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.
Bowman wasn’t great. He did vote to fund the Iron Dome a few years ago and still holds liberal zionist positions. That being said, it is disturbing how this wasn’t enough for the zionists and basically had his seat bought from him. Very bad vibes. Like electoralism is a dead end, but it somehow became even worse.
the current USA support to Israel must be too important to affort even a light zionist victory, they need the hard liners to support them now especially with their future invasion of Lebanon
ironically an invasion of lebanon would be a strategic disaster for the zionist project
This should be a lesson for the people that want to do triangulating electoralism “from the left”.
It doesn’t work. The liberal electoral apparatus is coming for you even if you give unconditional material support and publicly agree with 99% of their positions. You’ll just lose any chance you had of building a larger project that draws people in via principled agitation.
It’s also an example of how bad of an idea it is to use liberals’ political machinery that’s built on big donor funding. Bowman did not work within a left organization. He’s not a representative of a larger left project with dedicated cadres, recruiters, onboarders, political educators. He’s just a lone guy enjoying support from various groups because they kind of like what he says. That works for liberals because they’re about attracting donors to a candidate that will support the donors’ interests. They’ll keep that support by being a perfectly good little lapdog. Anyone that tries to make waves will see that rug get pulled out from under them fast.
Participation in bourgeois electoralism shouldn’t be written off but the people most interested in it make these naive mistakes. Bourgeois electoralism should be used when it can actually deliver valuable gains (this is hard but doable at a local level) and/or when it’s part of a larger organizing project focused on agitation and growth. Even if the candidate later loses, a competent org can reap benefits from either strategy.
I was a part of the group that wanted him disciplined in my local DSA chapter when the Iron Dome vote (we lost by 3 votes)… I basically used these arguments when told that he was making his position more palatable for his district, and look where that got him.
Participation in bourgeois electoralism shouldn’t be written off but the people most interested in it make these naive mistakes.
Unfortunately describes many people that I quite like. We kinda agree that this type of stuff should only be done at the local level for now.
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
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
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.*
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm
One of the things that amazes me about Lenin is how he is specifically accurate a century later.
Like there are other wise words or sage quotations that stand the test of time but they tend towards the vague. Lenin really got down to the damn joists. You’ll be reading him and he’s like “there’s this bank full of dickheads doing shady finance shit on the world stage named Deutsche Bank” and yeah, it’s that same fucking bank today doing much the same.
wake up bro we need u
the message is clear: the party line on funding genocide is nonnegotiable.
Or fight dirty and tell his supporters to stay home in November. Force AIPAC to buy both elections.
Perhaps he should.
It would most likely split the democratic vote and lead to a republican victory.
But it will send a message to Democrats that they must take progressives seriously if they want progressive votes.
Sending that same message in the presidential election would be a too high price to pay, but one House seat isn’t that bad.
Sending that same message in the presidential election would be a too high price to pay
For who? All the Palestinian children murdered by Biden’s weapon shipments?
Let’s be clear, if Biden wins then GENOCIDE is normalized amongst liberals
At that point this country is permanently cooked, there is no return from that, in no time at all another one will be normalized by the libs and then another
How are far down the queue are you? Or maybe you’re white and couldn’t care less? So do you want confident bipartisan and genocide-minded libs in charge or a dipshit who’ll immediately lose support from half the goverment, half the rich and half the population?
This is what you get giving life support to the Does Not Care party.
Look at all the dirty blood money they spent to get that Yonk elected. Disgusting.
