Bowman wasn't great. He did vote to fund the Iron Dome a few years ago and still holds liberal zionist positions. That being said, it is disturbing how this wasn't enough for the zionists and basically had his seat bought from him. Very bad vibes. Like electoralism is a dead end, but it somehow became even worse.
the current USA support to Israel must be too important to affort even a light zionist victory, they need the hard liners to support them now especially with their future invasion of Lebanon
This should be a lesson for the people that want to do triangulating electoralism "from the left".
It doesn't work. The liberal electoral apparatus is coming for you even if you give unconditional material support and publicly agree with 99% of their positions. You'll just lose any chance you had of building a larger project that draws people in via principled agitation.
It's also an example of how bad of an idea it is to use liberals' political machinery that's built on big donor funding. Bowman did not work within a left organization. He's not a representative of a larger left project with dedicated cadres, recruiters, onboarders, political educators. He's just a lone guy enjoying support from various groups because they kind of like what he says. That works for liberals because they're about attracting donors to a candidate that will support the donors' interests. They'll keep that support by being a perfectly good little lapdog. Anyone that tries to make waves will see that rug get pulled out from under them fast.
Participation in bourgeois electoralism shouldn't be written off but the people most interested in it make these naive mistakes. Bourgeois electoralism should be used when it can actually deliver valuable gains (this is hard but doable at a local level) and/or when it's part of a larger organizing project focused on agitation and growth. Even if the candidate later loses, a competent org can reap benefits from either strategy.
I was a part of the group that wanted him disciplined in my local DSA chapter when the Iron Dome vote (we lost by 3 votes).. I basically used these arguments when told that he was making his position more palatable for his district, and look where that got him.
Participation in bourgeois electoralism shouldn't be written off but the people most interested in it make these naive mistakes.
Unfortunately describes many people that I quite like. We kinda agree that this type of stuff should only be done at the local level for now.
Devil's advocate for a sec... if elections can be "bought" because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can't work?
I mean, if we can't trust the masses to make good decisions in elections how can we trust them to make good decisions in a post-revolutionary system? Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution or can people actually convert to our side en masse?
Devil's advocate for a sec... if elections can be "bought" because people are so apathetic or lazy that they need literally millions of dollars worth of advertising to convince them to vote, then maybe electoral democracy can't work?
Dig in just a bit deeper here: These are people who live in New York, a state notorious for being unfailingly Democrat and also unfailingly conservative in its governance. The fact that some people have become disillusioned with elections that, their whole lives, have probably demonstrated very little change, is understandable and not a symptom of the average person somehow being simply inadequate for very basic tasks.
Maybe Mao was right about a cultural revolution
Mao was a radical democrat (lowercase d) and both the successes and failures of the Cultural Revolution are connected to that. Though there was direction from the top, ultimately the events that I assume you are referring to, like the Four Olds Campaign, were carried out on a grassroots basis by young activists, sometimes constructively and sometimes not. It was in many respects a battle of the progressive elements of society against the reactionary elements, one that the reactionary elements ultimately won by holding out until Their Guy took over the country, since the progressive or would-be-progressive forces were too disorganized in themselves to succeed at anything but being a force of chaos that gave reactionaries a solid causus belli for police crackdown.
At scale this was not at all Mao dictating his socialism to the common people and then beating it into them when they resisted (though some of his followers certainly did, and this mostly failed).
The Cultural Revolution is a very fraught topic, but you are doing Mao a disservice by essentially accusing him of "commandism", an error that he was very much against.
