After New York City’s race for mayor catapulted Zohran Mamdani from state assembly member into one of the world’s most prominent progressive voices, intense debate swirled over the ideas at the heart of his campaign.
His critics and opponents painted pledges such as free bus service, universal child care and rent freezes as unworkable, unrealistic and exorbitantly expensive.
But some have hit back, highlighting the quirk of geography that underpins some of this view. “He promised things that Europeans take for granted, but Americans are told are impossible,” said Dutch environmentalist and former government advisor Alexander Verbeek in the wake of Tuesday’s election.
Verbeek backed this with a comment he had overheard in an Oslo café, in which Mamdani was described as an American politician who “finally” sounded normal.
From a unitedstatesian:
Genuinely, thank you, European politicians and public figures, for pointing out that reasonably socialized public services are considered de rigueur by the vast majority of the rest of the developed world.
It felt so weird when Tim Walz was lauded as a “gift to progressives” when he was running on a platform of “kids deserve food”.
The gift being that he was old and white with a proven political track record.
Politics isn’t just about policy, you have to appeal to enough voters to get elected if you want to implement those policies. Unfortunately, right now in the US, “kids deserve food” is a wild progressive idea.
I live in Colorado where we just passed a resolution to pay for school lunches by a small tax on individuals making $300,000 or more.
I swear to God, there were a ton of people complaining about it. My favorite was a Facebook friend of my brother who posted “Why are we allowing people to vote on this who don’t make more than $300,000 a year if it doesn’t affect them? That’s not how democracy works.”
These people are fucking insane.
Did you point out TABOR does require a vote for all new taxes, to include ones that don’t affect everyone?
No, since it was my brother’s friend, I just told my brother that dude was a moron - and left it at that.
Not just the developed world as quite a lot of developing nations strive to offer these services as well.
Which is even more insane.
But at the same time, 40 or so of our states have been essentially un-developing for the last couple decades. The US is essentially a dozen first-world countries supporting a few dozen third-world countries, and the latter constantly politically attack the former. Really would be nice if those of us who live in the actually productive regions could just cut bait on the regressive states and let them find out the hard way.