Originally published at: The Campaign Against Mamdani Has Echoes of the Panic Around Another Socialist Democrat
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. It has happened before: an upset victory by a Democratic Socialist in an important primary election after an extraordinary grassroots campaign. In the summer of 1934, Upton Sinclair earned the kind of headlines that greeted Zohran…
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Look, if New Yorkers want to elect Madman Mamdani, I’m going to have zero sympathy when this starts happening again!
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The definitive book of the Upton Sinclair 1934 California campaign was written by Greg Mitchell. Fascinating read!
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“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.” ― Hubert H. Humphrey
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What the average person fails to understand is that above a certain financial/societal level there are no politics. There is only money and tribalism. The rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, are different than you and me. They have always been, no matter the civilization. It was true of the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese Dynasties, the Inca, all the way to today.
The rich see themselves as separate and apart. So when they are threatened, they marshall forces that we cannot comprehend. They have lower classes of people they own, like the House Negroes of the slave south who were more violent in enforcing the rules than any white man ever was. These are the politicians of both parties who are all deluded into believing that their subservience will buy their way into the upper circles.
So, the campaign against Mamdani coming from both the left and the right makes perfect sense. However, it’s a tell of just how terrified the 01% are of people getting a taste of freedom and a government that facilitates it. They’re so frightened that they don’t care if people start asking why both the left and the right are attacking him. And for the most part they’re getting away with it because no one is asking that question. If there was a single journalist with a pair out there they would, and they’d find out the resources are all coming from the same place.
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This discussion is appropriate, since Trump and his crew of DOGE-meisters are trying very, very hard to bring us back to the world that Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle.
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Wasn’t Sinclair FDR’s VP pick (last term) before changing his mind to Truman at the last minute?
I’m glad the professor has a good topic for another paper.
Wasn’t that Henry Wallace the sitting Veep?
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Yes. TY. It was bothering me. I try not to google to push off dementia.
It’s a game one plays when old age starts to take over.
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Thought comparison was to FDR!
Hemry Wallace was indeed FDR’s third-term (1941-45) VP. He was dumped from the ticket when FDR ran for his fourth term, in favor of Harry Truman. The Republicans had made large gains in the 1942 midterms and Democratic politicians sensed that the electorate was moving rightward. So the pressure on FDR to drop Wallace in favor of a more “conservative” running mate–which was the general perception of Truman. Truman had also gained a lot of national publicity by chairing a Senate (or joint congressional?) investigation of wartime waste and corruption. Wallace wa perceived (basically correctly) as an enthusiastic New Dealer, as well as a rather mystical idealist. Truman was perceived as rather colorless and “safe.” It’s not certain how much FDR was invested in the choice of his VP (and during his abbreviated fourth term he virtually ignored Truman, who wasn’t told about the Manhattan Project until after he succeeded to the presidency). But FDR definitely agreed that the more “leftist” Wallace had to go–though he was appointed Secretary of Commerce. (During FDR’s first two terms, he’d been a highly effective Secretary of Agriculture.)
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Reagan did most of the work while the Democrats slept.
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Fantastic piece from Dr. Gregory; thanks for sharing here. I thought similarly after Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory, about this historical event and gubernatorial race in 1934, and what parallels we may see in the forthcoming NYC mayoral race. As a historian and teacher, I intend to incorporate some of the superb EPIC materials at the University of Washington, which Dr. Gregory kindly shared, in a politics course of mine this year, for students to better understand voting patterns, issues, interest groups, and shifting allegiances among power blocs in society as a case study. My thanks again, including to TPM for such rich, historically informed commentary.
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I’m a 67 year old who has spent his entire life on the west coast including a number of years in California. I consider myself well informed and have read several of Sinclair’s works. How is it I didn’t know he’d been a nominee for governor?
Thanks for the backstory. I remember reading about Wallace as an “enthusiastic New Dealer,” and then he was out of the picture.
The 2020 movie Mank contains a subplot on how William Randolph Hearst enlisted the help of the Hollywood movie industry to destroy Sinclair’s election campaign.
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The American working class needs to understand the Stockholm Syndrome and the economic concept of Marginal Utility. Understanding these psychological and economic situations will become more difficult as the US becomes more immersed in propaganda and disinformed. Incomes above a billion dollars have no marginal utility for a rational person. Like corporate mergers making businesses unwieldy and anticompetitive, just gamesmanship and a form of conspicuous consumption - an ego trip. This is Trump’s game, an old game, ego over sound business practices and one-upping the other billionaires. That he is using tax dollars is even more of a kick.