Commandism is wrong in any type of work, because in overstepping the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of voluntary mass action it reflects the disease of impetuosity. Our comrades must not assume that everything they themselves understand is understood by the masses. Whether the masses understand it and are ready to take action can be discovered only by going into their midst and making investigations. If we do so, we can avoid commandism. Tailism in any type of work is also wrong, because in falling below the level of political consciousness of the masses and violating the principle of leading the masses forward it reflects the disease of dilatoriness. Our comrades must not assume that the masses have no understanding of what they themselves do not yet understand. It often happens that the masses outstrip us and are eager to advance a step when our comrades are still tailing behind certain backward elements, for instead of acting as leaders of the masses such comrades reflect the views of these backward elements and, moreover, mistake them for those of the broad masses. In a word, every comrade must be brought to understand that the supreme test of the words and deeds of a Communist is whether they conform with the highest interests and enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of the people. Every comrade must be helped to understand that as long as we rely on the people, believe firmly in the inexhaustible creative power of the masses and hence trust and identify ourselves with them, no enemy can crush us while we can crush every enemy and overcome every difficulty.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_25.htm
I'm personally struggling with the idea of "democracy" being an ideal since I have grown to hate most people. I think the majority of people in America are simply not smart enough, nor have enough basic empathy for others, to be trusted to make good decisions. Someone convince me that some form of benevolent authoritarianism isn't the solution.
I say with more empathy than you can know that your perspective is entirely cope for being socially maladapted. You don't know how intelligent most people are. You don't know how much empathy they actually have. You're just like a channer writing monologues online about how "normies" don't have internal monologues [citation needed!] and therefore are "NPCs". Society has hurt you and you've grown estranged from it, and in bitter loneliness you tell yourself stories of their inferiority (which, not coincidentally, implies your superiority) in order to sooth yourself. But you aren't superior and they are not the wretched creatures you have portrayed them as in their absence.
It seems to me unlikely that you will be able to outgrow this mindset without confronting it directly, which is why I am broaching the subject so directly. My access to a device to write these things is irregular, but I strongly encourage you to a) try talking to more people and b) actually read Mao.
...We must also arouse the political consciousness of the entire people so that they may willingly and gladly fight together with us for victory. We should fire the whole people with the conviction that China belongs not to the reactionaries but to the Chinese people. There is an ancient Chinese fable called "The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains." It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. With great determination, he led his sons in digging up these mountains hoe in hand. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, "How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains." The Foolish Old Man replied, "When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we clear them anyway?" Having refuted the Wise Old Man's wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these mountains be cleared away?"
https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1900_mao_speeches.htm#foolish
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.
Benevolent authoritarianism is already the promise of liberal representative democracy. IMO the true problem is that people are alienated from politics after decades of neoliberalism being the leftmost position. If people didn't feel like the entire institution of democracy was useless, I'm sure you wouldn't see that level of detachment. Hell, just compare to Cuba where democracy is much more direct and people have much more input: it directly leads to a vastly larger portion of the population participating to protect their interests and their communities' interests. Because they see their own civil participation in politics as an extension of their country's revolutionary project. In America, the national political project is so transparently aligned with the interests of industrialists and billionaires that the best they can offer people is a negative promise, that we won't do what the other scary guy is gonna do.
American political ideology is also just broken as fuck. Most people can't even maintain a coherent set of beliefs let alone consistently vote base upon whatever incoherent beliefs they may have. Works out for the ruling class of course.
A benevolent dictatorship is obviously the most effective form of government, the problem is that any dictatorship can be used for good or evil and no matter how benevolent your queen or dictator or whatever you call her is, she's gonna die eventually and now you're rolling the dice. If you get someone less benevolent, system's a failure. If you get someone just as benevolent but less competent and they get deposed, system's a failure. And that's assuming that the system even survives succession rather than devolving into old-school feudalism or capitalist 'democracy' or ancap utopia or whatever in a power vacuum.
The only way to ensure a benevolent government remains long-term is by spreading the power out enough that the system can shrug off the deaths and retirement of individuals and keep going along some plan that exists beyond any one person
Okay, you say, so don't have a dictatorship of one benevolent queen but rather of a benevolent group acting in the best interests of the people. And this has the same pros and cons, but both blunted. It's good at what it does as long as the group remains truly benevolent, but any organization can decay and become corrupt and, in a sense, die just like our hypothetical good queen.
