Photo by Bingjiefu He. CC BY-SA 4.0.
After winning the New York City mayoral election in November, newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani made a particularly disturbing statement about government’s capacity to solve every problem and address every concern. This remark, and many more, drew the ire of many Americans. It echoes a much earlier sentiment attributed to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini describing the totalitarian idea “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” It’s a far cry from a much more familiar quote by President Ronald Reagan: that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”
However, a recent poll from YouGov and The Economist found that nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 29 express a favorable view of socialism. This age demographic played a significant role in the mayoral race’s outcome. As we discussed in an earlier broadcast, one of the key reasons for this trend is a gap in historical education. Younger generations have been taught all about the problems of capitalism, but very little about the historical tragedies of socialist regimes. There is little coverage of why so many fled those communism hellscapes, and how the outcomes of total state control over industry and agriculture led to episodes of mass starvation.
Instead, young people in American public education are taught all about the glories of socialism’s system of shared wealth and cooperative values. The reality is that this is never how socialist systems operate in practice. Coercion and violence is always involved when the state moves to centrally plan society. Political thinker Hannah Arendt explains well that these broad social planning schemes assume that a society’s problems can be solved by simply reorganizing power and removing obstacles to state authority. The problem is this theoretical framework depends on a particularly wrong view of human nature — one in which individuals are regard primarily as parts of a collective rather than independent actors with agency and dignity. Ultimate authority in the state will never lead to utopia. It will erode the bedrock American principles of the family and self-government.
Socialism put into practice has always denied economic effectiveness and individual freedom! If you want to be a part of the solution to teach these important historical lessons to our rising generations, join with us at PhyllisSchlafly.com. Contact us at PhyllisSchlafly.com to plug in with an Eagle chapter near you, and join us tomorrow for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
