remembering Victor Berger
I am watching some Fox News post mortems on Election 2025. I see where New Jersey’s Republican gubernatorial candidate lost “despite a late endorsement from Donald Trump” — an issue with cause and effect relations there. Moving on this clip, we have the discussion on the election of New York’s New mayor and the ominous take-away. “You need to talk to your kids about Socialism, because if you don’t, someone else will. “
Wanting to imagine how to approach the issue of Socialism “to the kids” as it has gone in the history of American electoral politics, I look to the Wikipedia entry on Victor Berger, but falter at the line — “helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialism movement“. This is puzzling to me in that I had thought that term “sewer socialism” was a pejorative used from people to Berger’s (and the three Milwaukee mayors) left who eschew electoral politics — deeming them all-out and reformist liberals who come up against actual power dynamics and limitations of the office and so end up doing nothing much more that wrestling the sewer system away from private profit making concerns. But maybe Berger And the others took it as a badge of honor on his way to winning an electorate. I would be curious on how the Fox News pundits wanting to “talk to your kids about Socialism” pivot about the issues of Victor Berger in the broader context of American electoral politics as well as if he offered anything substantive. I suffer the problem that I don’t have any central point to make and would be skipping off on different tangents — all a bit of a mess, ain’t it?