“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

-Zohran Mamdani, Mayor, New York City. Inaugural address.

With these words the Mayor of our largest city plainly tells us that his vision for our nation is radically different from the vision held by all generations before. With these words he also rejects the very ideas that made the United States exceptional in the world.

He is, in essence, declaring himself not just a socialist, but a communist.

Does this mean that next week we’ll see private property appropriated by roving gangs of young toughs with hammer and sickle armbands on their jackets?

Of course not. For all of his extreme rhetoric (delivered with a warm smile of course) the new Mayor just doesn’t have that kind of juice. Our system, for all its faults, has never concentrated absolute power into a single pair of human hands. Rather it is filled with checks and balances. The Mayor, like our President, will find his ideas crashing against America’s institutions and the rule of law.

Will the Mayor destroy New York?

No. No single man holds the power to do so, no matter what position he might hold. (If you will allow me to forget about nuclear weapons, just for a second, for the sake of argument.)

But, undoubtedly he will harm it. He will make it a poorer city than it is today. A city where in the future ordinary citizens will have to work harder to make ends meet than they do today. A city less vibrant, home to a less diverse and less exciting culture. The vast colors of life will slowly fade towards a grey sameness.

How can we know this?

By simply taking a quick glance at history. The Mayor’s smile may be warm, and he may promise collectivism to be warm, but by peering at any place that has adopted collectivism we can see that the promises of warmth are a lie.

Empty store shelves, coldness, a loss of individual liberty, and state sanctioned mass slaughter have always been the result of collectivism coming to power.

The people of the United States know this. It hasn’t been that many decades since the Soviet Union fell in spectacular fashion. Communist Cuba today is nearly starving, just a few miles from our shores. We all understand, because we have seen it, that multitudes living under collectivist rule are willing to risk their very lives to escape.

So why did the people of New York, and frankly Seattle, vote for this insanity?

That is what our society had better figure out, and quickly, if we hope to avoid a dystopian and grey future. A future of empty store shelves, deaths in modernized gulags, and without hope that anything will ever be better again.

We must put artificial divisions and differences aside so that we may work together towards a shared goal of leaving a better United States to those who come after us than the United States of the past. Only in this way can the American Dream continue. Only in this way can our children lead better lives than ourselves.

Not by importing the failed and foreign political and economic philosophies of the past.