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Like most of you I had (and still have) a lot of doubts about Mamdani, but I'd at least consider this a small initial win
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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The “it must be all good or all bad” mentality is reductionist. Some elements will be good, some will be bad. Call out as appropriate rather than ignoring whichever side doesn’t fit the narrative.
Zohran Mamdani is a land of contrasts
I think it comes down to there being two idealized camps in Western socialism. There’s the ones that want to see grassroots activism as snowballing to political office which snowballs to an even greater mass socialist movement. So they see any criticism of someone going through that path, even if valid and in good faith, as threatening to break the snowball.
Then there’s the camp that sees any socialist movement in the West that becomes visible or has friction when the rubber hits the road as tainted. This is often paired with a lionizing of AES countries outside of the imperial core. So they get hung up on optics and tertiary issues.
The core problem imo is that the perspective of “is socialist figure X good/pure or not?” isn’t the productive way of thinking about things, it should be “how can the socialist movement leverage figure X?”
Honestly. A centrist Demsoc is nothing to be too excited for, but by the standards this country's always dealt with, it's good to see some legitimate progress.
Take the wins where we can, openly and vocally critique as necessary, and use him as a springboard for a real leftist movement.
This isn't specifically about Mamdani, but not necessarily. It's often used as a way to shut people up. Like when that lawmaker tried to raise the min wage to $12/hr and tie it to inflation. Yes, it's better, but not enough, and just used to shut people up. Bernie was the safe option, and what people would've settled for. People barely protested Obama, even though he was the Deporter-in-Chief, increased drone strike like a 1000% compared to Bush, kicked five million people out of their homes, his administration was hand picked by bankers, and bankers got a hefty bonus for wrecking the world economy and kicking people out of their homes.
Yeah that's true too. People get complacent when it seems like it's just enough for them, and not look at the bigger picture.