hands of the people to correct it.
I’ve thought this way for a while, and part of it might be our experiences are with the American public, who are not known for their grasp on politics, let alone much else.
I think this is mainly due to lack of education, propaganda, and outright brainwashing by neoliberal interests. Hopefully, once those things are no longer in the picture, people can be trusted to do what is genuinely in their long term best interests.
Read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Money is needed to grease the wheels of the media apparatus. He who controls the flow of money controls what people are exposed to. With it you can vilify your enemies and make a saint out of a sinner.
with how publicized this primary was in terms of israel i think zionism was the losing factor here. the majority of americans (especially older ones who vote more) are indoctrinated zionists.
bowman already had a huge incumbent advantage and way more name recognition than most reps, so there’s no reason to believe seeing the other guy’s ads more is the reason he lost (even if it certainly didnt help). if it were that easy, mike bloomberg would be president and all the other cases where interest groups spent ungodly amounts to unseat a progressive would’ve generally worked
in elections between nobodies then yeah, a lot of people literally just vote for whoever’s name they hear more
