Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Utopian Future?

Utopia awaits in New York City. Karl Marx has been reincarnated, in spirit if not life, as newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani plans to use City Hall’s “power to improve New Yorkers’ lives,” especially those who have been “betrayed by the established order.” He promised that “their needs will be met. Their hopes and dreams and interests will be reflected transparently in government. They will shape our future.”

Not through the complex mix of compassion, conciliation, creativity, cooperation, and conviction that has distinguished America throughout its history. Instead, through the greatest “c” word, at least to a socialist: collectivism. Explained Mamdani: if “for too long” New York’s many “communities have existed as distinct from one another, we will draw this city closer together. We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity, then let this government foster it.”

The world has been waiting for this moment for at least the last 36 years. On Jan. 12, 1990, Germany began to officially destroy the greatest symbol of coerced community in the Western World, the Berlin Wall. Evidently misled by the errors of neo-liberal philosophy of “rugged individualism,” highlighted by cowboy capitalism, individual liberty, personal freedom, and constitutional rule, residents of the so-called German Democratic Republic abandoned “the warmth of collectivism” ensured by imprisoning the population of 16 million behind high walls bounded by death strips guarded by armed personnel ordered to shoot-to-kill. Karl Marx would have been shocked and saddened by the GDR’s demise. (RELATED: The ‘Warmth of Collectivism’ Comes to New York)

Marx published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. He was a classic limousine liberal who, pointed out historian Paul Johnson, “never set foot in a mill, factory or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.” Indeed, Marx was not just a dishonest intellectual but a disreputable person, whose atrocious misbehavior Johnson details in his devastating Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky. Even by his own measure, Marx fell short. He excited those seeking human utopia but failed to provide a pathway to power necessary to establish “the warmth of collectivism” in a world in which most people, unlike Marx, had to work for a living.

Were it not for Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian terrorist who lit the fuse to World War I by assassinating the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, communism might have died out as ancient monarchies developed, moderated, and transformed. Instead, as a war measure, communism succeeded beyond any expectation or imagination. Wilhelmine Germany enabled Bolshevik troublemaker Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to make his way back to Russia after the Tsar’s fall. The rest, as they say, is history. Once seemingly destined to remain an idle, chess-playing political babbler in comfortable exile in Switzerland, Lenin unexpectedly became the essential man, whose boundless will, utter ruthlessness, and perverse perspicacity yielded the Soviet Union.

Lenin’s commitment to “the warmth of collectivism” was boundless, bathed in the blood and guts of the millions who died during the Russian Civil War and even more who were murdered during his brief and Joseph Stalin’s much longer reigns. Nevertheless, Lenin is still beloved by the Left. They praise him, raise statues to him, and publish multi-author paeans to him. Indeed, in the latter 104 authors were so enthralled by his fantasy of coercive community that not one thought to mention even the most minor of his crimes.

Alas, people ruled by Lenin and his successors, especially in states where the Soviet Union imposed “the warmth of socialism,” lacked sufficient character to suffer through necessary oppression and poverty as they marched toward history’s grand proletarian conclusion. Hence, the need to fence residents into various socialist paradises. All of the latter forbade travel outside fraternally communal states. Most effective was the GDR, which, after its creation, suffered a devastating population loss through the divided city of Berlin.

Tragically, the development of the GDR as the Garden of Eden was delayed because its beneficiaries were leaving. An estimated 3.5 million East Germans fled between 1949 and 1961, when around 1,000 were leaving every day — all unaware of the warm collectivist benefits to come. Most likely to go were younger workers. Moscow’s ambassador, Mikhail Pervukhin complained that “the presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which unfortunately does not always turn out in favor of Democratic [East] Berlin.” Those sneaky “rugged individualists” just wouldn’t play fair! Thus, late on Aug. 12, 1961, the East German state began to construct a barrier, which became steadily more formidable and deadlier over time.

