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.
“Here, taking care of one another through public programs isn’t radical socialism. It’s Tuesday.”
Yes. Thank you.
The fact that even r/democrats has banned posts about Mamdani is shocking to me. (I found out from Bluesky, went to Reddit and checked and it’s true)
This dude is normal. Full stop.
EDIT: And yea, I was literally thinking these days “It’s nice to see Europe influencing the US for a change”
What why haha
Because Reddit is run by billionaires like any other enshittified format.
Head over there and promote a platform of free speech where Mamdami can be discussed. Like… this one?
Talking about Lemmy will also get you banned there. It’s best to treat Reddit like the plague house it is and stay far away.
Nobody can hear you over the bots
I don’t really know, to be honest. The mods there never gave off a bad vibe before. I don’t know what’s gotten into them.
“Europeans recognize his vision about free public transit and universal childcare. We expect our governments to make these kinds of services accessible to all of us,” said Verbeek. “We pay higher taxes and get civilized societies in return. The debate here isn’t whether to have these programs, but how to improve them.”
Yes.
Honestly I love taxes. I don’t love that billionaires don’t pay enough taxes and the unequal tax burden across different social groups but I love taxes and I love the idea of taxes. My dream would be a society where I work for basically pocket money and everything else - quality staple food and fresh food, education, healthcare, adequate housing, transportation, communication, childcare - is provided to me.
Honestly, one of my biggest conspiracy theories is that US employers (which are almost universally rich conservatives) use pre-tax income specifically to garner hate for taxes. Because conservatives always want to lower taxes on the rich, so they try to poison the average person’s view on them to sway public opinion. Whenever Americans discuss their income, it is always referencing the pre-tax amount. For instance, if an American says they’re making $50k per year, they’re probably only taking home ~$42k. So they tend to see taxes as an extreme burden, because they’re always looking at their pre-tax amount when they think about their income.
The American tax code is also intentionally kept extremely confusing, to further stoke hatred for taxes. Taxes could be an automatic “hey, here’s how much you owe, and how we calculated it. Let us know if you have any deductions we missed, and we’ll amend it for you” letter from the IRS. But instead, Americans are forced to calculate their own taxes, (even though the IRS already knows how much they owe), which means every American is annually reminded of how much income they’re “losing” to taxes every year.
In contrast, the rest of the fucking world uses post-tax income, because that’s how much money you can actually plan to take home. The taxes are a consideration, but if a job advertises €50k, it means the employee is taking home €50k. The taxes are more of a given, and are handled on the backend where the employee doesn’t need to worry about it. They apply for a job that makes €50k, and they know that’s how much they’ll take home. The taxes are already calculated for them, so they don’t need to worry about it.
Same for things like sales tax. If you see an item on the shelf for $1.00, it’ll actually ring up as $1.08 (or higher, if their state also has a sales tax) at the register. So Americans are constantly reminded of how much they’re spending in taxes, because every single purchase they make is noticeably taxed and hits their bottom line. Whereas Europe just lists the post-tax amount. So Europeans don’t need to worry about sales tax, because it is already factored into the cost of the item. If they see something on the shelf for €1.00, it will only cost €1.00…
Honestly I love taxes.
Yes, thank you! I agree taxes allow us to have nicer things than we could afford individually. The problem is how our tax money is spent, on things like those fucking private/public ventures where the municipality builds the stadium, and some jackoff gets billions from it
Extreme left as defined in US falls somewhere around center-center right in EU on most issues.
Of course. Your Democrats are our conservative parties, and your Republicans are our rightwinger/neo-nazi parties. And we have parties, left of the American spectrum that are mainstream.
and dont forget to the right!
Yeah, there is very little that is “radical” about Zohran. Especially when you contrast that with what the Republican Party is actually carrying out against the American people right now and we don’t even have to get into what they may or may not believe or what they want to do, in theory. We can see that with our own eyes.
That’s not even getting into the completely crazy shit that their funders are influenced by: insane dumbasses like Curtis Yarvin, who is so full of Dunning-Kruger that he seemingly is convinced he’s a genius and books like The Sovereign Individual.
It’s also not getting into how the more overtly racist part of the party is excited by books like The Camp of the Saints…
FOX is pushing HARD to paint him as a communist foreigner dictator.
Its working perfectly on my parents who swear he is the anti Christ. While they worship drumpf.
Help.
I would lead with your values and ask questions like why they think childcare or public transit are bad things.
Oh, it’s not that they think those things are bad, just that they want to be the arbiters of who deserves those things. They’re not against social programs, they just want to put their churches in charge of them so they can police behavior.
So (their) churches should run childcare facilities and public transit? In a country founded as a secular nation, no less. That must make for some wild conversations. I’d sure love to know more about how that would be funded, never mind the implementation.
