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Zohran Mamdani won three US House of Representatives seats last week. Claire Valdez in NY-7, Brad Lander in NY-10, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13 each won the Democratic primary after being endorsed by Mamdani, knocking-off two incumbants in the process. These are all 80-20 Democratic districts, so there is no realistic chance of any of them losing in the November.
Darializa Avila Chevalier is the one still making headlines a week later. She is, as far as anyone can tell, an actual communist. Rumors are that she personally founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest when she was a student there in 2016. Her stance on policing? She's against it.
Center-left politicos are currently melting down that someone like this won and is being accepted by the party apparatus. Credit to them for denouncing socialism I guess, but did they not know who their base is? Did they completely forget all of those "defund the police" chants from 2020? Did they not know that those people vote Democrat?
Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.
It's rather worse.
Leftists (defined as people sharing these views or sympathetic to them) are small minority of the population, but they form large part of D activists and organizer cadres, the party officers and NCO's who make the party actually work on the ground.
The party needs 1937 style purge, but such operation needs Georgian genius. Watch for new man/woman/nonbinary person coming from Atlanta.
The insane activist types are where all the energy is. Yglesias-style slow boring can't compete for low-information voters in the modern media environment. Cut the leftists out and the vibes die.
It is worth remembering that Yglesias doesn't actually disagree with the activist left's goals, he just wants them to keep those goals on the DL until after they get elected.
The whole point of his "Popularism vs Populism" bit was that left wing activists would be better served by trying to boil the frog slowly rather than turning the heat up all at once.
Yglesias explicitly does not support the "Palestinian Cause" (which he sees, in my view correctly, as the destruction of the Jewish State and the reversal of the displacement of Palestinians from what is now Israel proper). The activist left are river-to-the-sea Palestinian maximalists, and right now they are saying that this is their most important issue.
He also explicitly opposes, apparently sincerely, the standard leftist positions on public order, market-rate housing, and frankly almost every economic issue except climate where he has expressed an opinion.
The only area where Yglesias explicitly supports leftist goals and only disagrees on tactics is climate. On open borders, he is personally in favour (but acknowledges that this is not an electorally viable position for the Democrats, and favours compromise with the electorate) whereas it is the organised left which tends to hide the ball while de facto supporting open borders through non-enforcement. He probably also agrees with a bunch of unpopular left-wing views on issues around race and sex, but they are mostly issues where the left have won and are playing defence, and therefore the activist left find it hard to give a crap.
The current incarnation of the populist right is fundamentally single-issue on immigration, so from your perspective Yglesias and the far left agree on the things that matter. But that is a function of how you see the issues, not how they do.
On historical grounds I conclude that Yglesias is closely aligned and simply lying about it.
(The only reason I don't say "totally aligned" is that even he and Klein can't possibly be stupid enough to throw themselves under the bus.)
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