New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) said Saturday that Democrats have lost sight of the important economic issues facing working-class Americans as the party works to rebuild itself after a devastating loss in the 2024 presidential election.
“The party, as a whole, has lost its focus on working people,” Mamdani said in an interview with MS Now.
“People want to know: What are you going to do for rent? What are you going to do for housing? What are you going to do for gas? What are you going to do for groceries? We have to have answers to that.”
Issues like housing affordability, the cost of healthcare and rising gas prices should be at the forefront of the party’s focus, according to Mamdani, rather than ideological battles that distract from what matters to most Americans.
Did it ever actually have a true genuine focus on working people?
Absolutely FDR
That’s when the Democrats had a populist message and actually helped the working class
It also resulted in them controlling like 80% of Congress
It also probably stopped America from falling to a revolution (even if it provoked the business plot, but that went nowhere luckily)
Sure seems like the businesses have won to me
In the long run they did take back control, but the The Business Plot did happen for a reason, capital hated FDR
In a different timeline, we might have had Smedley Butler lining up Henry Ford and other magnates against a wall, without offering a final cigar.
I’d say that’s the point of having a functional democracy: you respond to the needs of the people with a series of bloodless revolutions in the form of elections so as to make bloody revolutions unnecessary. Why should there be cities in flames and blood in the streets when one can have a series of votes instead?
This is predicated on the the concept of a functional democracy, of course, whereas ours has become less and less functionally representative every year since 1929, and then got a bullet to the brain from Citizens United.
I do think that the US should’ve become a socialist country during the Great Depression (if not for FDR, that is).