The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York
In his inaugural address, New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani described his taking the levers of municipal power as “an opportunity to transform and reinvent.” He will do that, he said, by governing “expansively and audaciously.” The “era of big government” is not over, he pledged. City Hall will produce “abundance” by fighting against “corporate greed.”
To accomplish those stated goals, the mayor will need to … “wield the powers of a tyrant.”
The Mamdani administration will meet the needs of the people: it will “make it possible for every New Yorker to afford a life they love once again.” Mamdani will tax the rich, freeze rents, and make bus rides free. He will govern, in his words, as a “democratic socialist” with “the wind of purpose” at his back. Mamdani promised to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The young socialist Mayor is either incredibly ignorant or, worse, a committed ideologue to whom facts, history, and human nature are meaningless.
There was a time when big city mayors in the United States, whether Democrats or Republicans, were pragmatists — they made sure the garbage got collected, kept the streets and neighborhoods reasonably safe. One thinks of Chicago’s Richard Daley (the elder), Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo, and New York’s Rudy Giuliani. Big city mayors in the United States were usually the furthest thing from revolutionaries. Not anymore.
It is characteristic of revolutionaries to want to “transform” and “reinvent.” The Jacobins of France tried it in the 1790s. The Bolsheviks tried it in 1917. Since then, it has been tried in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, and other socialist “paradises” governed or ruled by collectivist regimes. Leftist intellectuals often saw in these collectivist regimes their visions of utopia on earth — Paul Hollander called them “political pilgrims” and catalogued their ideological obeisance to gangster-statesmen.
All of those collectivist regimes claimed to rule in the name of the people, but in reality they ruled as a nomenklatura or ruling class that used the coercive powers of government to maintain and increase their power and privileges. And when the people resisted their attempts at transformation or reinvention, the nomenklatura used the “warmth of collectivism” to control, imprison, and, in some instances, liquidate the people.
So where in the chronicles of history has Mamdani seen the “warmth of collectivism?” Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot did not exude “warmth.” One wonders if Mamdani has ever heard of any of them. Does he not know about Stalin’s collectivization of the farms in the early 1930s that killed millions? Has he ever studied Mao’s collectivist Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions? The socialists whom Mamdani credits for paving the way for his political rise are Bernie Sanders, Nydia Velazquez, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (better known as AOC) — all legislators who didn’t or don’t wield executive powers; who didn’t and don’t control police or security forces.
New York Catholic Bishop Robert Barron knows all about collectivism. “Collectivism in its various forms is responsible for the deaths of at least 100 million people in the last century,” Bishop Barron wrote. And capitalism, not collectivism, Bishop Barron explained, is “the economic system that is based on the rights, freedom, and dignity of the human person.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also understands collectivism’s history. The warmth of collectivism, he wrote on X, “always requires coercion and force.”
Back in the 1970s, French writer Jean Francois Revel wrote a book titled The Totalitarian Temptation, in which he examined history’s political leaders who wanted, or surrendered to the temptation, to “wield the powers of a tyrant.” Revel believed that the totalitarian temptation had two main features: the rhetoric of “the struggle for economic justice and the improvement of life in general” and “the desire for totalitarianism among elites.” Those elites believe they can bring about “the one true social and moral order.” The political and economic collectivists, Revel explained, like to pass themselves off as progressives, but their principal goal is power, instead of the improvement of society.
Mayor Mamdani’s inaugural address contained plenty of rhetoric about the struggle for economic justice and the improvement of life in general: tax the rich; freeze rents; free bus rides; and using the powers of City Hall to make it possible for every New Yorker to “afford a life they love.” To accomplish those stated goals, the mayor will need to, as he said, “govern expansively and audaciously” pushed by the “wind of purpose” at his back — in Revel’s words, “wield the powers of a tyrant.” Such is the “warmth of collectivism.”
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