© Amir Hamja/APLetitia James, Zohran Mamdani, and his wife Rama Duwaji at his swearing in as Mayor of New York City, January 1, 2026
Much has been made over the past several days about a jarring line uttered by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address last week. "We will," the city's first "Democratic Socialist" mayor promised/threatened, "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."
Understandably — and rightly — most of the criticism of this line (and its speaker) has centered on its mortifying and inarguable whitewashing of the term "collectivism." Collectivism — at least as it has been used for the last 150 years — refers specifically to the political manifestations of mass ideologies, mostly Marxist in origin, but including fascism and Nazism as well. Hence, its historical record is one of repeated failure and continual mass murder. In just six decades — from 1917 to 1977 — collectivism in its various forms produced the deaths of upwards of a quarter of a billion civilian men, women, and children, from Russia to Germany to Cambodia. Add in the casualties of various wars, and the total is even larger and more abominable.
Given all of this, Mamdani's use and attempted rehabilitation of the term were viewed by many observers (of all political persuasions) as either the height of ignorance or an expression of solidarity with true and profound evil. Either way, that's not a great look for the new, democratically elected leader of the largest city in the country and the center of global finance.
But while both traditional and social media are filled with comments on and repudiations of Mamdani's embrace of collectivism, what concerns me more, but has drawn far less rebuke, is the false dichotomy he fabricates in articulating that embrace. Worse still, some of those who profess to oppose his ideology and the perniciousness of collectivism nonetheless accept that dichotomy, conceding his definition of the competing and conflicting visions. They thereby demonstrate both their ignorance of history and the challenges that confront civil society as it fights to prevent its destruction by Mamdani and his ilk.
To start, it is vital to note that the "individualism" that Mamdani decries is largely a mythological beast, no more real than the Scylla or Charybdis. Not only are societies today neither built around nor devoted exclusively to individuals, but they never have been. "Man is by nature a social animal," Aristotle wrote, and "an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human... Society is something that precedes the individual." And thus has it always been. To be clear, "rugged individualists" tend not to cluster together in groups of nearly 8.5 million just so they can be told what to do and how to live by a failed rapper who has never held a real job.
More to the point, individualism, where it does exist, is not exactly the opposite of "collectivism." If anything, radical individualism is a precursor to collectivism, one of the many steps along the proverbial road to serfdom down which collectivism treads. In truth, man — being the social animal Aristotle identified — craves belonging. As a rule, he requires companionship and interaction. When he is deprived of them, on a societal level, by the dysfunction and haphazardness of the liberal order, he grows restless, lonely, and willing to do whatever is necessary to assimilate into whatever crowd will have him. This desire — multiplied by millions of "atomized" individuals — contains the seeds of "mass man," of mass movements, of collective action, and, in time, of totalitarianism. As Hannah Arendt noted,
"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century."Individualism breeds atomization, which breeds loneliness, which, in turn, leads to that which those of us not named Mamdani know as the horrors of collectivism. Collectivist totalitarianism, Arendt continued, "bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man."
Unsurprisingly but still unnervingly, in the wake of Mamdani's comments on collectivism, some observers and commentators purportedly on the political right tried to use those comments as a cudgel against others on the right, those with whom they disagree about Donald Trump and the direction of conservatism. Cathy Young, for example, a Never-Trump conservative/libertarian who writes for Bill Kristol's Never-Trump The Dispatch, mocked the president's supporters, writing that "What's amusing is that much of the MAGA and MAGA-adjacent right...will nod right along to Mamdani's broadside against 'the frigidity of rugged individualism.' The only difference is they'll use some trad euphemism for left-coded 'collectivism.'" And just what kind of euphemism would they use? Young continued, "If you replaced 'collectivism' with 'community, family, and tradition,' much of the current right would agree."
This is a particularly peculiar criticism of "the current right," if for no other reason than the fact that "much of the current right" absolutely should agree with that. It is, in fact, the reason the right exists.
I'll cut Young a little slack here, in part because she later tried to correct herself by drawing a (largely imaginary?) distinction between "voluntary" and "involuntary community," and in part because she was raised in the Soviet Union and may not be familiar with the niceties of American conservatism. Nevertheless, it is inarguable that American conservatism is more than a little preoccupied with the notions of "community, family, and tradition." Together, these things are, as I say, American conservatism's raison d'être. Moreover, they are its raison d'être specifically because they constitute the alternative to collectivism. They, not the strawman of "rugged individualism," are the opposite of Zohran Mamdani's ideology, and one need take neither my word nor that of "the current right" as proof of this.
The post-World War II conservative renaissance began in 1948, with the publication of a little book titled Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver. Russell Kirk, who is himself often described as the father of modern-day conservatism, called this book "the first gun fired by American conservatives in their intellectual rebellion against the ritualistic liberalism that had prevailed since 1933 and which still aspires to domination over this nation."
Fast on the heels of Weaver's Ideas came Peter Viereck's Conservatism Revisited (1949), Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951), Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953), and Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community (also 1953). Each of these books was a warning cry that leftist collectivism, which had gathered a huge head of steam during the Roosevelt years and accelerated dramatically in the postwar period, represented a growing danger to American society. Weaver said this most directly in the opening sentence of the introduction to Ideas, where he announced quite simply, "This is another book about the dissolution of the West."
Given this, each of these books was also "another book about the dissolution" of community, family, and tradition, as well as a plea to save what was left of these institutions as (ironically) a bulwark against collectivism.