Questions like: how do we decide which churches are worthy? There are approx 45,000 denominations of Christianity and that’s just Christianity…
lol or for some child’s play. US far left ideas is basic in most countries.
As a foreigner I’ve been disgusted by all the American media surrounding Mamdani’s campaign. Even from so called “liberal media” like the Washington post; it’s been grotesque racist caricatures, overblown red scare taglines, and downright apocalyptic visions for a guy that wants, cheap fast buses and to tax the oligarchs.
I can’t believe the Ideological shit show that is America and it frightens me that they think it is their duty to export these ideas to other countries.
Just a heads up, the Washington Post is considered the an oligarch paper over here. It’s owned by Jeff Bezos and rarely is anything published which might try to push back on a finances first narrative that puts money before people. The people who still follow it are already million or multi-millionaires or believe that some day they will obtain that much money, and they might with the way inflation is going.
It’s “Liberal” only in that it pushes for business liberty which I think is the simplest definition of Liberalism in Europe. As a USian I read that and think, “Why would anyone think WaPo is Liberal?”
I would consider WaPo a conservative paper. But like with the definition of conservative we used until I was 25. Meaning a tight fisted, push for no spending, fewer taxes, if YOU want your kid educated YOU have to pay for it YOURSELF, but we’re cool with gays and blacks and other minorities, type of conservative.
But that type of thinking is now “Woke” according to our far right which currently controls our entire government. And that somehow makes WaPo a Liberal paper on comparison. Advertising works I guess.
If you want to know what progressives or really just what our big cities think I’d recommend googling smaller papers or magazines. I’m not saying there isn’t some crazy right wing stuff out there too but here’s a smattering:
Seattle: https://www.thestranger.com/
Denver: https://www.westword.com/
Chicago: https://chicagoreader.com/ https://blockclubchicago.org/
NYC: uhhh I never lived here so… Wikipedia has a list of print media! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_newspapers_and_magazines
I’m not sure Westword is the same as it once was or frankly any of these but they’re all smaller than Jungle Oligarch Daddy’s paper. Possibly owned by less agent oligarchs, I don’t know but it’s a place to start.
I agree with the sentiment, but the Washington Post has not been “liberal media” since Bezos bought it. I used to have a sub, in 2017, and don’t recognize the place any longer.
So it turns out Jeff Bezos hasn’t been funding the Antifa super soldiers like musk said? =P I am shocked, Next you are going to tell me George Soros isn’t a bastion of liberalism either!
But in all seriousness. The vibe i am getting from overall media in the Us is that some leans “liberal” and some leans “conservative” but they all protect the interests of billionaires or are downright owned by them.
The vibe i am getting from overall media in the Us is that some leans “liberal” and some leans “conservative” but they all protect the interests of billionaires or are downright owned by them.
This is pretty much my view on it. For the most part, the way they may lean “liberal” would be on the margins, maybe something like identity politics. Anything that might mess with oligarchs’ money or question something like our relationship with Israel is usually out of bounds.
I didn’t start really paying attention until the early 90s, but it’s been more or less like this as far as things I’ve noticed. Chomsky says similar things going much further back in relation to the corporate media. Movies like Network lampoon it…
I don’t think it’s been getting any better - with deregulation and consolidation, it seems to be getting even worse.
Even before Bezos bought it, I don’t think they were all that liberal. I’m sure it’s only gotten worse, though.
it frightens me that they think it is their duty to export these ideas to other countries.
It frustrates me that they have been exporting these ideas for a very long time.
American exceptionalism has been an underlying assumption in Hollywood movies and US television, books and music for longer than either of us have been alive.
I’m getting kind of tired of Europeans thinking their stiuation is normal. They have ~350 million well-off people in a world of 8.5 billion.
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”.
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.
Is he going to skip off to Galt’s Gulch now? 🤣
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.
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.
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.
I always found it absurd that in the richest country in the world, there is no universal health insurance, no parental leave, no public holidays, that a college education costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, that there is no protection against dismissal, that people are starving or working but still homeless because they cannot afford an apartment—all of this is inhumane, uncivilized, and a disgrace to the US, not its recipe for success; it is its downfall, as the current regime is demonstrating.
the richest country in the world
Cite your sources please, unless you mean to suggest that simply a rich person entering my house that I’m rich suddenly
It’s the richest country in the history of humanity and all we did with it was oppress other nations, build a massive military, and sell the nation off to the rich. So far it’s not a winning plan for anyone outside of the top 1%. Same shit, bigger piles of gold.
Well, you have produced the richest man in history, who is a Nazi and, apart from his wealth, does not seem to be particularly intelligent—but all the more greedy for it.
