Leftism

Not Your Grandfather’s Socialism

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We now have an open socialist, Zohran Mamdani, who may well become the next mayor of New York City. Mamdani has made his views on economic organization pretty clear, speaking about “seizing the means of production.”

Increasingly, though, I see posts from Left-oriented people who don’t seem to realize that production is necessary at all. The assertion is made that abundance is the natural state of man, and scarcity is caused by capitalists fencing everything off to deliberately create scarcity. I saw one particularly exemplary post along these lines I was intending to cite, but it seems to have disappeared. Here’s another post, along the same lines though not quite as extreme: Link.

For roughly 190,000 of humanity’s 200,000 years, this was simply how life worked. Food was shared because people understood their interdependence. Communities ensured everyone’s survival not through legal obligation or market exchange, but through social bonds and mutual recognition of common humanity…One day your food isn’t guaranteed. Common lands are ‘enclosed’, stolen and claimed as private property. The next day it is under someone else’s control. Shared granaries become privately owned warehouses.

In reality, of course, your food was never guaranteed, as any American Indian or European villager could have explained based on personal experience. And that “recognition of common humanity” tended to be strongly limited by tribal boundaries.

Richard Fulmer explained:

Your view of the past is just a bit romantic. It ignores floods, droughts, famines, plagues, bandits, and wars; imagines that no one was ever exiled for refusing to work; that weak or sickly infants weren’t sometimes killed or left to die; that the elderly were never abandoned to starvation or the wolves; and that peasants didn’t live with their livestock, sharing parasites and disease.

…and offered some ‘slightly more realistic’ versions of the stories in the original post.

There’s a lot of the abundance-is-natural kind of thinking floating around at present. Here’s another example.

Earlier generations of leftists got a lot wrong, but generally  at least understood  that we were not born into the Garden of Eden and that abundance needs to be created–it is not and never was there auomatically. Here is the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, writing about the importance to humanity of what he called the Machine Age.

What can be done to remedy the failure to understand that abundance isn’t automatic?  Some have suggested that the answer lies in the universal teaching of economics in high school and college. Maybe this could help, but equally or more important, IMO, would be teaching the history of technology–with ‘technology’ broadly defined. There needs to be a better understanding of what it really meant to be at the mercy of nature unmediated by human knowledge and skill.

Your thoughts?

Enablers of Mamdani: America’s Universities

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Supporters for Mamdani tended to be more college-educated than those who voted for Cuomo; many have graduate degrees. One might find this surprising, since university graduates are supposed to have more knowledge about things like history and economics…and more ability to think clearly about things. But actually, it makes sense that Mamdani’s greatest strength is among college graduates, especially young college graduates. Why? Several reasons:

First, there’s student debt. A lot of people believed the promises about the right educational credentials practically guaranteeing a future income which would make any educational debt incurred almost trivial by comparison. Now they’ve found out that it isn’t so, and they are angry not at the educational institutions that benefited from their tuition, but on broader factors: ‘society’, or ‘boomers’, or, especially, ‘capitalism.’

Second, the education that many of these former students received encouraged them not only in an anti-capitalist attitude but in a broader hostility toward American society, hence priming them for a sense of resentment and an affinity for those promoting revolutionary change. In effect, this indoctrination largely immunized the universities they attended from blowback directed against themselves.

Third, there is a sense of entitlement coupled with a limited sense of options: the idea has been broadly promoted that college is the way to go for career success. At the same time the idea has been promoted that noncollege jobs (and noncollege people) are inherently inferior.  There is a feeling that “I did what they told me and now look where I am.”

Here’s an interesting email that Peter Thiel wrote to some Meta executives and board members back in 2020. Excerpt:

Nick — I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

College debt has contributed to the negative-capital phenomenon, and what is taught in all too many colleges has contributed to the feeling that it’s impossible to get out of the negative capital trap.

Of course, Mamdani may not win the NY mayor’s race: only a small percentage of New Yorkers actually voted for him, and his extremism is sure to drive considerable pushback. But I’m afraid that we haven’t seen the last of the phenomenon he represents.  This post notes that:

The kids who were radicalised and indoctrinated into Critical Theory at elite universities in the 2010s are now in their mid 30s. And they’re starting to climb the ladder. Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York is just the first of many, I fear.

The marketing approach taken by the Mamadani campaign also bears examining.  @signulll says:

one under discussed part of the mamdani campaign was the usage of the video filters. every video used the same soft, humanizing tone consistently. it crafted a world around him. an aesthetic, almost utopian one. close shots, warm tones, delicate pacing.

it framed him as the delivery vehicle for a better feeling reality. beautifully cinematic. no surprise,

his mom is a well known filmmaker. this was vibe warfare. & he won. you have to understand how modern culture works in order to partake in it no matter what your underlying mission is.

