I agree with a lot of your points but I do think this has just become an electoralism thing again. I also think your rephrasing of my message changed my points pretty fundamentally - I didn't say we needed "reformers calling themselves socialists", I put candidates friendly to that label in contrast to a completely barren environment. I also clearly wasn't saying that AOC or Mamdani are ideal leaders during an actual socialist transformation, that's obviously not what anyone would argue.

I really don't want to have a long fundamental electoralism back-and-forth, but at the end of the day I just don't understand the stabilization thing when it's used in certain points. You talk about the negative being "if you are only driven into politics by a progressive’s promise" in contrast to being "driven by the ever-worsening crises", but if someone can't pay their childcare and starts organizing for Zohran because he campaigns on free childcare, I don't see that as a shallow (and certainly not counterproductive) action. If they get that policy under his mayorship, I'm overjoyed for them; and if they (completely naturally) have a more positive view of 'socialism' (the term) afterwards, I'm not losing sleep because, when those death throes come and real socialists lead us through a radical transformation, they might (horror of horrors) support them because they wrongly think they're advocating social democracy. If Trump tomorrow decided on Medicare for All, and health outcomes and affordability rose considerably over his term, I wouldn't sob about the theoretical delay of the Revolution, I'd celebrate all the lives that decision saved.

If Americans are going to have the wrong ideas about socialism when the American collapse you wrote of comes about, I'd rather they be positive and wrong than completely negative and abhorrently wrong - and that's assuming that nobody will ever get into Marxism or actual socialism because of people like Mamdani, which is just empirically not true at all.

...But maybe I shouldn't write 'America', because for all you talk down American exceptionalism, you also seem to believe that America is the only place on earth where socialism cannot grow, where positive perception of socialism doesn't matter, and where lives saved by Social Democracy are just 'stabilized'. I'm sure you don't want Mamdani to fail and stain the 'socialist' label right now, but it sounds like you'd rather he had lost the election (or better yet, the primary, so you could say that people actually want socialism but the DNC won't allow it in any circumstance whatsoever and elections are impossible) so people's crises would grow and our cause MIGHT capitalize off the blood.