The Socialist Order … It’s Not Pretty | The American Spectator

“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” That is how Vladimir Lenin began his speech to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on November 8, 1917. Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani in his victory speech quoted not Lenin but Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist presidential candidate, but like Lenin he outlined his vision of a socialist order for New York. “The future,” Mamdani said, “is in our hands.” The workers — the proletariat — will wield political power. “[W]e insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us,” he continued, “[n]ow it is something that we do.” His election, he told his crowd of supporters, ushers in a “new age.” And that new age is the socialist order.

It is noteworthy that most, if not all, of New York’s leading Democratic Party politicians supported Mamdani’s campaign. So did former President Barack Obama, whose victory speech in 2008 proclaimed “This is our moment. This is our time,” and who before the election promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Obama and Mamdani have much in common, including an African-Muslim heritage, an elite education, and a background in community activism. Obama as president, however, quietly, cautiously attempted to fundamentally transform America — and largely succeeded. Under his presidency and Biden’s presidency (largely staffed with Obama appointees), the far left completed their takeover of America’s major institutions and implemented a woke, DEI agenda that, despite President Trump’s best efforts, is still with us.

We know what Lenin’s socialist order meant for Russians and the world — secret police, political repression, state-induced famines, show trials, political purges, Gulags. The so-called socialist workers’ state enslaved workers. Lenin was an intellectual who had nothing in common with the working class, yet he claimed to speak for them and to govern for them even while he oppressed them. Mamdani, too, is an intellectual who has nothing in common with working class New Yorkers, yet he, too, claims he will wield power on their behalf. In his victory speech, Mamdani pledged to fight for “Yemeni bodega owners,” “Mexican abuelas,” “Senegalese taxi drivers,” “Uzbek nurses,” “Trinidadian cooks,” and “Ethiopian aunties.” The socialist anthem, after all, says, “The international shall be the human race.”

Lenin’s socialist order was in reality the dictatorship of the proletariat. Karl Marx predicted that the dictatorship would end when the classless society emerged, but Lenin and his Bolsheviks had no intention of establishing a classless society. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be the ruling class — the nomenklatura that exercises political power and enjoys privileges denied to other classes. The socialists of the Democratic Party — Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders and, yes, Barack Obama — are ideological soulmates of Lenin. They, too, want to construct a socialist order.

The Democratic Party socialists here don’t use all of the terror tactics of the Bolsheviks. But they do use the coercive powers of government and their control of institutions to attempt to impose their will on the country. The Obama-Biden governments used the administrative or “deep” state and lawfare to attack their political opposition, while some far-left state and local officials followed suit. News reports indicate that their lawfare is under scrutiny by a grand jury in Florida.

Socialism is one of the great evils that emerged in the 20th century, as in country after country the state assumed more and more power. The American political philosopher James Burnham, who flirted with socialism in the 1930s, saw the emergence of a new ruling class that ushered in what he called the “managerial revolution” which in all countries expanded the “scope of activities of the state” and consequently the power of governments to control the “most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society.” The managers he predicted, would try “to increase their relative power and privilege” over the citizens they rule.

The great British historian Paul Johnson made the growth of state power one of the major themes of his masterful history of the 20th century, Modern Times. Johnson noted “the impressive speed with which the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies and for the exercise of despotic power over its own citizens.” Socialists like Lenin, he wrote, had an “unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.”

We have seen what attempts at construction of the socialist order can do to our country during the Obama and Biden presidencies. We will now see what attempts at construction of the socialist order will do to New York. It won’t be pretty.

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