Also seeing Hasan Piker at Mamdani's celebration say that it's a tragedy that the US defeated the USSR in the cold war was fucking disgusting.

And also in keeping with @taylorswiftspickles request (I actually don't even know who this person is. Edit: Piker, I mean. I like @TaylorSwiftsPickles), this has been something I've found obnoxious and counter productive in the US Left, lately.

I'm American, I've been to more than half a dozen protests this year and it absolutely irks me that people are wandering around waving Communist/USSR flags. It's just bad optics for a movement, especially an American movement.

Also, I want to see US flags, because you know what, we're far from perfect, but damnit, we're American and we've also done some good for both the world and ourselves. I used to not be big on the Flag here, but the more I've been protesting and the more I've seen the things we are capable of and the good things we've accomplished in the past, the more proud to be an American I am. Let's wave our flag damnit, because we can do cool stuff, we can change our politics if we fight hard enough. We have a history of great Americans that have been at the forefront of change for the better, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, Rosa Parks, Betty Friedan, let's celebrate the fact that we're part of that lineage of Americans and not support an oppressive regime that was the USSR.

Kind request to all commenters, let's not turn this thread into a pro-Hasan vs anti-Hasan shitshow. We already had one with such beef recently and IIRC there were at least a couple of ad-hominems thrown around.

Many policies that Europeans consider normal and that are widespread here get constantly defined as radical or impossible in America - mostly by those that stand to lose power if similar policies were implemented. The best examples are governmental or EU level, rather than municipal, so applying the principle to Mamdani isn't straightforward. The underlying concept is sound nevertheless.

Some examples: people's right to privacy, adequate annual paid vacation time and parental leave, social security networks, free or affordable high quality healthcare, urban planning that enables healthy lifestyles rather than car-dependency (affordable public transport is just the cherry on top), consumer protections against unfair business practices (for example planned obsolescence and obscure algorithmic consumer manipulation), women's equal rights, divorcing religion from governmental policy, and so on.

Obviously, not every EU country is the same and if you're from somewhere where "communism" is still a touchy subject, your experience may be different.

I have mixed feelings about Mamdani although I was happy with a recent interview he did where he said he wanted to provide/foster/promote more 'third spaces' for people to meet each other and associate with each other. Isolation and loneliness is a big problem here in the US to the extent that a former surgeon general wrote a book about how important isolation is as a factor in poor health and how to possibly overcome it.

I respect your point. Personally, I draw a hard line between democratic socialist policies that I support and authoritarian/totalitarian government of all kinds including communism. Here in the US, the propaganda from the right treats it all as the same and many people don't know how to treat these topics critically and carefully.

At the moment, our danger is fascism, but I agree with you re the USSR and the former governments of the countries behind the iron curtain in Europe.

some of which just seem normal like the article claims, and others seem insane and/or remind us of dysfunctional soviet communism.

I honestly disagree with that take. Note that my background is also European, but not former-sowjet European, so my region has a different history to deal with.

Yes, Mamdani's policies are a mixture of things that are commonly implemented across Europe, implemented in some places, or not commonly found at all. But you have to keep in mind that things commonly implemented across Europe are usually a compromise between conservative and progressive forces. Yet what we are talking about with Mamdani is his pre-compromise election program at the 'what would I do if I had 100% public support' stage. So it's not a fair comparison to only consider what is found in European law already.

If we look at the less common policies through the lense of what an average center-left politician around here would demand in their election program, most of the policies do not seem extreme at all. And I'm not talking extreme left parties here, but people in the social-democrat spectrum that are commonly found in government coalitions around here.

Is free public transport something that is an unusual or radical suggestion in election programs of left-leaning or environmental conscious European parties? No. Is it something that's usually watered down to some sort of subsidy because they have to compromise with right-leaning, conservative parties? Yes. Is the result usually much better public transport than in the US (although there's still room for improvement)? Yes. (A similar logic applies to rent-control mechanisms.)

Another aspect to consider is, that some of Mamdani's policies are rather hard to place on the European left-right spectrum, because they assume a fundamentally different baseline to build upon. The status-quo is simply so different that the details of some suggestions seem like a step backwards and forwards at the same time.

As for government run supermarkets, that's really the only thing that seems rather weird to suggest from a European perspective. But the underlying ideal of ensuring affordable prices and easy access to essential goods is not. And if I compare the status-quo of my region to that of the US in terms of both the fundamental structure of supermarkets, as well as the regulations supermarkets are subject to, we're looking at two entirely different worlds here. So I believe, despite the suggested implementation seeming like a weird way to go about it, we're simply looking at the ambition to solve a problem that is not as predominant around here as it is in NYC, due to a vastly different status-quo.

All in all, looking at it through a European lense, even with Mamdani as NYC mayor I've yet to find a truly 'radical-left' US politician in a position of power.

The reality in the post-communist Europe where I live is that the actually leftist democrats like AOC or Mamdani propose a strange mixture of policies, some of which just seem normal like the article claims, and others seem insane and/or remind us of dysfunctional soviet communism.

You're tarring with a pretty big brush here, would you care to give some examples of the policies that you specifically think we don't find normal?

Worth noting his name is spelled "Hasan"

So I get what you mean, that some of Mamdani's policy goals don't align directly with European ones. But as someone from the US, I feel like the spirit of what he is proposing aligns with the spirit of European policy.

Feel free to push back because you are from there and I've merely lived there, but I think the breath of the article is focused on how social support systems are common place. When I lived in the Netherlands we paid $100 a month for both of our healthcare, something that costs ~$2,000 here. Our good friends had paid nothing for their university education - both undergraduate and graduate - while we both spend over $80,000 nearly 2 decades ago for an undergraduate with instate tuition at a public school. When we lived in Amsterdam there were big pushbacks happening to move away from government owned and non-market housing options - something that is almost non-existent in the US (outside of the projects). And that maternity/paternity expectations were still incredibly high. Our wealthy German friends complained that earning above $120,000 euros a year only got you 70% of your salary for a year vs 90% if you earned below it. Here the number of support from the state is zero. And childcare - kindergarden - is free for parents and state subsidized throughout most of Europe while a cheap, subsidized daycare in the US is $2000 a month. All of those things are still wildly progressive compared to what Mamdani is proposing.

So I get that you're saying that his specific policies don't feel like they align with the mainstream European system, but I'd argue they are the few things that could try to replicate some of those social supports that the Mayor of NYC could actually implement. He can't make university free and he can't build a subsidized healthcare system, those both require federal level intervention and funding. But he can subsidize transport options, daycare, and food programs.