am i wrong for not trusting her for her having spent a decade as a restaurant owner and the organizer of a women's restaurant owner group? that she literally never talks about? i can't help but be overcome by distrust for a supposed anticapitalist that was actively a capitalist for a decade. i understand that she was paying her workers during 2020 closures, but i have trouble believing that she actually hates capitalism.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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It’s definitely reason for pause, but the bourgeoisie has its class traitors. People can get disillusioned when they see how the sausage gets made, even if they keep depending on said sausage making to pay the bills. Engels owning a factory and all.
She's less principled and less polished than Mamdani, but the WI Democratic party is on the verge of being dominated by fairly radicalized social democrats if people like her keep building the movement. The state legislature has a small but growing socialist caucus (obviously not the revolutionary kind) and "normal" Democrats don't seem to undermine them the way other state parties do. The culture of Wisconsin gives me a lot of revolutionary pessimism, so I'll take what I can get
Wisconsin is also the home of "sewer socialism" and the 2011 teachers strikes, and adjacent to MN, all of which offer mild optimism. The EEUU will never do "cool socialism", but I think a socialish future is possible. I think it would weaken the USian bourgeoisie and their ability to meddle overseas.
wisconsin politics was cool like 100 years ago and there's enough old liberals who are within two generations of those guys that the impulse to punch left isn't as strong as elsewhere, but on the other hand you get Scott Walker and Tommy Thompson coming out of the state.
fuck the tavern league all my cousins hate the tavern league.
i will say, i also was not impressed with her insistence that kamala harris would be markedly better on Palestinian genocide during the presidential election season. (and mark pocan was belligerently trying to pass kamala off as being significantly more opposed to the genocide than she ever was, which is neither here nor there, but i find him sickening in his dogged loyalty.) i don't think these sewer socialists are bad or anything, i think she could even do a lot of good, i just find the enthusiasm about such candidates to be misguided and overcaptured into a movement around "one really cool person" and we know that this always results in the "one really cool person" being distinctly unprincipled in critical moments with no real means of accountability. idk, i'll keep trying to be charitable towards her, we'll see how things progress.
If you wait for the perfect candidate you will be waiting forever. We all have flaws.
That made me hesitant too, but she's the only socialist running as far as I know. I think she'd be better than anyone else running by a lot
oh, no argument there.
I think as inequality grows, petty bourgeois elements are going to become very volatile. A few will become class traitors when they realize that they can never join the transnational bourgeois that dominates the empire, and more will become reactionary Hitlerites who blame the Jews for globalism, but the era of temporarily embarrassed millionaires is coming to an end.
A particular flash point will be with landlords. Restaurant owners have to give up most of their profits to their landlord just to keep the restaurant open, and that can align them with other renters even as they themselves benefit from labor exploitation. Then there's the banks, because the ones who manage to buy their storefront had to take on a ton of debt to do so, which aligns them with other debtors.
They're not to be trusted, but I think we're going to see interesting ruptures among them as a class.
*Democrat candidate
67% undecided, so this doesn't seem to be measuring much but name recognition
Mandela Barnes was the previous candidate for Senate and has high name recognition. He would have actually been the senator already instead of Ron Johnson if the Democrats didn't send all their money to some stupid ass race in Texas or Tennessee