People vote along ethnic/racial lines (look at the primary voting for Adams versus Yang versus Garcia) which means that infighting overtakes quality of governance as a priority. New York has been like that forever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
It’s the same story all over the world where you have similar sectarian politics.
Everything that I read suggested that Adams had a broad constituency of Black and Hispanic votes.[1,2,3] This was also a point that you made repeatedly, while noting that politics was more significant than racial voting lines:
> I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives.
> voting in New York seems to be more third-world style ethnic warfare
> People vote along ethnic/racial lines (look at the primary voting for Adams versus Yang versus Garcia)
This seems to imply something quite other than a broad cross-racial constituency. It also seems to fit oddly with the fact that progressives of all races voted against Adams. And why mention Garcia if there "wasn't a major Latino candidate"?
Look, I'm clearly not inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt here. You make incendiary trolling claims, and when asked to explain yourself, backpedal into vacuous, but reasonable-sounding, contradictions. And you get leeway because you played the role of a Burkean foil for other popular commenters here. But at this point, it just seems like you're showing contempt for the site, and for its users.
In both america and Bangladesh, moreso in the latter, secularism is a structured form of elite oppression against the masses. In America it reflects the American elites’ belief in the moral superiority of the French, while in Bangladesh it reflects the Bangladeshi elites’ belief in the moral superiority of Europeans.
My family is Ahmedi, (not a community historically disposed to the moral superiority of Europeans or Christians and not an upper class family either) so secularism was and is a way of making sure the masses don’t turn us into mincemeat (in Bangladesh too)
What I’m trying to drive at is that this ignores indigenous leftist as well as minority (historically Ahmedis were never leftist with exception of 1970) movements.
It does, insofar as religious minorities have very little influence on Bangladeshi political dynamics. The overriding force for secularism in the country is the notion that Islam is for poor and backward people. Similarly in the US, religion is what actually poorer racial minorities have in common with the dominant group. Secularism actually arose in the US in response to poor Catholic immigrants.
I might find Adams’ criticisms of white progressives amusing, but it’s not a recipe for building a city focused on getting the trains to run on time.
> It also seems to fit oddly with the fact that progressives of all races voted against Adams.
Progressives make up a small percentage of the electorate. The fact that racial conflict plays a major and destructive role in city politics doesn’t mean there aren’t also other issues in play.
I don’t know what makes you think I’m “trolling.” Show me a city that, like NYC, has an established history of ethnic partisanship in politics but also has an effective government?
As you well know, when you're wading into volatile arguments here --- and the racial dynamics of elections are obviously that, for multiple reasons! --- the onus is on you, the commenter, to prevent spontaneous conflagration by writing carefully and hedging away the most noxious interpretations of what you're writing. You share responsibility for how your writing is interpreted. You've long since given up on that, which is why you're finding so much of what you write so unwelcome here.
OP isn’t overreading my point, he’s disagreeing on the merits. Correcting the misconception about Garcia’s race, I don’t see how anyone could disagree that NYC has quite bitter racial politics, and that’s long been true.
The crux of our disagreement seems to boil down to him wanting to avoid the implication that New York’s racial politics is a bad thing for the city’s governance, and me not caring about doing so. That’s fine, we don’t need to defensively write around each other’s pieties.
