The suggestion of Schlozman and Rosenfeld that Democrats inherit consultants after each contest may have a wider reach and longer history that just the past 20 years. Your comment that grassroots organizing may effectively confront this trend may also appear in the recent Seattle campaigns for mayor and city council. Here as in other unaffordable US cities, the ground games of working class organizers struggle against the consultant class who represent both real estate and technofeudalist interests. Redefining the commons is on the agenda now.
Social media encourages propaganda and mob violence. The paranoid right have more quickly adapted to these new circumstances of public discourse because they more closely resemble their politics.
Mamdani ran as a Democratic candidate though which I think is important. He probably would not have been as successful running third party.
I also think relying on charismatic candidates is problematic. We need people to vote for humdrum candidates too.
The truth is that the Democratic Party is a brokerage party of the non-insane and there are often nearly unsolvable conflicts between various Democratic groups in each election, both local and national. Part of SF revolted because the rest of the city decided to turn a stretch of highway to nowhere in their neighborhood into a park.
A member of the Board of Supervisors was recalled over this. The park proposition passed overwhelmingly but local rules allow for a revolt.
The role of the Democratic politician is often as an intra-party mediator. We need different candidates for different areas. Spanberger for Virginia, Sherrill for New Jersey, Mamdani in NYC
"they want to build a flat earth" is the ominous gut punch line to dan olson's video essay on flat earthers tracing their evolutionary trajectory from casual conspiracism to qanon to maga fascism
as a movement what these people are doing is playing a totalizing game of mass make-believe in which aimless nobodies get to be somebodies embroiled in a noble, cosmic morality tale, and they are compelled to dragoon all of society into this collective fantasy role-play to make it "real" and "true" in a postmodern sense
“My hope for the Trump era was always that it would spark a civic and small-d democratic renaissance in response. As big institutions fail or cower, we’re seeing more and more of that.”
I agree with this, but I also believe that it’s a bit utopian to think that the political parties are going to go away or that there is some sort of ready mechanism by which to substitute them absent Trump and MAGA autocracy.
Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024 because the Dems, in the form of Obama/Clinton/Biden/Harris, failed to act in any way sufficient to the Dem Party having been complicit in 40 years of the middle/working class being financially undermined and politically marginalized by Neoliberal Trickle-down economics.
Inflation and affordability have now been adopted as the main issues for the disenchanted American middle by mainstream pollsters, economists, and pundits as the culprit. This is such weak tea. It turns EPI-phenomena into explanations for popular disenchantment that is so much more fundamental and, at least to me, obvious. ‘Inflation,’ ‘prices,’ and ‘the cost of living ‘ are just proxies in the popular mind for how precarious, exhausting , demeaning, and impossible for many tens of millions of Americans is the struggle to ‘make it in America.” Please read that sentence again — and again.
We, the professional and managerial elite have arrogated to ourselves the keys to relative security and prosperity in a socio-political order that values what we do most. And we continue to fail to appreciate how complicit we are in the decades-long evisceration of the middle/working class.
How to “Make it in America” as a middle/working class person/family is the most important ‘popular’ issue over the last 40 years. It spans well more than a generation. And as Tuesday showed, America’s middle/working class (and youth, more generally) are still waiting for one of the parties to actually champion and act in serious, epic, and epoch-defining ways to ensure that the average person can actually ‘Make it in America.’
I’m entirely confounded by the continuing failure of the punditocracy — let alone the Democratic Party — to understand this and to insist that the party recast and recommit itself to this simple, obvious, and overwhelmingly important cause of being the party of Making it America.
I pretty much agree with you, but tone is important. The PMC has been enforcing a genteel tone in Democratic politics--one which does not appeal to people in precarity. You can't compete in democracy without a fair amount of demagoguery. The PMC does not like demagoguery. Appeals to anger or resentment are forbidden by the PMC. Their ideal-type politician is a Cory Booker-style puritan. (Booker is pretty good on substance, however.) Sanders' tone--ANGRY!--is probably more important than his New Deal-ish substance.
And yet Mamdani’s tone was always calm, and he gave his answers with a smile. We don’t know what’s coming next or what horror the next 12 months may bring, but I’ll work within the Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party to make government accountable and responsive. It’s not a big ask, but ofc the devil is in the details.
