Ben BayerZohran Mamdani caused a stir in his New Year’s Day inauguration speech, when he proclaimed, “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Commentators immediately noted that it sounded like something straight out of a speech by an Ayn Rand villain. It was.
But why is a prominent politician so willing to sound like some people’s idea of a villain?
As many have noted, the only warmth collectivism ever generated came from the torrents of blood unleashed by communist regimes in the 20th century. Is Mamdani just counting on the historical ignorance of his fan base?
Ignorance might be a factor, but it can’t be the full story, especially given the strong support Mamdani received from highly educated Manhattan voters. Educated socialists know about the Soviet slaughter, but respond that it wasn’t “real socialism.” But then what motivates educated people to engage in such mental gymnastics to evade the evil their own political ideas have wrought?
A clue to the answer is that sympathy for collectivism is much wider than today’s socialist activists.
Mamdani has actually done us a favor: he’s used the most accurate name for his ideology and for the idea that’s taken more seriously in both of today’s political camps. “Collectivism” is the broad category that covers socialism, fascism, and any other system that sacrifices the individual to some group.
Nazi Germany sacrificed millions of Jews and other minorities to the alleged master race. The Soviet Union sacrificed millions more bourgeoisie, kulaks, and dissidents for the sake of the working class. The essence of the evil of these regimes is that both denied the existence and value of the individual, savagely violating the rights of millions of individuals to their property, their liberty, and their lives.
Though Mamdani speaks as though his policies would break with ubiquitous free market individualist system, there’s little respect left today for individualism anywhere in politics. Both Democratic and Republican politicians have increasingly restricted the free market for decades, and voters have cheered them on.
The widespread rejection of individualist free market policies is well documented in Ruchir Sharma’s What Went Wrong with Capitalism. In the last fifty years, every American administration has extended the regulatory state, bailout culture, and deficit spending to fund collectivist “safety net” schemes and hire more government workers. Revealingly, the American welfare state is second only to the French in terms of total expenditures (when you include all transfer payments). Republicans and Democrats alike agree that it takes a village of bureaucrats to raise a child.
The Trump administration has doubled down on its own form of nationalist collectivism, restricting international free trade in the name of the American working class. No wonder Mamdani and Trump hit it off in their Oval Office meeting. Mamdani knows, as he mentioned in his speech, that many 2024 Trump voters voted for Mamdani in 2025.
As today’s politicians advance increasingly collectivist policies, activists have shown renewed interest in the most consistent forms of collectivism, both socialist and fascist. Recent scandals in conservative circles have highlighted the growing popularity of racist ideas, from Young Republican text messages joking about slavery and gas chambers to podcasters like Tucker Carlson respectfully interviewing Hitler sympathizers and Holocaust deniers. Again it’s not just historical ignorance. They know the historical claims but are eager to gin up “revisionist” histories to whitewash the impact of their ideas.
When collectivism is advancing in every political camp (not just among New York socialists), it can’t just be youthful naivete or ignorance that explains it. It has to be something culture-wide. And when activists try to reinterpret history to save their ideals from being discredited, we should consider blaming their deepest ideals.
Ayn Rand’s villains are memorable because they are consistent embodiments of deeply villainous ideals. And the underlying ideal they embody is not socialism or fascism, or even collectivism as such, but the dominant cultural dogma that empowers all calls to sacrifice the individual to the collective: the idea that self-sacrifice for any “greater good,” whether the poor or family or God, is noble. Today Republicans and Democrats alike agree that “service is the rent we pay for living.”
As long as people regard self-sacrifice as the essence of morality, they’ll resonate with “warmth” for the collectivist “ideal.” As long as they hold that dogma as basically an item of religious faith, they’ll refuse to believe that criminal regimes of the past could possibly have been living in accordance with their own moral ideal.
The most important ignorance that accounts for the trend toward collectivism is not historical ignorance, but ignorance of an alternative approach to morality. Yet this is exactly what Ayn Rand formulated in her ideal of individualism, which was neither “rugged” nor “frigid.”
In her essay “Textbook of Americanism,” she wrote: “Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: ‘I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.’ An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man — his own and those of others. . . . An individualist is one who thinks ‘I will not sacrifice myself to anyone — nor sacrifice anyone to myself.’” To see what an individualist morality looks like in practice, readers should pay attention not only to Ayn Rand’s villains who oppose it but especially to her heroes, who exemplify it. Pick up The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged and, like a true individualist, see for yourself.
Image Credit: JASON ALPERT-WISNIA / AFP/ via Getty Images
Ricardo Pinto
NI Staff
