He proclaimed that New York, under his tenure “will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
Mamdani’s audience was probably framing that question in terms of material needs and wants.
Our own Albin saw something else in that boast. Another kind of framing.
A sad fact of history has been the shocking frequency with which the excited fires of revolutionary fervor burn down, and those who once embraced it find themsleves left with the cold comfort of ashes in a state where speaking out against the ‘collective wisdom’ of an all-powerful party leadership brands you as an ‘enemy of the cause’ before it lands you forgotten in the basement of some featureless building at best, or dumped unceremoniously into a hole at worst.
But don’t worry. THIS collectivism has our best interests at heart, even if it has to force those best interests down a few unwilling throats.
(It has ever been thus.)
