Why I Support Zohran | The American Spectator

No, I am not a socialist, despite having been on the Yale Law School faculty for most of my career.  But nonetheless, I favor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed “democratic socialist” — and according to President Trump, an outright “communist” — in the upcoming mayoral race in New York City.

The reason is simple but not obvious: let’s call it “the vaccination effect.” Live virus vaccines prevent disease by giving a person a mild case of a disease that stimulates their body’s immune system to produce antibodies to fight off a more virulent case in the future. Infecting New York with Mamdani-ism may inoculate the rest of the country against a bad bout of socialism in the future.

One of the earliest examples of the vaccination effect occurred when some unknown genius noticed that people who got cow pox from milking infected cows did not contract a related disease, smallpox, which was more serious and often fatal.  This led a famous scientist, Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology in the West, to invent vaccination. However, the practice of intentionally injecting “fresh matter taken from a ripe pustule of some person who suffered from smallpox” under the skin on the arms or legs of a nonimmune person to give them a mild case and prevent a more serious one went back hundreds of years in other cultures.  (True, today we also use inactivated virus and messenger RNA vaccines that pose less risk of developing the disease in question, but I digress.)

Today in the United States, we need a vaccine against the creeping socialism that is gradually infecting our culture. The slow decline into socialism has been going on at least since James Burnham wrote Suicide of the West in 1964. The elections of Donald J. Trump are, of course, a hopeful counter-indication, but today, Marxist ideas are still infecting large portions of our educational system and mass media. Often, most of us don’t even recognize the subtle Marxist ideas that surround us. (RELATED: Mamdani Markets Envy to Sell a Marxist Utopia)

For example, a few years ago I attended a conference at which a prominent conservative federal judge despaired that law students had to borrow money to attend law school because this might force them to go to work in private law firms for a few years to pay off their debt; what they “really wanted to do” (according to her) was to go into “public interest work” that paid less. She was blissfully unaware that her comment echoed one of the primary critiques of capitalism by Karl Marx, “alienation”: the market channels people into doing their highest and best use economically rather than supporting their desire to become poets and artists, which they might consider to be a more satisfying life. (If you detect a little bitterness, yes: I would have preferred to have been a poet rather than a lawyer and law professor.)

Marx condemned capitalism as a system that alienates the masses. … [M]arket forces, not workers, control things. … Work, he said, becomes degrading, monotonous, and suitable for machines rather than for free, creative people. In the end, people themselves become objects — robotlike mechanisms that have lost touch with human nature, that make decisions based on cold profit-and-loss considerations, with little concern for human worth and need. Marx concluded that capitalism blocks our capacity to create our own humane society.

The good judge didn’t even know she was spouting Marxist dogma. Perhaps this is what Khrushchev had in mind when he reportedly said to Ezra Taft Benson

You Americans are so gullible. No you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and you find you already have communism.

Socialism sounds good with all that “to each according to need” stuff, but it doesn’t work in practice. Ask someone from Venezuela. In the 1950s, Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world, right up there with the U.S., New Zealand, and Switzerland. Today, 90 percent of its people live in poverty. What happened? According to most experts, Venezuela was ruined by bad government policies. “The regimes of Presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro decimated the country through ‘relentless class warfare and government intervention in the economy.’” According to the authors of the policy brief cited above, the example of Venezuela “serves as a reminder of the dangers of socialism for the rest of the world.”

It should do so alright, but it doesn’t, and that’s why we need a little dose of the bad stuff at home to vaccinate us against something even worse in the future. The problem is that many voters today don’t know about the failed experiments in socialism in Venezuela — and in Russia, East Germany, and Cuba.  Either they aren’t paying attention, or they were too young and never learned about the failures of socialism in school. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Smoke and Mirrors)

Enter Mamdani. Yes, if elected, he will ruin New York City, at least temporarily. There will be even worse housing shortages, and lots of employers and rich people who pay taxes will flee. Crime will mushroom if, as Mamdani promises, police are replaced by social workers. That’s the point. Hopefully, that will be an object lesson on the dangers of socialism for the rest of the country. (RELATED: Mamdani’s Makeover)

“That which does not kill us, makes us stronger,” wrote Nietzsche. That’s the vaccination effect in action.  To extend the MAGA movement beyond Trump’s second term, we could use a good vaccination against socialism about now.

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