Upton Sinclair Was 1934's Mamdani
California has seen this movie before, almost literally. In 1934 author Upton Sinclair came out of nowhere to win the Democratic primary for governor in a landslide. A dedicated socialist like Mr. Mamdani, Sinclair beat out the party establishment's favored candidate, George Creel, who had run Woodrow Wilson's World War I propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information. Sinclair ran on a radical platform known by the acronym EPIC, for End Poverty in California. EPIC proposed universal old-age pensions (before Social Security), Soviet-style collective farms, state-run industries that would 'produce for use, not for profit,' and perhaps property confiscation.
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