George Nash, the author of the authoritative book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, described the thesis of the last of the books noted above, Robert Nisbet's fittingly titled The Quest for Community, as follows:
The history of the West since the end of the Middle Ages was a story of the decline of intermediate associations between the individual and the state. The weakening and dissolution of such ties as family, church, guild, and neighborhood had not, as many had hoped, liberated men. Instead, it had produced alienation, isolation, spiritual desolation, and the growth of mass man. But men cannot live in Hobbesian isolation, and so, to satisfy his longings, he seeks out ersatz community — eventually finding it in the totalitarian state.In many ways, this is the broad thesis of American conservatism. It is also the broad thesis offered by other anti-collectivists, who would undoubtedly bristle at being labeled "conservatives," including Hannah Arendt, noted above, and the inimitable former Communist Alastair MacIntyre.
Collectivism is truly and inarguably evil. Community, in turn, stands as its rival — albeit a deteriorating rival. One needn't be a "post-liberal" Trumper to recognize this. One need only be aware of man's nature and his history.
Reader Comments
One might feel the "warmth" only as a proper sheeple that gives in to peer pressure already on subconscious level. Like we experienced with the plandemic.
But for those who doubted or dared to openly disagree even on minor details, a collectivist society felt rather cold. Stone-cold.
Brave AI: "The Cultural Revolution in China, which took place from 1966 to 1976, targeted four specific elements collectively known as the "Four Olds". These were old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. The campaign aimed to eliminate these remnants of pre-communist and traditional Chinese society to enforce Communist ideology and establish a new socialist order."
What is Woke, trans, choose-your-gender, open borders, no Christianity, no merit, equity=equality?
I could recommend this YT channel [Link] an American history professor specialized China and the PLA (their army). Mostly funny, often with interesting details, but a lot of historical context. "Unfortunately" the whole story is spread over dozens of episodes ...
According to him, the "Cultural Revolution" was mostly a battle between different party factions fighting for dominance, which escalated intto a "life-and-death scenario. Similiar to the current battle between US deep state factions, only that the lethal stage is not yet reached.
By the way, after the "revolutionary" excesses were over, China stabilized, and conditions improved relatively quickly. Up to a point in 1989 were they even threw out George Soros, who had tried a Chines color revolution that year ...
It is interesting that Soros and his NGO where kicked out of China.
I still like AI as giving context, Brave AI: "Jia Chunwang, as Minister of State Security (MSS), played a central role in expelling George Soros from China in 1989. The MSS, under Jia's leadership, closely monitored Soros's activities and viewed his foundations as potential tools for foreign political infiltration. On 23 May 1989, just before the Tiananmen Square crackdown, all Soros-related foundations and organizations were forcibly dissolved and shut down, and Soros himself was warned that he was "not welcome" in China anymore. " The connection to Tiananmen Square? Was Soros/NGO running a "color revolution"?
But in general, I came to the conclusion that China is a much more complex topic than our Western indoctrination wants to make us believe. Mind you, most "news" and "history" is distorted and falsified by Western media, especially the perpetrators of the Opium wars.
Not that I like China, understand their societal climate, or ever want to live there - but this is their business, not mine. Perhaps you have seen some Chinese movies, time period or plot doesn't matter. When you assess the human interactions and relations, you will find their society is much more hierarchical and formal than the Western ones. Which applies to most other East Asian cultures as well - Korea, Japan, Thailand, etc. I think this is linked to the relatively high population density, and long history. Although I think the Chinese hierarchies are more flexible and meritocratic than in other neighboring countries.
If you take a closer look at the current Chinese government structure, their methods, rituals and control over society, you will find it is not at all "communist", but very much resembles the "old" Chinese imperial court. Why they kept the "communist party" veneer I don't know ...
If you look at Dynastic education in China, it focused on Chinese values and not on technological skills like math. This created a people that were obedient to the values being taught which means to the Dynastic leaders. This China was not able to compete with the West. (In my view, the education/indoctrination in the West is designed to use Woke values to reduce the West capacity for innovation and creativity.)
Where is Chinese education now? Brave AI: "In the PISA 2022 assessment, China, represented by the four provinces of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z), ranked first in both mathematics and science , with scores significantly higher than other participating countries and economies ."
At the same time, China kicked Soros and his NGOs out of China indicating a realization of the globalist inroad of Soros. My understanding is China was used by the globalist power structure to experiment and implement technocracy.
Where does Xi stand? Is the CCP still the major power player in China?
Brave AI: "The book referenced in the Congressional Record regarding the 45 goals to undermine the United States is The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen, a former FBI employee. The list of 45 goals, which were read into the Congressional Record on January 10, 1963, was presented as an excerpt from Skousen’s book."
It is worth readers time to review the list and you find that many have been successful. Here is the list provided by Brave AI: [Link]
It includes (15 through 22):
"Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum.
Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
Gain control of all student newspapers.Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.
Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms"."
But like Russia and Iran (Persia), they are a civilisational state which have survived more than a millenium in one form or another. They seemingly developed a form of societal and cultural cohesion that transcends the shift of generations and temporary fads. Which seems to make them much more resilient to subversion and external control.
These globalists are "bad"(IMO) when they stick their noses in other countries(buying land, factories, or other national assets, even renting them), and employing foreign workers(at cheaper costs) depriving their host countries populations with jobs, pensions and sharing the productive gains of the oligarchs businesses(within their own borders).