Toward a Humanist Accelerationism

The 2024 election of Trump was a lot of things.

It was proof that Americans were very willing to stomach abjectly fascist politics if it meant that the average household income could increase somewhat. It was proof that we were willing to fall for the anti-interventionist lie twice from the same person. It was proof that a convicted felon could reach office, that #MeToo did a lot of good but didn't remove the stain of rape apologia from our politics.

It was also proof that the DNC had completely failed to build a leftism, or even a left-of-center-ism, that Americans could get behind.

I'm not going to place the election of Trump purely at the feet of Kamala. I don't think that's fair. I will say, though, that the fact that Kamala was the pick, the fact that a center-right institutional candidate was the best that the DNC had to offer after 4 years of Trump and 4 more years of Biden, is telling. The fact that the Bernie movement taught the DNC nothing about the younger generation's disdain for institutional DNC politicians, the fact that them losing the election to Trump the first time after they chose the penultimate institutional candidate, is incredibly telling.

The truth is, while the remnants of the DNC bleeds out in the corner still ranting about Mamdani's win in New York, we need to come together and start thinking about, and organizing, what the New Left is going to look like.

The Need for a New Left

I don't think "we need to reinvent the left in the US" is a fringe policy point to anybody except for McKinsey consultants and the Clinton's.

Frustration, bordering on outright rage, toward the institutional democrats in the DNC has boiled over. AOC was an early precursor, but Mamdani is the bullhorn. Mamdani ran against two Republicans (let's be honest, in any other world, Cuomo is a Republican) with 0 support from the DNC, without abandoning "controversial" issues like the genocide in Israel and the ability for trans people to exist. And he won.

He won on a platform (progressive-including-trans people, anti-war including opposition to the genocide in Palestine, anti-Zionist but anti-anti-semitism, YIMBY on housing, tax the billionaires and be wary of the NYPD) that the Democrats have ignored or have insisted is untennable. He did so in an incredibly complex city, one that serves as the backbone for US culture, politics, history and economy.

He proved that a New Left is possible. Now let's talk about what I believe it can look like.

What is changing is that I'm centralizing a lot of the "pain points" so that I can minimize the time I work on them. For example, I'm going to implement authentication as a library so that I only have to build it once (for ScrollWise) and in every other project I'll just have to import the library and tweak the inputs.

For things like marketing... that's going to take some time to figure out. Time and experience.