Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. In an inaugural address that was delivered on New Year's Day, New York City Mayor Zuran Mamdani promised, and I quote, to replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.
Social media quickly filled with memes that paired the quote with images of the victims of Nazi, Stalinist, and Maoist warm collectivism. For all of Mamdani's charisma, his choice of words was certainly intentional. Regurgitating language from revolutionaries and ivory tower intellectuals, he's not attempting to hide who he is or what he plans to do. And he said as much in his inauguration speech: quote, We will govern without shame and insecurity, making no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a democratic socialist.
I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical. Except, of course, that his principles are radical. In fact, as Al Moeller put it over at World Opinions, they come right out of the Marxist nightmare. And we know how this dream ends.
As Moeller continued, quote, it's not that his ideas haven't been tried, it's that they've produced a measurable human misery wherever they've been adopted, end quote. Either Momdani doesn't understand the history of his ideas, or he believes that this time will be different. After winning the race on November the 4th, he declared, we will prove that there's no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about. That comment reminded many of what President Reagan once called the nine most terrifying words in the English language. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
In fact, Momdani sounds very much indeed like another politician, one who said, all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. That was Benito Mussolini.
Now at one time, it would have been problematic for an American politician to essentially sub-quote a fascist dictator, but many younger Americans are ready to reconsider the failed ideas of the past. According to a recent YouGov and Economist poll. Nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 29 have a favorable view of socialism. Unsurprisingly, that demographic overwhelmingly turned out for Mamdani.
Now a key factor here is that many in the younger generation simply do not know better. Their education has failed them. They've heard all about the evils of capitalism, but not about the many who were killed attempting to escape socialist regimes, or why the escapes always and only went in one direction. They've been taught to fear the impending catastrophes of climate change, which is, they've been told, the fault of evil corporations, but they haven't been told about the mass starvations which resulted from the state controlling industry and agriculture. They've learned that socialism is about sharing, not that the sharing is often forced at gunpoint.
They've learned that when socialism fails, it's because it was done wrong. and that true socialism has never been trod.
Well, the truth about socialism is that it is inherently immoral. As Ben Shapiro put it a few years ago, socialism is bad because socialism is tyranny. Not it's an aspect of tyranny.
Socialism itself is tyranny. The notion of socialism is that you don't own your own freedom. In other words, the reason oppression results every time socialism is tried is because it's built into the system. Oppression is not a bug of socialism, it's a feature. That's because, according to a socialist vision, every element of society must either submit to the state, be stripped away altogether, or even better yet, made into another arm of the state.
The mediating institutions that Alexis de Tocqueville observed as being drivers of American liberty and prosperity-churches, schools, volunteer associations, organizations, families-these all must devolve under socialism into departments of government power. The state, according to this view, cannot fail. But of course the state does fail, and not just because of inefficiency. Ultimately, socialism is built on flawed anthropology.
Socialists claim to be for the people, but what they mean is humanity, never humans. According to a socialist vision, the individual receives dignity from society, not the other way around. The individual, with his or her unique insight, perspective, and preference, becomes an existential threat to the grand socialist project. In contrast, within a Christian worldview, dignity is given to individuals by God, who made them in his image. Individuals bring dignity to the families, the communities, and to the societies around them.
They're not cogs in a government-sponsored wheel. They're not problems for the state to solve. They are, to borrow from J.R.R. Tolkien, sub-creators who, given the freedom and chance to do so, will always outperform any mass system that seeks to control them. For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And to download or share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.
