Like a contagious disease, socialism comes roaring back when people have forgotten the terrible damage it did the last time it ravaged a society.
This time, it’s Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s startling victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary that has put the dreaded term back in the headlines.
For a former citizen of the Soviet Union like me, Mamdani’s promises of city-run grocery stores and his attacks on the affluent members of the city are as familiar as his polished antisemitism.
I’ve been a proud New Yorker since I was exiled from Putin’s Russia for my pro-democracy activities in 2013, and I never expected to hear the socialist siren song at such volume in my adopted home.
Back in the USSR? No thanks.
Mamdani is too slick and savvy to hoist the Jacobin Jolly Roger in full view, of course. The American immune system against the socialist infection has waned since the end of the Cold War, but until now it has mostly remained on the fringes.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders can rile up an anti-corporate crowd with the best of them, and his true-believer idealism has an honored place on the political spectrum, even from me. Sanders’ views put him on the far left, but he works within the system, constrained by the stodgy Senate, and that’s how his constituents like it.
An executive position like the mayor of New York City is a very different proposition.
NYC has a population of more than 8 million and an economy that would put it in the top 20 countries in the world. Electing an NYC mayor who doesn’t believe in capitalism is like appointing a Secretary of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in vaccines.
Sorry, bad example.
Churchill said that a nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. The amount of damage even mild socialist policies could do in a short time cannot be underestimated — and simply normalizing them is a serious threat.
The billionaires that Mamdani wants to get rid of may oblige him, and red states with fewer regulations are already luring blue state businesses.
Be wary of anyone who says he wants to get rid of the poor but mostly talks about getting rid of the rich. The latter never leads to the former.
If you want more evidence against socialism beyond my own experience and thoughts, just look up every time it’s been tried anywhere.
Anyone who responds with tales of the “socialist” paradises of Northern Europe should first ask someone from Sweden or Denmark. These prosperous free-market countries have robust welfare states and relatively high taxation, but they are as socialist as Milton Friedman.
Like every other rich country, they got that way thanks to good old-fashioned capitalism, and they’d like to keep it that way.
Europe has also spent decades benefiting from American tech innovation investment and the US military security umbrella.
I wouldn’t say they are complete freeloaders, but America doesn’t have that option. Coasting on the achievements of others isn’t how the American century came about.
I’m hardly against regulations and government services, let alone taxes. There are always elements where private interests are inappropriate to determine the public good.
For inspiration I turn to a New York president — Roosevelt, but not Franklin Delano. FDR’s New Deal went a little far for someone as phobic about government power as I am, but at least he was dealing with a real emergency, the Great Depression. (I favor the scholarship that posits it was World War II, not the New Deal, that rescued the US economy.)
No, my guiding light is Teddy Roosevelt, who busted the trusts and railed against “the preachers of an unrestricted individualism.”
He wanted to level the playing field, not fix the results of the match. Not everyone deserves success, but everyone deserves a chance to succeed.
The unequal prosperity of capitalism is still far superior to the equal misery of socialism.
Rising inequality is a crisis; the question is how to deal with it. Putting the heavy hand of the state on the economy of the greatest city in the greatest country in the world would be a grievous mistake.
Innovation and evolution require failure, something that can never be centrally planned.
I’m well aware that Mamdani isn’t planning to turn City Hall into a Soviet-style communist totalitarian regime. He may be badly misguided, but he’s not going to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs for just one meal.
The problem with “socialism lite” is that it’s never perfect, but socialists are always very confident that if you give them just a little more power, it will be.
Power given to the government is never returned without a fight. I speak from experience when I say start fighting now.
Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative and the former world chess champion.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