So if we just keep following the logic down, we end up at the idea that the group responsible for the wide-ranging decisions affecting everyone's lives should ideally be accountable to, more or less, everyone. If the ultimate goal is for the government to act in the best interests of the people, it follows that it is the people who should be the best judge of how well the government is working. If it stops doing its job properly, it is the people who notice. So it should be in the hands of the people to correct it.
I've thought this way for a while, and part of it might be our experiences are with the American public, who are not known for their grasp on politics, let alone much else.
I think this is mainly due to lack of education, propaganda, and outright brainwashing by neoliberal interests. Hopefully, once those things are no longer in the picture, people can be trusted to do what is genuinely in their long term best interests.
Bourgeois democracy does work, just not for the majority.
America would need a cultural revolution. There’s no ifs or buts about it. This country is dogshit.
Read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Money is needed to grease the wheels of the media apparatus. He who controls the flow of money controls what people are exposed to. With it you can vilify your enemies and make a saint out of a sinner.
Many apathetic non-voters are that way because they correctly see the narrow bounds of what bourgeois elections can accomplish. Changing that can change voter apathy.
Just use propaganda and don't let the capitalists mislead the gullible
with how publicized this primary was in terms of israel i think zionism was the losing factor here. the majority of americans (especially older ones who vote more) are indoctrinated zionists.
bowman already had a huge incumbent advantage and way more name recognition than most reps, so there's no reason to believe seeing the other guy's ads more is the reason he lost (even if it certainly didnt help). if it were that easy, mike bloomberg would be president and all the other cases where interest groups spent ungodly amounts to unseat a progressive would've generally worked
in elections between nobodies then yeah, a lot of people literally just vote for whoever's name they hear more
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake “public opinion” for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.*
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm
One of the things that amazes me about Lenin is how he is specifically accurate a century later.
Like there are other wise words or sage quotations that stand the test of time but they tend towards the vague. Lenin really got down to the damn joists. You'll be reading him and he's like "there's this bank full of dickheads doing shady finance shit on the world stage named Deutsche Bank" and yeah, it's that same fucking bank today doing much the same.
wake up bro we need u
There's a reason he's considered to have evolved Marxist theory.
the message is clear: the party line on funding genocide is nonnegotiable.
He should say F it and run as an independent.
Or fight dirty and tell his supporters to stay home in November. Force AIPAC to buy both elections.
This is what you get giving life support to the Does Not Care party. 
Look at all the dirty blood money they spent to get that Yonk elected. Disgusting.
Proof that any self styled "progressive" has nothing to lose by completely opposing Zionist fascism. The Zionists will stab you in the back even if you support them. We can advance confidently knowing anyone that tries to tow a middle position on the issue is an opportunist.
Fuck it, let him run in the general. Split the vote
Bowman was/is a member of DSA and a controversial one. The Palestinian solidarity group tried to get him expelled years ago for both funding the iron dome and doing a tour of Israel.
Years later, he's gets primaried by Zionists.
He was a member. He quit during that controversy. He actually kinda improved on Palestine after he visited Israel because he wasn't impressed by what he saw.
The russians are interfering with our democracy
the worst person's ego about their political relevance just got a shot in the arm
The only good thing about this is how incontrovertibly it demonstrates that the dems are totally unworthy of your vote, even to fairly clueless liberals.
I'm tired of losing, and I'm tired of hearing cope about how elections don't matter or how Bowman was uh bad actually.
He's a liberal that voted for the Iron Dome funding and quietly left the DSA before that. He's a liberal and not an example of us losing. I would never claim him to be on my side or my organization's side or a comrade.
not an example of us losing
Not sure about this bit
Bowman's not a comrade but soft criticism of Israel lost to full throated support of Israel in an election. I think that demonstrates a loss of some kind.
Bourgeois electoralism isn’t a sphere any of us win in. Bowman never represented a victory, even in the most modest sense
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to 
it's been nothing but success.