NEW YORK PARTIED LIKE IT WAS 1975. IN EAST BERLIN:
The lack of food is a sneak preview for the empty shelves of the city-owned grocery stores.
— Joel Kleinbaum (@PostWokePNW) January 1, 2026
Mamdani had a CASH BAR at his victory party. If you can’t get a free vodka from this guy something tells me the free food and buses ain’t coming. Congrats, suckers.
— Jimmy Failla (@jimmyfailla) November 5, 2025
I guess this is part of that whole “warmth of collectivism” vibe:
Related: Jonah Goldberg: Collectivism, Warmed Over.
When I first heard Mamdani refer to the “warmth of collectivism,” I immediately thought of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag: A History. In one scene, she describes how a slave-laborer fell in the snow from exhaustion. The other slaves—and they were slaves, owned by the state, as Chamberlin would put it—rushed to strip the fallen man’s clothes and belongings. The dying man’s last words were, “It’s so cold.”
Collectivization under Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” led to millions more Chinese famine deaths from 1959 to 1961—from a lowball estimate of 20 million to a high of 45 million.
Now, I don’t for a moment think Mamdani has anything like that in mind. Moreover, even if he did, nothing like that can be orchestrated from New York’s City Hall.
But here is what I do think is interesting and worrisome about his use of the term “collectivism.” I can only think of three possibilities for it: 1) Mamdani is ignorant of the term’s historically grounded connotation, 2) he knows it and doesn’t care, or 3) he knows it and does care.
Under the second and third options, he could be trying to reclaim the positive connotation of collectivism—a connotation it has not had for at least a century. Or he could be trying to troll people—like me—into attacking him and overreacting to a word his fans have no problem with.
I suppose there’s a fourth possibility. He has a bad speechwriter—or is one—and just made a stupid, lazy mistake. After all, he could have used “community,” “communal,” “solidarity,” “cooperation,” “shared sacrifice,” or some such treacle.
But this mistake is essentially no different than ignorance. That it didn’t stand out to him is a form of ignorance. After all, if the draft referred to the warmth of “Stalinism” or “National Socialism,” Mamdani would certainly have said, “Whoa, we can’t say that. Let’s talk about the ‘warmth of community’ instead.”
Mamdani’s fan club were certainly choosing that fourth option yesterday:
We are one day in and already at the "good tsar, bad boyars" stage. pic.twitter.com/quQeT6voXq
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) January 2, 2026