This is vastly overstating Democrats’ role in our rightward economic turn since Reagan. Democrats largely aren’t neoliberals in the Reaganite sense; but the national consensus has been.
I get your point about a Democratic rightward shift. But that’s not what I’m arguing. The party didn’t shift right so much as 1. slip right into accommodating to and furthering neoliberalism. And 2., become the party of the managerial and professional elite, while pretty much abandoning championing the wellbeing of the working classes. The combination has meant that Trump’s arrival with the message of ‘a plague on both their houses’ generated an enormous groundswell of support to the point of a cult-like following. I think it’s hard to overstate how much damage perceived Dem Party indifference to the wellbeing of‘regular folks’ has done in these circumstances.
This excellent column may be representative of a big turn in thinking that has been accelerated by the Democrats caving on the shutdown. But wasn't the cave just a few of the Democrats? No, people are sensing something deeply lodged in the Democratic Party. The conventional thinking was that our whole problem is MAGA-Republicans: the Republican Party has to be burned to the ground. True enough, but a lot of people are beginning to feel that the focus should be on radically reforming the Democratic Party. For starters, let's judge candidates in primaries by how much corporations pay to support or defeat them.
On the domination of propagandists: this profile of Laura Loomer in the New Yorker describes how she's not just an influential nut, but apparently paid to take positions on behalf of lobbying corporate interests. So not just crazy but corrupt.
Free link via Drudge, whose transformation from anti-Clinton to anti-Trump has been a welcome surprise.
My concern with the Republican’s reliance on propaganda is that we don’t have a mainstream media that seems concerned with combatting the falsehoods contained within it.
As someone said awhile back (and I have often quoted since), the Republicans declared a war on truth and objective reality, and the media chose to cover the conflict.
Excellent work, as usual, here. The decline of American political parties has been happening for a long long time and we may be now approaching an ending. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who in the 80s and 90s wrote a column for the Japanese newspaper where I work, used to talk to me about this 40 years ago.
In an essay after the GOP and Gingrich took control of the House in the 90s, he wrote.
"The United States is not likely to be entering a period of Republican dominance. It is more likely to be entering a period of deepening political instability. The electronic technologies, especially television, the computerized public opinion poll and the fax machine reduce the need to maintain political parties in order to organize and mobilize the voters."
"... My hope for the Trump era was always that it would spark a civic and small-d democratic renaissance in response. As big institutions fail or cower, we’re seeing more and more of that."
A good conclusion, as far as it goes.
The bigger the institution, the bigger their bureaucracies. The Bureaucrats lust for power, money, and graft do to those institutions what cancer does to our bodies.
The worst are those funded by coercive government with no checks. Second worse are the NGO's and "private" corporations whose only hope is to be saved from their internal rot by buying political monopoly and favors.
Political activism of any type only strengthens that bankrupt cycle.
Shunning politics and embracing the grey market shuts down the blood flow to toxic actors.
I read some more on Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. The idea that the Democratic party's main problem is ineffectuality in pulling all their constituencies together takes a whole new layer in the context of the shutdown caving. Even if it's not entirely his fault, it frames Chuck Schumer as the François Hollande of the Democratic Party, a consensus seeker trying to hold his party together on the lowest common denominator... Which of course only accelerates the disintegration, because the party, or the caucus, would need a consensus builder.
The part on the "advocacy revolution" and the boom of interest / lobbying groups in the 70s is interesting too. The current MAGA propaganda apparatus seems to me to be the hybrid child of the New Right resentment politics propaganda and of the sophisticated corporate public relations / lobbying industry, which mastered coming up with alternative facts far before Trump was in power (cf the tobacco industry : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10731746/)
Just for the sake of steelmanning the counterargument here and perhaps reflecting my ignorance of the NYC mayoral race: is Mamdani not fundamentally a triumph of social media content creation as a political tool?
The ideology is very different of course, but I look at Mamdani as someone who seems to have cracked the code of leveraging the present media environment that has so rewarded the Bongino's and Libs of TikTok's toward more humane, prosocial ends. That's very distinct from saying he has created something real world and face-to-face though, which isn't really my perception of him or any of the modern Bernie progeny of left-wing politicians, congenial as they may be.
