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.
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.
I feel like this is a very boring answer, but it still needs to be given:
I think the main issue here is that you are starting from a lens of what borders on racial essentialism. The different historical examples you give have wildly different contexts (for example, the occupation of Korea being much more heavily military than the others you list, while white South Africans were overwhelmingly civilians – whatever else might be said of them). I think the greater through line here is the one that any Marxist would point to first: class. Fundamentally, these societies of brutally exploited underclasses were setting themselves up for revolt by the very fact of their exploitation itself. What sets the US apart from these societies then is not the racial divide (though of course US society is highly racialized and it factors in to things) but that it is not primarily the site of the exploitation it carries out, i.e. it is imperialist, and therefore is able to temporarily “circumvent” the consequences of the basic principles of social stratification that all capitalist systems are bound by.
As imperial decline accelerates, more and more of the population you identified as settler (idk where you got 70% specifically from, but that doesn’t really matter) is going to find themselves on the “brutally exploited” side of the above dichotomy, and from there, and with the necessary construction of dual power, it should not be difficult at all for them to be turned to the side of the colonized population as fellow exploited people.
So I believe that, in the framework of Mao’s metaphor, the American people are still our God, and the mountains are capitalism and imperialism.