Even so, the Wall did not end escape attempts. To start, members of the GDR’s coerced community jumped from adjoining buildings, climbed over barricades, tunneled under the barriers, and flew over obstructions. As the Wall metastasized, people deployed cables and ziplines, used balloons, submarines, and microlights, crashed through barriers, added secret compartments to vehicles, and even impersonated diplomats. Over the next 28 years, some 100,000 East Germans sought to escape. An estimated 5,000 made it. More than 1,000 of those who didn’t died trying. Many of the rest were imprisoned for Republikflucht, a serious crime in the eyes of those generously determined to share “the warmth of collectivism.”

The first death, of someone who jumped from her apartment building, occurred 10 days after the Wall was first erected. The first murder, of 24-year-old tailor Guenter Litfin, shot while swimming across the River Spree, occurred a couple of days later. The deaths continued, day in and out, often in full view of the world. Guards wounded Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer, as he climbed the wall, and left him to bleed out to the horror of viewers in both East and West Berlin. The last murder, of 20-year-old restaurant worker Chris Gueffroy, occurred on February 6, 1989. A month later, the last East German died in an escape attempt, 32-year-old electrical engineer Winfried Freudenberg, whose home-made balloon crashed.

While most squishy Westerners were appalled by the killing, those heroically dedicated to spreading “the warmth of collectivism” understood the need for discipline. For instance, Angela Davis, who remains a paragon of radical chic, visited the great and glorious GDR during its heyday. In the company of East German party boss Erich Honecker, she visited the monument for a border guard shot by an escapee, lauding the “loyal soldier, who sacrificed his life for his socialist country.” She pledged to tell Americans on her return home “about the true function of this border” — in today’s lingo, to share “the warmth of collectivism.”

Alas, even more than Americans, East Germans never came to understand “the true function” of the Wall. Or, actually, they came to understand it too well. As demonstrations against the regime exploded, Honecker sought Soviet support and proposed to shoot. However, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev put human life and liberty before “the warmth of collectivism” and refused to intervene. Worse, Honecker’s cowardly subordinates retired him. In early November 1989, a million people marched for freedom in East Berlin. A few days later, the Wall fell. And its “warmth of collectivism” was forever lost, with its demolition beginning 36 years ago next week.

Of course, Mamdani does not propose turning New York City into a death state, its residents penned in by walls and guards. However, “the warmth of collectivism” is difficult to maintain even in its smallest and most intense form, the family. Beyond that, only the most limited and transitory communes survive any length of time. The idea that politicians imposing taxes and regulations, employing bureaucracies and police, and concocting plans and programs, can create something approaching “warmth,” let alone anything reflecting genuine compassion, meaningful consistency, and normal competence, is fantasy. (RELATED: From Solidarity to Statism: Mayor Mamdani’s Vision for New York City)

Mamdani still could do some good, even if he governs on the left. Government should do its essential tasks well. Much of the regulatory state does more to oppress than uplift workers, entrepreneurs, independents, and most anyone else who believes that responsibility for their life, and that of their family, lies outside state institutions. He pledged to “deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance.” If the city does better at protecting safety and allowing private operators to promote affordability, abundance is more likely to occur naturally — without the impediments that inevitably accompany collectivism, especially of the coercive variety. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Rent Control Plans Will Make the Rental Market Worse for Working People)

Unfortunately, it took Soviet communists seven decades to learn the truth about “the warmth of collectivism.” Along the way, working people suffered the most, with Communist apparatchiks the original “one percent.” Alas, Mamdani apparently sees no limits to the collectivist faith that he promotes. Among his promises is to “overcome the isolation that too many feel, and connect the people of this city to one another.” Can a program to promote universal happiness be far behind?

Political utopias have a poor record. Mamdani’s vision of a warm, collectivist New York City is unlikely to perform any better than the many failed nirvanas and idylls sketched by past philosophers. Those who best understand collectivism’s realities are those who suffered through “the warmth of collectivism” at its most intense.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in the GDR. In her maiden speech as leader of a reunited nation, she explained that “The biggest surprise of my life was freedom.” She “expected The Wall” and discovered that “once you’ve had such a wonderful surprise in your life, then you think anything is possible.” In a call to the German people that should reverberate across geography and time, she declared: “Let us dare to have more freedom.”

Yes, let us do so. Today. In America, and even New York City.

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Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.