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Notes -
Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?
Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.
Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.
Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.
That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.
Sadiq Khan is really more a typical Blairite Labour man than socialist. He's a lot more progressive on cultural matters, but that's par for the course for the wider Labour party these days.
He is also indescribably inept, but I'm not sure his chronic uselessness will open the door for an actual socialist to grab the mayorality of London. They already had that more than two decades ago, with full-blown Trotskyite Ken Livingstone.
Same with Brandon Johnson in Chicago. The man has made enemies out of nearly every faction aside from the highly-controversial Chicago Teachers Union, who basically blessed him with the position.
Humorously enough, Chicago would've been put in a bizarro-world situation if the opponent had made it in (Paul Vallas), with the Fraternal Order of Police pulling the strings instead of the CTU.
I think either way Chicago's budget would've been fucked, which is the number one issue anyway.
I've been meaning to read up on him. Sounds like he's a total fucking disaster.
My general vibe is Chicago has been on a pretty good hot streak of terrible mayors.
He's a caricature of a man. Toxic masculinity, minus the overt misogyny. Nothing is ever his fault. No compromises. All decisions are "tough", but somehow don't solve any issues. Manages to piss everyone off every time he opens his mouth.
Probably the worst defeat progressivism has faced in the US since LaFollete lost to McCarthy.
But, Chicago is a powerful economic engine with a multitude of billion-dollar-per-year, both publicly-traded and privately-owned entities across multiple industries. Even a few decades of bad mayors won't stop it, maybe just slow it down. Pritzker seems to be helping at least, too.
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