This post was originally published on this site
What to make of these recent political developments? Seattle has clearly shifted back to the progressive camp. The centrists are sinking, one after the other. Mayor Bruce Harrell is the latest to go under. It is mathematically impossible for him to catch up, and he is expected to concede today.
The remaining members of a center that swelled in the 2023 election (Rob Saka, Robert Kettle, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera) are likely to reassess the “public safety” mania that got them elected and essentially came down to reducing a structurally induced housing crisis and stagnant wages to those who fell through the paper-thin bottom floor of an otherwise very rich city. The centrist Dan Strauss? Never really existed. He was just a dream. Expect him to wake up one of these fine mornings as the progressive he, to save his political career, put to sleep in 2023.
And so, the heyday of centristism is receding, and what we are heading to is a politics that sees homeless people and substance abuse as a minor problem when compared to the thugs authorized by the president to kidnap people from the streets and rip them from their families.
BREAKING: Masked ICE agents tried to take custody of an 11 year old girl as her mother screamed, “She’s a minor, don’t touch her!”
Bystanders shouted that the little girl is an American citizen, but the agents didn’t care, they saw brown skin and assumed immigrant.
💔 www.threads.com/@swagrman/po…
— Lugala (@lugala.bsky.social) November 13, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Because the homeless do not abduct people and traumatize children, it’s much harder to portray them as the ultimate urban villains. They have rightly been eclipsed by ICE; the city can see clearer now. We are at war with the superrich, and this is why Wilson is our next mayor. In this new and more sober context, the importance of urban fellow-felling and affordability carries the day.
This local development was not isolated. From the elections that occurred across the nation (New York City, New Jersey, California, Virginia, and even Mississippi) on November 4, the geist of an unapologetic or combative left emerged and marched straight to the frontlines of the class war between billionaires and the rest. This is the era of Zohran Mamdani.
Then came November 10. That day witnessed a political disaster of the first order. Moderate Dems did a thing completely at odds with the feelings of most voters, or even in defiance of this new spirit. After forcing Donald Trump to shut down the government unless a popular program (tax credits for the Affordable Care Act) that cut healthcare costs for millions of Americans was extended, moderate Dems showed their true colors by caving to Trump and giving him exactly what he wanted with practically nothing in return. And it was at this moment, after 40 days and 40 nights, that the flaw in the structure that maintained the middle in American politics became as shamefully exposed as Noah after he had too much to drink.
Drunkenness of Noah https://www.wikiart.org/en/giovanni-bellini/drunkenness-of-noah
— Giovanni Bellini (@giovannibellini.bsky.social) September 5, 2024 at 8:54 AM
The moderates no longer generated compromises but concessions to what was left of the right, the far right. But where had the counterpart to the moderate left, the moderate right, gone? An answer can only be supplied if we take a brief walk through the short 20th century.
The center in American politics didn’t exist in any meaningful way until after the rise of social democracy (also called New Deal policies) in the US. This happened in the 1930s, the Red Decade. Following the Second World War, capitalists, shaken by two devastating wars and a massive market crash in 1929, were forced to compromise with labor. This commitment was codified in 1950 by the Treaty of Detroit and a form of state-managed capitalism that increased homeownership, guaranteed full employment and living wages, provided a social safety net, and built roads to the suburbs. Here, in this conjecture, a center emerged and found a home. And class struggle became, at least for white labor (black labor remained militant), a thing of the past.
The reason for the center’s success and longevity (30 years) is that it was composed, in equal measure, of people on the right and the left. This successful union stabilized American politics until the 1970s, when capitalists, borrowing ideas cooked up at the University of Chicago, revolted and demanded, for the resuscitation of the kind of profits no one had seen since The Gilded Age, labor’s submission and the freezing of wages.
By the 1980s, labor collapsed, the right returned to political power, and it imposed massive tax cuts and deep cuts on social democratic programs. This is when their journey away from the center began. And the more they moved to the right, the more and more moderate Democrats were isolated in the center.This growing imbalance ultimately led to the end of compromise and the rise of concession. And this is why we found, even during Biden’s term, the wealth of top capitalists increased like never before.
True, Biden attempted to counter this disparity with Keynesian programs (“Build America Better”) that kept unemployment low, but this proved to be inadequate to save the centrists, who were now despised because the main posture of the center was capitulation.
Enter the Elvis of continental philosophy, Slavoj Žižek. In an article recently posted on Project Syndicate, he made this important assertion: “Mamdani won because he did for the left what Trump did for the right. He clearly articulated his radical position without worrying about losing the center.”
This needs a little consideration. Right after Mamdani won, Trump realized that his rejection of the center was now directly challenged by a politician on the left who also rejected the center, but for completely different reasons. Nothing in Mamdani politics comes close to resembling those of Trump. It’s just that both have left the center. This structural similarity has made Trump vulnerable because it exposes the limits of his form of rejection, which was entirely negative and plainly unproductive .
Now, if there is someone on the left who offers the same rejection but in positive terms and offers a real possibility of economic gains for wage earners, the game has completely changed.
Do not be surprised to see many on the Trump side pop up, with quantum suddenness, on the Mamdani side. Why? Because at the end of the day, you can’t eat the Gulf of America.