…to which @Olivia_Reingold responded:

Filters are just the beginning.

Zohran is the director of a Hype House first and politician second.

From what I can tell, his team can shoot, produce, and edit a reel within an hour. That means there is about a ~60 minute lag time between when he appears in public, shaking hands in a given location somewhere in the city and the moment it goes live on his various channels.

Not every video of his gets uploaded to every one of his pages. They understood that their recent “Hot Girls For Zohran” video, in which esteemed political theorist Emily Ratajkowski declared that Zohran is like so totally cool, would preform better on Instagram than X, and so they pushed it primarily via Instagram reels and by adding @emrata as a collaborator to the post. T

hey are the kind of operation that would never be caught dead uploading a horizontal video to Instagram. This is a vertical-first shop. It’s the kind of team that makes Trump’s viral TikTok dance (the iconic shimmy) look cute. Zohran has introduced a new era that has instantly outdated that craze, making it look ‘so 2024’ in retrospect.

You’ll notice he cultivated virility without a signature dance, gesture, or gimmick. There was no TikTok dance that spread like wildfire. Merely supporting him became the meme.

All you need is a look at Cuomo’s feed to understand why the man got cooked.

(‘virility’ corrected to ‘vitality’ in comments)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is reminded of a filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl and her accomplishments in shifting the political winds in Germany. And no, I’m not asserting that Mamdani is equivalent to Riefenstahl’s client (although there are some points of similarity), but making the point that the aesthetics of the way that something is presented–in video or otherwise–can have a lot to do with how successful it is in the marketplace.

Your thoughts?

 

Libertarians vs Communitarians?…Is This Really the Primary Split?

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@TedThorson4506 says:

The current American Left (communitarian) and the current American Right (libertarian) are diametrically opposed politically, and thus have no common ground. No reconciliation is possible.

…which inspired @michelletandler to post a poll: is reconciliation possible?  As of this writing, the voting stands at:

–Yes, 29%
–No, 42%
–Maybe, 25%
–Other, 3%

I voted ‘other’, because I’m not sure that ‘libertarians vs communitarians’ really represents the primary factor in the split we are seeing. As I said at Michelle’s post:

I don’t think the current American Left is really communitarian. They use the term ‘communities’ a lot, but their idea of a ‘community’ is basically a demographically-defined group, or a category of people defined by sexual behavior.

What do you think…does ‘libertarians vs communitarians’ really capture the primary factor in the split we are seeing?  And, if not, what factor(s) are primary in this split? And, whatever those factors may be, is there a real chance for reconciliation?

 

The Persistence of the Left

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Benjamin Kerstein writes:

”The American public has clearly rejected the RGA’s (Red-Green Alliance) barbarous rhetoric and violence; universities have cracked down on illegal protests on their campuses, albeit unwillingly; Congressional investigations and hearings have savaged the Alliance’s claims to moral authority; and the election of Donald Trump is seen, rightly, as a total repudiation of the progressive left’s ideology and agenda….

“…As of yet, the RGA has very much not been stopped completely. It continues to fester in its totalitarian citadels of academia, the NGO industry, and the fringes of the American political establishment like the Democratic Socialists of America. Racist hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine are still very active. The Democratic party politicians the RGA owns are planning their next move. In short, the RGA is regrouping and reassessing its situation, contemplating its next steps and perhaps a new strategy. It will be back.”

Kerstein states that part of that strategy is to run a favored candidate in the 2028 presidential cycle, a successor to Bernie Sanders if you will, in the form of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Now I don’t think very highly of Sandy “Squeaky” Cortez. We’re at the claw-machine part of the 2028 cycle where seemingly attractive names are bandied about and grasped for, without any idea if they are viable candidates in terms of exposure or fund-raising. I have a feeling that AOC will wear as well on the campaign trail as Kamala did in 2019. Most people forget that Kamala pulled in a lot of money and hype when she started in 2019 and never got a delegate.

However, Kerstein brings out two key points.

The first is that the totalitarian Left still lives. It may have been routed in 2024, but it was able to retreat in good order into its redoubts in higher ed and NGOs. More importantly it still possesses the key elements of mass and cohesion. Given those two attributes, it will continue to play a role in Democratic politics. Its defeat was telling, but not decisive. It will be back. In fact there is nothing in American social and political history from the past 50 years that would lead anyone to believe that they won’t play a role in 2028 and for years to come.

The second is something that is a bit more chilling:

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