Alone we go fast, together we go far. We’re rich relative to other countries specifically because of how much we valued greed after ww2. Now that wave has ended and if we want to keep going we need to figure out how the second half of that statement works.
The wealthy in the US got rich by exploiting the rest of the population.
It is time for the Americans to wake up and strike for all the freedoms and benefits that we have enjoyed here in Europe for 50 years
50? You got these rights in the 1970s?
Yes,
They won’t.
Afraid or lazy ?, why not ?
67% living paycheck to paycheck, will be broke and dead missing work.
Theres no social safety net to fall on during protests/strike but they would have to do mass strikes/protests to get those safety nets. Hell the poor excuse of social safety nets Americans do have disappear if the government just decides to shut down.
Keeping healthcare coupled to employment will forever be the chains on the US working class. Food, child care, many social services can be absorbed through community solidarity but healthcare costs are unbreakable.
It’s almost as if that is the plan
“They took some much from us that they took out our fear”
Same like here in Belgium 100 years ago
That’s what unions are for.
This was the situation in the late 19th century for the workers in Sweden. They somehow managed?
Mostly fear, driven by stupidity. Socialism is indistinguishable from Communism and on par with Nazism in some parts of the US. There’s also the myth of American exceptionalism, that we can succeed where others have failed because 'Merica.
Someone i know on fb literally just posted that they are glad snap ended so people have to work hard like him.
Everyone commented he was an absolute idiot. So that was good.
So yes, its American individualism at work. Fuck everyone. I got mine (especially if they have kids, then theyre 1000x more selfish, as is natural).
Wish I could move.
The interesting thing is that the myth of American exceptionalism works both ways - both that we can succeed when we use strategies that have failed elsewhere, and also that we’re so unique and different that we’ll fail if we try strategies that are proven successful elsewhere. Both convincing people that we should do the opposite of what’s been shown to solve problems elsewhere.
What I feel more fascinating is how, at least it seems to me, the exceptionalism often stays with Americans even if they do realise how shitty the country is becoming. You can see it either in comments suggesting the USA is worse that any third world country (“we’re the best at being the worst!”) or, especially with tankies, where since capitalism isn’t working in the USA and USA is the best at capitalism so obviously it can’t work anywhere else and the Russian model is the way to go.
It’s just how it looks to me as an outsider, but I can’t shake the feeling that the idea of American exceptionalism is too deeply entrenched even in people who hate the country.
We can succeed where others fail in all things except taking care of each other.
On par with nazism would be a good thing for MAGA wouldn’t it?
Well indoctrinated to enshitification.
The problem with fighting is that there is a chance you will lose something. United States citizens still have it pretty good compared to most of the world. Yes, that’s falling fast, but I think it will take a generation or two for that to really sink in. So, it’s not bad enough to take chances just yet. (Lazy)
Also, there is quite a bit of corruption on every level, and most US citizens with any amount of power are more than willing to throw their neighbor under a bus if it will benefit themselves. This means that, should any sort of strike happen, there will be plenty of scabs and shitty rich people to squash that. (Fear)
Also, over the past many decades, public opinion has been manipulated into thinking that supporting the company is better than supporting your comrade. Quite a number of people think unions are a bad thing. And while they’re certainly can be bad unions, that does not make the concept bad. (ignorance)
For example, The huge amount of work and public support to required to entirely dismantle an industry like Health Insurance is unfathomably large. It would mean work loss for millions who won’t have skills outside that industry. The transition to socialized healthcare would undoubtedly be rocky at best—and people will die. And trillions of dollars would be “lost.” The rich would never allow it, they would sink the whole ship before caving to the people.
I’m all for it. Strike until 100% socialism. But people with kids? They are not so bloodthirsty.
A century ago, the church and the landlords were supreme, child mortality and child labor were commonplace here. The socialist trade union has broken the power of the church over the state. This has only been achieved through many and long-lasting strikes. Now we are the land of beer, chocolate and fries
Church took back its power while we were watching TV. Back to square one.
Stand up and start again 🧨
And don’t sit down next time ffs lol
TSA didn’t show up to work in Houston, people are starting to protest how they can. If they’re not getting paid anyway…
Edit: here’s the video: https://nitter.net/Suzierizzo1/status/1985813704277991745#m
That’s great! But unless they say “we are never coming back unless…,” The rich people can hold out.
Why are you being so negative about the pushes forward Americans are doing?
The young Bernie made it to mayor in fucking NYC. There was so much money against him there, he still won.
People get complacent. They will think this one voting season means a blue trend. They are so far from wrong it’s just… you gotta laugh. We are on the cusp of martial law… if this isn’t your primary political concern, then I dunno how to help you.
This guy’s hardly as radical as Jeremy Corbyn. Americans continue to astound me
