Progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., suffered a primary defeat Tuesday to a moderate challenger who was backed by pro-Israel groups, NBC News projected, following a bitter and expensive race that exposed the party’s divisions over the war in Gaza.
The race between Bowman and Westchester County Executive George Latimer in New York’s 16th District drew more ad spending — $25 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact — than any other House primary in history. Nearly $15 million of that spending came from the United Democracy Project, a super PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which backed Latimer.
With 68% of the vote in, Latimer led Bowman by a wide margin, 55.7% to 44.3%.
Speaking to a roomful of his supporters Tuesday night, Bowman conceded defeat to his “opponents,” most likely a nod to big-spending outside groups, but he vowed that the broader fight for “humanity and justice” would go on.
“This race was never about me and me alone. It was never about this district and this district alone. It was always about all of us,” Bowman said. “Now, our opponents — not opponent — may have won this round, at this time, in this place. But this will be a battle for our humanity and justice for the rest of our lives.”
edit: also AOC won her primary so she is staying
In a closely watched primary, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, has emerged victorious, securing her position as the Democratic candidate for New York’s 14th Congressional District.
The 34-year-old progressive, known as AOC, overcame a challenge from 66-year-old investment banker Marty Dolan, who positioned himself as a moderate alternative.
I’m really enjoying this discussion, my question is, for imperial countries like the USA, wouldn’t the two mountains that need to be removed in this case be the Americans themselves? I can understand having little to no faith in westerners, but I will never lose my faith in humanity.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about population these days. Fascists obsess over white replacement, but maybe there is actually something to this. It’s obvious, but colonial projects tend to fail sooner when they have smaller proportions of “white” people. I think for instance that Korea never had more than five or at most ten percent of its population being Japanese during the colonial period, and the portion of Americans now living in the south is much less than 1% (which kind of negates this idea). Algeria was ten percent French, apartheid was officially swept away when South Africa’s population was ten percent white, and now Israel is disappearing when half its population consists of settlers. The USA however is about 70% settler, which makes it a much tougher nut to crack, since settlers almost always think of themselves as their nationality first and barely if ever conceive of themselves as workers.
I feel like this is a very boring answer, but it still needs to be given:
I think the main issue here is that you are starting from a lens of what borders on racial essentialism. The different historical examples you give have wildly different contexts (for example, the occupation of Korea being much more heavily military than the others you list, while white South Africans were overwhelmingly civilians – whatever else might be said of them). I think the greater through line here is the one that any Marxist would point to first: class. Fundamentally, these societies of brutally exploited underclasses were setting themselves up for revolt by the very fact of their exploitation itself. What sets the US apart from these societies then is not the racial divide (though of course US society is highly racialized and it factors in to things) but that it is not primarily the site of the exploitation it carries out, i.e. it is imperialist, and therefore is able to temporarily “circumvent” the consequences of the basic principles of social stratification that all capitalist systems are bound by.
As imperial decline accelerates, more and more of the population you identified as settler (idk where you got 70% specifically from, but that doesn’t really matter) is going to find themselves on the “brutally exploited” side of the above dichotomy, and from there, and with the necessary construction of dual power, it should not be difficult at all for them to be turned to the side of the colonized population as fellow exploited people.
So I believe that, in the framework of Mao’s metaphor, the American people are still our God, and the mountains are capitalism and imperialism.
I’m far underread for this discussion but I think for most americans the mental/superstructural blocks to over come are the structure of race and whiteness and the perception of everyone as consumers.