I must admit, the rise of the “democratic socialists” in left-leaning enclaves of America has fascinated me. The penchant of humans to endlessly repeat our dumbassery — and our persistence in championing its cause — is amazing.
H.L. Mencken was right that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I’ve written many times how Hayek noted, “Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable but that to strive for it produces something utterly different — the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.’”
It seems to be reaching a crescendo of the current cycle with the likely election of an outright communist, Zohran Mamdani, as mayor of New York City. If the Ugandan-born politician is successful, as the polls predict, it will conclusively prove that Hayek was right: “democratic socialism” cannot exist, and democratic socialists are nothing more than communists with better PR.
When attempts at coerced collectivism — socialism, Marxism, or global communism — inevitably collapse, it’s only a matter of time before the next generation rediscovers the ruins and declares, “We’ll get it right this time.” The corpses aren’t even cold in the historical record before the same utopian impulse reemerges, rebranded with new slogans and fresh naivety. Rudyard Kipling captured this recurring madness perfectly when he wrote, “The burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.” It is, it seems, the natural progression of human nature to forget pain, to romanticize failure, and to believe oneself clever enough to outwit both history and human nature.
I suppose human nature is responsible for the lather-rinse-repeat retrying of communism, something that has never made sense to me, especially when it comes to forcing a system on the world from which history has proven only a minority will ever benefit — the ruling class, the party elite, or the ideological priesthood. The rest, inevitably, are left poorer, more fearful, and less free. What continues to baffle me is the assumption that human nature can be rewritten like software code. How can people imagine they can scale up altruism across an entire population by decree? To implement any collectivist system on a large scale requires force — first to take, then to keep, and finally to silence.
The contradiction at the heart of communism has always been this: it promises freedom from responsibility and consequence, which seduces the weak of mind and soul, but it can only be sustained through force, which crushes both freedom and conscience. When those two realities meet — seduction and coercion — they annihilate each other. What’s left is the gray, lifeless wreckage of a society that has traded liberty for equality and wound up with nothing but shared misery.
While the economic failures of collectivism are obvious — the shortages, the inefficiency, the bureaucratic rot — I think its fatal blow comes from something deeper and far more ignored: the spiritual dimension. Humans are flawed from the beginning; that imperfection is what makes us human. One of our most persistent flaws is the conflict between wanting freedom for ourselves and power over others. We are born with what seems to be a moral switch that toggles between good and evil. Life, in many ways, is the struggle to keep that switch in the “good” position, though even in pursuit of what we believe is good, some will flip that switch without realizing it.
C.S. Lewis, in his essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” put this phenomenon into terrifying clarity: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” There is something especially dangerous about people who do evil while believing they are doing good; their certainty makes them impervious to reason and immune to guilt.
I prefer what journalist and philosopher Isabel Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine: “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people… deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.” That insight might explain every revolution that devoured its children, every purge justified as “for the people,” every tyranny draped in moral purpose.
In the end, coerced collectivism always fails — not only because it misunderstands economics, but because it misunderstands man. You cannot build a perfect society out of imperfect beings by threatening them into virtue. You cannot redeem humanity through control. The switch will always flip back.
