I'm curious what you think the AOC/Mamdani left is even like. MAGA is the culmination of decades of escalating extremism. I was in OKC when the right wing terrorist killed so many innocent people, and that was what, 35 years ago? Meanwhile, AOC/Mamdami are lunatics who want ... better healthcare? Less inequality? What is so objectionable about their ideology that it justifies that absolute craziness that has consumed the right wing?
> Meanwhile, AOC/Mamdami are lunatics who want ... better healthcare? Less inequality?
It's not about their goals, it's about first world versus third world approaches to achieving those goals. The first-world approach is about shared sacrifice and building systems with the correct tradeoffs, incentives, etc. That’s how you end up with a system like Sweden that has high middle class taxes to support a robust welfare state along with extremely competitive corporate taxes. It also fosters efficiency because middle class people have a lot of skin in the game.
The third-world approach instead is tribalistic. The bad tribe, rich people, have the money, and the job of government is to expropriate that money and give it to the good tribe. In that kind of politics, you see a strong emphasis on identity and class warfare, and very little talk about tradeoffs, system, and sacrifice. It’s a type of politics that works equally well in Bangladesh, where the population is barely literate, as it does in Queens. (Of course, MAGA is like that too. Trump is the third world version of Reagan or Romney. It’s not a coincidence that no Republican in history has done better in Queens’s “Little Bangladesh” than Trump in 2024.)
The devastation from AOC/Mamdani politics is far worse than right-wing terrorism. In 1960, South Korea had a GDP per capita around $150, while Bangladesh was at $100. But my parent’s generation Indians/Bangladeshis were AOC/Mamdani socialists. As a result, Bangladeshi grew to just $260 by 1989 when we left. By then, Korea was at $6,000. And of course today Korea is a first world country while Bangladesh is still a third world country.
Around 2010, Bangladesh adopted neoliberalism and tripled its GDP per capita in just 14 years. So there was nothing about Bangladesh structurally that prevented the same kind of growth you saw in South Korea. It was all cultural and political. If my parent’s generation hadn’t been AOC/Mamdani socialists, I’d still probably live in my homeland. More importantly, millions of children would be alive today who instead died in poverty because of delayed economic growth.
This is not a problem specific to very poor countries. Latin America is largely a lower middle income continent with slower growth than developed economies. From 1960 to 2018, Latin American GDP per capita grew just 1.8% annually: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/latin-america-economic-gr.... Latin America actually fell further behind the U.S. since 1960.
Your previous statement was flagged so I couldn't reply, but I wanted to pick up on this one thing you said:
MAGA is a necessary response to the AOC/Mamdani left
But MAGA officially began in 2015, when Trump announced the launch of his Presidential campaign with a speech including a string of vicious remarks against immigrants. AOC was elected in 2019 and Mamdani (to the NY state assembly) in 2021. MAGA has been a populist movement from the outset, seemingly motivated by conservative dislike of the Obama administration (anything but populist) and the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration (likewise), as well as an atavistic dislike of immigrants.
The devastation from AOC/Mamdani politics is far worse than right-wing terrorism.
The populist politics of AOC and Mamdani seem motivated by exasperation with the prejudice, corruption, and general lawlessness of the Trump administration and the larger MAGA movement, and I doubt they would have enjoyed their electoral success if the Republican party had selected a staid institutionalist over Trump in 2016.
It's interesting to hear context about the economic history of Bangladesh, but I don't think comparing the grinding poverty of cold-war era Bangladesh with the economic and strategic hegemony of early 21st century USA is even slightly illuminating or useful.
We can just look at the current situation. AOC/Mamdani policies have been the norm in the US since ... oh wait, never. We are run by the billionaires, not by the socialists.
Maybe your argument is that our GDP is doing great? Except the entire point of MAGA is that a whole class of people feel like GDP is not describing their own situation accurately. It's almost like all it really describes is how successful the billionaires are. The US lags behind a bunch of western nations in important metrics, and we are decidedly to the right of them and have been for a very long time. Trying to lay blame for this on the paltry excuse for 'the left' that we have in the US is pretty lame.
