In an interview on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend, Mamdani warned that if the American Dream is just an ideal that’s out of within reach, then people may start to give up.
The democratic socialist compared it to legendary NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s observation during the rise of fascism in Europe, saying people turned away from democracy not because they were tired of liberty, but because they were tired of being hungry.
“So if democracy doesn’t mean the better life that it has to, it’ll lose its worth. And the same thing with the American Dream: if it’s something you can only see when you turn on your TV or you hear about that one guy you grew up with who made it, that doesn’t mean enough,” Mamdani said.
Thing is, I really don’t care if it’s just PR, so long as that PR involves taking good actions.
It’s the same way how a fear of eternal damnation and hellfire does not by default make you a good person, but it can cause you to perform the same actions as a genuinely good person would. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if you were really feeling it or not, as long as you acted like a good person.
I feel the same way about the rich. I don’t really care if you really want to be a good person or not. If some billionaire’s entire philanthropic history revolves around strictly just not wanting to get eaten by the peasants, that’s fine by me. I don’t really care if you really love trans kids in your heart of hearts, but if you donate some of your money to helping them, it keeps you off my dinner menu for another day.
We can’t expect the rich to be good people at heart, because that doesn’t really ever happen (with some VERY rare and VERY special exceptions), but we can compel “good” behavior out of them if they fear the unwashed masses. For me, that’s good enough for most cases.
But you fucking should, that’s the entire point I’m making
If we just fucking taxed them, then the wealth would go back into circulation. If we let them pick where to donate, it just makes idiots think letting billionaires be in charge of billions of dollars might not fuck us all.
It always will Even if takes a generation or two, eventually they’ll decide that they really should be in charge because they have the most money. The only way to stop it is to stop letting people accumulate that much, and we do that thru taxation.
You are pining for a past that does not exist. It’s very similar to MAGA and it’s how they all got tricked, except this is the version that Bill Maher wants you to believe.
Again, the philanthropy was a ruse to get their taxes lowered so they would “have more to give back”.
Their taxes were lowered many times, and here we are. Carved up and stagnant since the 1980s, every gain we make erased, every ladder pulled up. Every third place closed and commercialized; even the entire sport of bowling has been fist-fucked by private equity. No more toy stores; the only hobby store is run by fundamentalist Christian nationalists who harbor stolen ancient artifacts as if Lara Croft was in Leviticus. They’re not just gaining power, they’re fucking styling on us.
Now they want us to only rent from them; from land to software and everything in between.
I’m not going back to a time when we fell for their tricks, this has played out so many times over history. This time, we keep the fucking money and build what society needs. No one needs that kind of unelected power. I don’t care what you built, you didn’t earn that.