On July 18, Hasan Piker – a Twitch streamer who has made millions denouncing capitalism – addressed the national convention of the Democratic party’s student wing in a gray tunic suit of the kind Mao Zedong wore. Days later, a stream resurfaced in which Piker, broadcasting from China, called Mao “one of the great leaders of this world.” His clarification, that there were “a lot of excesses, let’s be real,” is the tone of a man returning a fish that a restaurant served over-salted, not of one contemplating tens of millions dead.
Nobody would need to care if the socialists were losing. On Tuesday a democratic socialist, Donavan McKinney, took a safe Detroit congressional seat from a sitting Democrat, and Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who is not a socialist, beat the party establishment’s candidate for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination. The Democratic Socialists of America says it passed 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist organization in American history. New York City is run by one.
Almost no one votes on a movement’s foreign enthusiasms, so nobody asks who pays to keep those enthusiasms in circulation
Most of these voters are thinking about rent and hospital bills, not Mao. Almost no one votes on a movement’s foreign enthusiasms, so nobody asks who pays to keep those enthusiasms in circulation. Several are well funded.