His campaign was also extremely grounded. He raised 90 000 people to canvass for him and he reached out to everybody (I mean, he even reached out to Trump !). He and his teams showed a great culture of politics in general, NYC politics, municipal policies and used their social media to share these (social media as well as other medias and actions on the ground : Morris Katz, Mamdani's strategist, said that nowadays in politics you had to be everywhere, on social media, on TV, in the streets, to reach everybody, because people's media consumption is so atomized). And it's really interesting to watch his current videos, because he's very aware of the local and global stakes and wants to leverage the enthusiasm and grassroot engagement in his campaign for greater aims : for success as a mayor, and for a rise of much larger civic involvement elsewhere.
His campaign's style will be imitated, its substance will be harder to replicate. But let's hope it sets a precedent !
I mean, to put a fine point on it, if a door-knocking volunteer army of smiling young libs were the key to electoral success, the Democratic Party would already be holding 134 Senate seats.
As someone who has done a lot of electoral canvassing, that's not really real-world organizing either, and it ranges from empty calories to actively counterproductive.
I don't mean to say that as a criticism of Mamdani, that would be a way in which he was just adopting the going Dem best practices, but the thing that really made him stand out was the way in which he was able to leverage the new media environment as the means of communicating who he was and what he was about with a fluency I haven't seen in a left wing figure.
Some of that is narrow and specific and won't translate outside this race, but some flavor of it is just very obviously the future of the way this game is played.
I won't comment too much on the canvassing because I was not on the ground, but the same way you can do online videos that are good or are bad, are all canvassing operations the same ? Isn't raising 90 000 people out of nowhere for a local election a feat ?
And the videos were indeed extremely effective communication, but they wouldn't have amounted to much without the substance of what was expressed and Zohran Mamdani's evident skills as a politic. The most important points imo are both his strong political backbone & culture and, as you said, his fluency and capacity to adapt to all environments and to defy expectations. A less adept candidate may have done good videos but would have done poorly in meetings with NY business figures, or when discussing wonkish public policies, or in fast paced Gaydar interviews, or on Fox News, or when meeting orthodox Jewish leaders, or when meeting muslim leaders, or when talking to bodega owners...
The suggestion of Schlozman and Rosenfeld that Democrats inherit consultants after each contest may have a wider reach and longer history that just the past 20 years. Your comment that grassroots organizing may effectively confront this trend may also appear in the recent Seattle campaigns for mayor and city council. Here as in other unaffordable US cities, the ground games of working class organizers struggle against the consultant class who represent both real estate and technofeudalist interests. Redefining the commons is on the agenda now.
Social media encourages propaganda and mob violence. The paranoid right have more quickly adapted to these new circumstances of public discourse because they more closely resemble their politics.
Mamdani ran as a Democratic candidate though which I think is important. He probably would not have been as successful running third party.
I also think relying on charismatic candidates is problematic. We need people to vote for humdrum candidates too.
The truth is that the Democratic Party is a brokerage party of the non-insane and there are often nearly unsolvable conflicts between various Democratic groups in each election, both local and national. Part of SF revolted because the rest of the city decided to turn a stretch of highway to nowhere in their neighborhood into a park.
A member of the Board of Supervisors was recalled over this. The park proposition passed overwhelmingly but local rules allow for a revolt.
The role of the Democratic politician is often as an intra-party mediator. We need different candidates for different areas. Spanberger for Virginia, Sherrill for New Jersey, Mamdani in NYC
"they want to build a flat earth" is the ominous gut punch line to dan olson's video essay on flat earthers tracing their evolutionary trajectory from casual conspiracism to qanon to maga fascism
as a movement what these people are doing is playing a totalizing game of mass make-believe in which aimless nobodies get to be somebodies embroiled in a noble, cosmic morality tale, and they are compelled to dragoon all of society into this collective fantasy role-play to make it "real" and "true" in a postmodern sense
“My hope for the Trump era was always that it would spark a civic and small-d democratic renaissance in response. As big institutions fail or cower, we’re seeing more and more of that.”
I agree with this, but I also believe that it’s a bit utopian to think that the political parties are going to go away or that there is some sort of ready mechanism by which to substitute them absent Trump and MAGA autocracy.
Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024 because the Dems, in the form of Obama/Clinton/Biden/Harris, failed to act in any way sufficient to the Dem Party having been complicit in 40 years of the middle/working class being financially undermined and politically marginalized by Neoliberal Trickle-down economics.
Inflation and affordability have now been adopted as the main issues for the disenchanted American middle by mainstream pollsters, economists, and pundits as the culprit. This is such weak tea. It turns EPI-phenomena into explanations for popular disenchantment that is so much more fundamental and, at least to me, obvious. ‘Inflation,’ ‘prices,’ and ‘the cost of living ‘ are just proxies in the popular mind for how precarious, exhausting , demeaning, and impossible for many tens of millions of Americans is the struggle to ‘make it in America.” Please read that sentence again — and again.
We, the professional and managerial elite have arrogated to ourselves the keys to relative security and prosperity in a socio-political order that values what we do most. And we continue to fail to appreciate how complicit we are in the decades-long evisceration of the middle/working class.
How to “Make it in America” as a middle/working class person/family is the most important ‘popular’ issue over the last 40 years. It spans well more than a generation. And as Tuesday showed, America’s middle/working class (and youth, more generally) are still waiting for one of the parties to actually champion and act in serious, epic, and epoch-defining ways to ensure that the average person can actually ‘Make it in America.’
I’m entirely confounded by the continuing failure of the punditocracy — let alone the Democratic Party — to understand this and to insist that the party recast and recommit itself to this simple, obvious, and overwhelmingly important cause of being the party of Making it America.
I pretty much agree with you, but tone is important. The PMC has been enforcing a genteel tone in Democratic politics--one which does not appeal to people in precarity. You can't compete in democracy without a fair amount of demagoguery. The PMC does not like demagoguery. Appeals to anger or resentment are forbidden by the PMC. Their ideal-type politician is a Cory Booker-style puritan. (Booker is pretty good on substance, however.) Sanders' tone--ANGRY!--is probably more important than his New Deal-ish substance.
And yet Mamdani’s tone was always calm, and he gave his answers with a smile. We don’t know what’s coming next or what horror the next 12 months may bring, but I’ll work within the Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party to make government accountable and responsive. It’s not a big ask, but ofc the devil is in the details.
This is vastly overstating Democrats’ role in our rightward economic turn since Reagan. Democrats largely aren’t neoliberals in the Reaganite sense; but the national consensus has been.
I get your point about a Democratic rightward shift. But that’s not what I’m arguing. The party didn’t shift right so much as 1. slip right into accommodating to and furthering neoliberalism. And 2., become the party of the managerial and professional elite, while pretty much abandoning championing the wellbeing of the working classes. The combination has meant that Trump’s arrival with the message of ‘a plague on both their houses’ generated an enormous groundswell of support to the point of a cult-like following. I think it’s hard to overstate how much damage perceived Dem Party indifference to the wellbeing of‘regular folks’ has done in these circumstances.
This excellent column may be representative of a big turn in thinking that has been accelerated by the Democrats caving on the shutdown. But wasn't the cave just a few of the Democrats? No, people are sensing something deeply lodged in the Democratic Party. The conventional thinking was that our whole problem is MAGA-Republicans: the Republican Party has to be burned to the ground. True enough, but a lot of people are beginning to feel that the focus should be on radically reforming the Democratic Party. For starters, let's judge candidates in primaries by how much corporations pay to support or defeat them.
On the domination of propagandists: this profile of Laura Loomer in the New Yorker describes how she's not just an influential nut, but apparently paid to take positions on behalf of lobbying corporate interests. So not just crazy but corrupt.
Free link via Drudge, whose transformation from anti-Clinton to anti-Trump has been a welcome surprise.
https://archive.is/BgCW8
My concern with the Republican’s reliance on propaganda is that we don’t have a mainstream media that seems concerned with combatting the falsehoods contained within it.
As someone said awhile back (and I have often quoted since), the Republicans declared a war on truth and objective reality, and the media chose to cover the conflict.
Excellent work, as usual, here. The decline of American political parties has been happening for a long long time and we may be now approaching an ending. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who in the 80s and 90s wrote a column for the Japanese newspaper where I work, used to talk to me about this 40 years ago.
In an essay after the GOP and Gingrich took control of the House in the 90s, he wrote.
