NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'd probably vote for Rojas if I was a New Yorker, but let's not pretend like she has the slightest chance to even come close to winning.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'd probably vote for Rojas if I was a New Yorker, but let's not pretend like she has the slightest chance to even come close to winning.

Neither did Debs or the SDP in the 1870s, yet it was a start of something much bigger.

Hope springs eternal, I guess, but I'm gonna need evidence that this is anything more than the umpteenth third-party lefty candidate who's going to go down as a footnote and make no impact on anything.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'd probably vote for Rojas if I was a New Yorker, but let's not pretend like she has the slightest chance to even come close to winning.

Neither did Debs or the SDP in the 1870s, yet it was a start of something much bigger.

Hope springs eternal, I guess, but I'm gonna need evidence that this is anything more than the umpteenth third-party lefty candidate who's going to go down as a footnote and make no impact on anything.

Well then, let’s use an analogy

In 1885, the United Kingdom held an parliamentary election. Would you have chosen the pragmatic and expected option of the Liberals or have backed the strains that would become the Labour Party; the Lib-Labour list and Social Democratic Federation? Would you have even backed the Chartalist movement before in its split from the Liberals?

All great movements start off small, it grows if those people in the know of the need for such a movement join it. Do you want to build the American workers movement? Well here is a chance to vote for them.

Hindsight sure is 20/20, so it's pretty easy to pick one of the instance where a fringe left-wing movement grew to become a major party and ignore the hundreds of instances where that didn't happen. Not to mention that the material conditions that were driving the rise of social-democratic parties in 19th century Europe have very little to do with those affecting US society today.

Anyway, to answer your question, you bet I probably would have voted Liberal in 1885, at least assuming I was in a competitive district. Are you seriously expecting me to risk handing the country to the reactionary Tories for the off-chance that a bunch of scattered leftist movements might one day grow into a mass party?

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'd probably vote for Rojas if I was a New Yorker, but let's not pretend like she has the slightest chance to even come close to winning.

Neither did Debs or the SDP in the 1870s, yet it was a start of something much bigger.

Hope springs eternal, I guess, but I'm gonna need evidence that this is anything more than the umpteenth third-party lefty candidate who's going to go down as a footnote and make no impact on anything.

Well then, let’s use an analogy

In 1885, the United Kingdom held an parliamentary election. Would you have chosen the pragmatic and expected option of the Liberals or have backed the strains that would become the Labour Party; the Lib-Labour list and Social Democratic Federation? Would you have even backed the Chartalist movement before in its split from the Liberals?

All great movements start off small, it grows if those people in the know of the need for such a movement join it. Do you want to build the American workers movement? Well here is a chance to vote for them.

Hindsight sure is 20/20, so it's pretty easy to pick one of the instance where a fringe left-wing movement grew to become a major party and ignore the hundreds of instances where that didn't happen. Not to mention that the material conditions that were driving the rise of social-democratic parties in 19th century Europe have very little to do with those affecting US society today.

Anyway, to answer your question, you bet I probably would have voted Liberal in 1885, at least assuming I was in a competitive district. Are you seriously expecting me to risk handing the country to the reactionary Tories for the off-chance that a bunch of scattered leftist movements might one day grow into a mass party?

We’re in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and have had continuous working class uprisings in Black Lives Matter and the fresh waves of strikes since the start. The level of class consciousness in the United States is at an all time high.

Off the bat you are abandoning any real chance at building the movement, instead taking the easy route and hoping that by being subservient, you can get the concessions you want through appeasement instead of real work. That is some serious lack of imagination even with all the hindsight in front of you.

Imagination is the ability to conceive of what might be. I'd like to think I have plenty of that, but it's pretty useless without the ability to assess how likely those possibilities are and what it would actually take for them to happen. You don't seem to have any concrete argument for how we get from A to B, just questionable historical parallels and "use your imagination" paeans. I'm sorry, but after 20 years of seeing the left lose and retreat, I'm going to need a bit more than that.

As for the idea of class consciousness being "at an all time high", I really don't see that. Strikes are nice, and I certainly wish them best, but they tend to be highly localized and aren't part of a broad labor movement that is capable of making demands at a national or even branch level. Union membership is still at an all-time low and it's telling that Democrats are feeling no major pressure to enact the PRO act or any other pro-union legislation. Meanwhile a growing share of the working class (and not even just the white working-class) is embracing reactionary politics. There's no fatality to any of this, but I'd like to see an actual plan of action to change at least some of these factors before I'm going to put serious hope into it.