“Socialism,” said the British free speech campaigner Lord Young, “Always begins with a universal vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with people having to eat their own pets.” While exaggerated, the point stands — socialism never delivers what it promises. Yet now, the world capital of capitalism is flirting with that catastrophe. The Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York has been won by an avowed socialist: Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani doesn’t hide his socialism. It’s all over his campaign website, the socialist magazine Jacobin hails him as one of their own, and he is comfortable with socialist shibboleths like “seize the means of production.” Despite espousing a political philosophy that has seen little electoral success outside of Vermont in recent years, the Democratic voters of the New York City primary swung to him in large numbers as the campaign closed, and he won with a plurality of the vote (though the final ranked choice tally saw him him win a majority).
Among Mamdani’s policies are a rent freeze, shifting the burden of taxation to “richer and whiter neighborhoods,” and city-run grocery stores, one per borough. These are not, shall we say, policies with a stunning track record of success. Countless cities have tried rent control, all with the same inevitable results — supply dries up, properties fall into disrepair, and families are unable to find homes. As the Swedish socialist economist Assar Lindbeck summarized, perhaps understating the problem, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”
Leaving aside the question of whether taxing “whiter” neighborhoods more can possibly be constitutional, soaking the rich doesn’t work either, as richer people can simply relocate to less punitive jurisdictions. It’s already happening, and Mamdani’s policies will simply exacerbate the “brain drain.” Of course, with fewer entrepreneurs and high-earning professionals, New York will cease to be the crossroads of the world and may well turn into Detroit-on-the-Hudson.
As for city-run stores, municipalities like Erie, Kansas, have been unable to keep the lights on, with customers preferring other ways to get their groceries. Yet New York City owning grocery stores may be more like a nation owning them than a rural township. There the prospects are even worse. Venezuela may be an extreme example, with shortages and bureaucracy making grocery shopping a nightmare, but you don’t even have to imagine Latin American levels of corruption to realize the problems involved. While the stores may be rent- and tax-free, they will still have to compete against the economies of scale, efficient supply lines, and simple know-how of the established grocery chains.
All this is predictable and indeed is a major reason why mainstream economics exists. Yet people still fall for the promises. Why?
In 2020, when it seemed plausible that Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination for President on a socialist platform, I wrote a book called The Socialist Temptation that attempted to answer this question.
My answer was that political communication is at heart about values, not about policy analysis. If the politician can connect with a voter at the level of their motivating values, then they have won the battle, and the most vigorous political debates are between competing values.
One of the reasons why socialism never seems to die is that it plays a very good game at connecting with people at the values level. In America, research suggests that there are three main values groups active in politics. While political scientists have fancier names for these groups, I summarize those groups as egalitarians, whose motivating value is fairness, libertarians, whose motivating value is freedom, and traditionalists, whose motivating value is community, stability, and order. (There is a fourth value group, fatalists, whose value is essentially survival, but they tend not to vote.)
Socialism has a story to tell all these groups. It obviously speaks to egalitarians, proposing a more equal society where no one can exploit anyone. Yet it also speaks to libertarians, as it says that to be truly free you must have certain basic needs met, and the state can do this (any so-called freedom that doesn’t do so is illusory). Moreover, it speaks to traditionalists, conjuring up an image of a society where everyone is pulling for everyone else, with good jobs that pay the working man and woman a living wage.
Of course, these promises don’t stand up when tested. Socialism relies on bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats quickly become a new ruling class. Those bureaucrats also restrict freedom with rules, in ways ranging from those of Harrison Bergeron all the way to 1984. Communities, meanwhile, are set against each other as favored identity groups are privileged, while others pay for the supposed sins of their ancestors. Socialism betrays American values every chance it gets.
Yet the socialists have developed a get-out-of-jail card for this objection. As Kristian Niemietz of London’s Institute of Economic Affairs puts it, all attempts at socialism follow the same three-part pattern of failure and excuse.
First, there is the honeymoon, where the glorious ascent of workers’ or popular control is hailed; at last, we have real socialism! It works for a while. Then reality starts to bite, and the wheels start to come off as socialism’s inherent contradictions work against each other. Socialists blame this on “wreckers,” saboteurs, the CIA, or any convenient boogeyman, foreign or domestic. If in doubt, ask “what about?” and suggest that the failing state is still better than capitalism or any other alternative system.
Finally, when all comes to ruin and people are indeed reduced to eating their own pets, we hear the refrain, “That wasn’t real socialism!” The failure is blamed on a formerly beloved leader straying from the true path, or the regime’s murderous tendencies are taken as evidence that it could never have been socialism, because socialism is all about that universal vision for the brotherhood of man.
And so, from the ashes of “not real socialism,” a new generation rises again, promising the same thing and expecting different results.
There are other explanations posited for socialism’s Dracula-like tendency to rise from the grave. A common one is that young people were hit hard by the financial crisis and so unable to get on the property ladder, meaning they have no capital to attract them to capitalism, and turn instead to the most obvious alternative.
Yet this isn’t quite the case. Research shows that Millennials, the ones so badly affected by the crisis, are richer in real terms than baby boomers were at the same age, and only slightly behind Gen X. Even if it were true, the message that socialism would be a better system in these circumstances is still one that speaks at the values level, primarily to the egalitarian value.
Then there is the argument that young people are more susceptible to socialism. The idea, often misattributed to Winston Churchill, is “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” This rings true as young people are even more motivated by values than older people. As I examined in the book, however, the American education system has been manipulated to valorize socialism, making it even more likely that young people with a long education will be sympathetic to socialism. And so it proved in New York.
This is personal to me. I grew up in a Britain that had suffered several decades of democratic socialism. Socialist labor unions forced me to do my homework by candlelight. Nationalized stores (thankfully not grocery stores) lacked choice and imposed a dreariness on Britain that was only amplified by the weather. High taxes led even the Beatles to complain about the Taxman taking 19 parts of their wealth to every one he left them. Council estates where my friends lived may have provided low-rent housing, but they were little better than slums.
Gotham is not Caracas. But if New Yorkers keep choosing the path of dreams over freedom, they may learn the same hard lessons. For the sake of the city—and its cats—I hope they wake up in time.