"The United States is not likely to be entering a period of Republican dominance. It is more likely to be entering a period of deepening political instability. The electronic technologies, especially television, the computerized public opinion poll and the fax machine reduce the need to maintain political parties in order to organize and mobilize the voters."
"... My hope for the Trump era was always that it would spark a civic and small-d democratic renaissance in response. As big institutions fail or cower, we’re seeing more and more of that."
A good conclusion, as far as it goes.
The bigger the institution, the bigger their bureaucracies. The Bureaucrats lust for power, money, and graft do to those institutions what cancer does to our bodies.
The worst are those funded by coercive government with no checks. Second worse are the NGO's and "private" corporations whose only hope is to be saved from their internal rot by buying political monopoly and favors.
Political activism of any type only strengthens that bankrupt cycle.
Shunning politics and embracing the grey market shuts down the blood flow to toxic actors.
Go for it!
I read some more on Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. The idea that the Democratic party's main problem is ineffectuality in pulling all their constituencies together takes a whole new layer in the context of the shutdown caving. Even if it's not entirely his fault, it frames Chuck Schumer as the François Hollande of the Democratic Party, a consensus seeker trying to hold his party together on the lowest common denominator... Which of course only accelerates the disintegration, because the party, or the caucus, would need a consensus builder.
The part on the "advocacy revolution" and the boom of interest / lobbying groups in the 70s is interesting too. The current MAGA propaganda apparatus seems to me to be the hybrid child of the New Right resentment politics propaganda and of the sophisticated corporate public relations / lobbying industry, which mastered coming up with alternative facts far before Trump was in power (cf the tobacco industry : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10731746/)
Just for the sake of steelmanning the counterargument here and perhaps reflecting my ignorance of the NYC mayoral race: is Mamdani not fundamentally a triumph of social media content creation as a political tool?
The ideology is very different of course, but I look at Mamdani as someone who seems to have cracked the code of leveraging the present media environment that has so rewarded the Bongino's and Libs of TikTok's toward more humane, prosocial ends. That's very distinct from saying he has created something real world and face-to-face though, which isn't really my perception of him or any of the modern Bernie progeny of left-wing politicians, congenial as they may be.
His campaign was also extremely grounded. He raised 90 000 people to canvass for him and he reached out to everybody (I mean, he even reached out to Trump !). He and his teams showed a great culture of politics in general, NYC politics, municipal policies and used their social media to share these (social media as well as other medias and actions on the ground : Morris Katz, Mamdani's strategist, said that nowadays in politics you had to be everywhere, on social media, on TV, in the streets, to reach everybody, because people's media consumption is so atomized). And it's really interesting to watch his current videos, because he's very aware of the local and global stakes and wants to leverage the enthusiasm and grassroot engagement in his campaign for greater aims : for success as a mayor, and for a rise of much larger civic involvement elsewhere.
His campaign's style will be imitated, its substance will be harder to replicate. But let's hope it sets a precedent !
I mean, to put a fine point on it, if a door-knocking volunteer army of smiling young libs were the key to electoral success, the Democratic Party would already be holding 134 Senate seats.
As someone who has done a lot of electoral canvassing, that's not really real-world organizing either, and it ranges from empty calories to actively counterproductive.
I don't mean to say that as a criticism of Mamdani, that would be a way in which he was just adopting the going Dem best practices, but the thing that really made him stand out was the way in which he was able to leverage the new media environment as the means of communicating who he was and what he was about with a fluency I haven't seen in a left wing figure.
Some of that is narrow and specific and won't translate outside this race, but some flavor of it is just very obviously the future of the way this game is played.
I won't comment too much on the canvassing because I was not on the ground, but the same way you can do online videos that are good or are bad, are all canvassing operations the same ? Isn't raising 90 000 people out of nowhere for a local election a feat ?
And the videos were indeed extremely effective communication, but they wouldn't have amounted to much without the substance of what was expressed and Zohran Mamdani's evident skills as a politic. The most important points imo are both his strong political backbone & culture and, as you said, his fluency and capacity to adapt to all environments and to defy expectations. A less adept candidate may have done good videos but would have done poorly in meetings with NY business figures, or when discussing wonkish public policies, or in fast paced Gaydar interviews, or on Fox News, or when meeting orthodox Jewish leaders, or when meeting muslim leaders, or when talking to bodega owners...