Mentions Zohran Mamdani

The central goal of much anti-transgender rhetoric is to make cisgender people believe that their interests and trans people’s interests cannot be met at the same time. It’s not just the accusation that trans people are different or weird or creepy; it’s that our rights, our healthcare, and our well-being must come at the expense of your well-being. As the infamous ad from Trump’s reelection campaign put it, transphobes want cis people to think that someone who cares about “they/them” could never be for “us.” It fits neatly into the central thesis of Trumpism—that someone else’s suffering will be your gain. It also feeds into the portrayal of the Democratic Party as feckless, effete, and obsessed with the abstractions of identity.

For any politician facing them, there are two ways of handling these attacks: by promising to care less about trans people or by promising to care more about everyone. If you are not responsive to the needs and interests of a broad coalition of working people, you can be more easily caricatured as dedicated to the interests of some nefarious (and often racialized) other. But if you do have a compelling vision for how to improve all people’s lives, the fact that not all of those people are the same carries less weight. It is true that many Americans would rather starve than share a table with someone they view as less deserving or too deviant from their own experience. But it’s especially true if all that’s on the menu is scraps.

[…]

I am exhausted with begging for help and pleading for others to recognize transgender people’s humanity. I’m also exhausted with the shallow brand of identity politics removed from the material concerns of most people–including trans people–adopted by the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the 2010s when it seemed a useful wedge against progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Judith Butler told El País earlier this year, “Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandon our interdependent ties.”

It is exactly those interdependent ties that Mamdani won on and that our political future depends on. The politics of forced scarcity being sold by Trump and seemingly bought into by many Democrats is a myth deeply ingrained in our politics, our communities, and our culture. Rewriting it is not simply the work of rhetoric, talking points, and being open to disagreement. It’s also the work of changing how people experience politics to begin with, and showing them their freedom and dignity need not come at the expense of someone else’s. And what I see in Mamdani’s campaign is not only a promise of solidarity with a marginalized group I happen to be a member of. What I see is a promise that nobody will have to do that work alone.

This is a lot of fun. It really gets going at about twenty-five minutes in, where they start talking about ways that the government can can intervene in markets for essentials goods and services that don't function the way that undergrad textbooks say they should…

… which leads to this exchange about ten minutes later:

JON STEWART: So let's-- all these points go together in a larger thing. So let's take a step back. Lina Khan is redesigning the system of incentives. So we'll redesign the system for when markets don't really function that well, like with health care and utilities and broadband, those kinds of things that you say, the markets, even left to their own devices, we want them still to innovate, but they're not going to function properly on their own. How would you redesign the government's role in those? Would you advocate for always, as you said with the e-filing and that, for an always-accessible public option within those markets? 

LINA KHAN: I think when you look at markets that are really essential for the necessities of life, those need to be the first order area of focus for the government, these markets where people don't have a choice. Health care is an important one. Food and agriculture is an important one. Day-to-day transportation, especially in a place like New York City, where you're so reliant on infrastructure, those are the core parts of people's day-to-day infrastructure that we need to make sure they're not getting squeezed or price gouged. And so I would say that has to be the first layer of focus. And you need to figure out, are these markets where if we just take on illegal monopolistic practices, that'll be enough to make sure that companies aren't price gouging? Or do we need to have more of this public option?

Yay!

Funny 'cos it's true:

Political novices put far too much value on winning. Think about a game of basketball against your eight-year-old son. You may have scored more points, but now his feelings are hurt. Wouldn’t it have been better to simply let him win? The same thing goes for the Democratic Party. When progressives like Mamdani are too focused on winning, they don’t consider the feelings of more-established candidates who deserve to win because they want to. Or because it’s “their turn.” Or their dying wish.

Let’s imagine that Zohran Mamdani does win, with a coalition of multi-class young people, immigrants, unions, renters, faith leaders, and pansexual mustache men. What does that mean for the losers? The investment bankers, the landlords, and the Wall Street guys who ask women on the street if “they’re sisters or something”? Was winning worth their tears?

As someone who won one time, I can tell you winning is often not worth it. You know what happens after you win? Governing. You know how hard that is? Who wants that kind of responsibility? Making people’s lives better by advancing policies? Responsibility is incredibly stressful.