by Roger Kimball
New York flirts with a familiar disaster as Zohran Mamdani rides Rousseauvian rhetoric toward the same ruinous script that doomed revolutions past.
As the world waits for New York’s first Islamo-Communist mayor—hailed alike by the overtly malicious and the terminally stupefied—it may be worth stepping back to ask what the advent of Zohran Mamdani, the pampered 34-year-old rich kid who was born in Uganda, tells us about the decay of liberalism.
In many ways, Mamdani—who, as I write this, is a comfortable 10-15 points ahead in the polls—is just the latest avatar of the AOC-Ilhan Omar wing of the Democratic party. He loves talking about (re)distributing the wealth of others, defunding the police, arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, and penalizing “landlords,” which last is just one of his many code words for Jews.
But haven’t you seen this play before? Don’t we know how it ends? Yes, we have, and yes, we do. It ends badly.
Remember the intoxication that greeted the French Revolution in 1789 or the Russian Revolution in 1917. At first, it was all “what bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.” But the bliss quickly soured and turned rancid.
Mamdani does not quote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. However, his utopian politics owe a great deal to Rousseau’s hothouse sentimentalities—and their more somber incarnation in the theories of his disciple Karl Marx. For more than two centuries, Rousseau’s mesmerizing rhetoric has provided despots of all kinds with a means of promoting conformity while ostensibly praising freedom. It is a neat trick. Words like “freedom” and “virtue” were ever on Rousseau’s lips.
But freedom for him was a chilly abstraction; it applied to mankind as an idea, not to individual men. “I think I know man,” Rousseau sadly observed near the end of his life, “but as for men, I know them not.” In the Confessions, he claimed to be “drunk on virtue.” And indeed, it turned out that “virtue” for Rousseau had nothing to do with acting in a certain way toward others. On the contrary, the criterion of virtue was his subjective feeling of goodness. For Rousseau, as for the countercultural radicals who followed him, “feeling good about yourself” was synonymous with moral rectitude. Actually behaving well was irrelevant if not, indeed, a sign of “inauthenticity” because it suggested a concern for conventional approval. Virtue in this Rousseauvian sense is scarcely distinguishable from moral intoxication.
Translated into the political sphere, Rousseau’s ideas about freedom and virtue are a recipe for totalitarianism. “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people,” Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract, “must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature… of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”
As the philosopher Roger Scruton observed in an essay on the French Revolution, “the revolutionary consciousness lives by abstract ideas and regards people as the material upon which to conduct its intellectual experiments.” Man is “born free,” Rousseau famously wrote, but is “everywhere in chains.” Alas, most men did not, according to him, truly understand the nature or extent of their servitude. It was his job to enlighten them—to force them, as he put it in one chilling epithet, to be free.
Such “freedom” is accomplished, Rousseau thought, by bringing individual wills into conformity with what he called the “general will”—surely one of the most tyrannical political principles ever enunciated. “If you would have the general will accomplished,” he wrote, “bring all the particular wills into conformity with it; in other words, as virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills, establish the reign of virtue.”
Establishing the reign of virtue is no easy task, as Rousseau’s avid disciple Maximilien Robespierre discovered to his chagrin. All those “particular wills”—i.e., individual men and women with diverse aims and desires—are so recalcitrant and ungrateful for one’s efforts to make them virtuous. Still, one does what one can to convince them to conform. And the guillotine, of course, is a great expedient.
Robespierre was no political philosopher, but he understood the nature of Rousseau’s idea of virtue with startling clarity, as he showed when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is a remark worthy of Lenin and a grim foreshadowing of the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that informed a great deal of radicalism since the 1960s.
I mention Rousseau here because, acknowledged or not, he is an important intellectual and moral grandfather of so much of the radicalism that speaks through political mouthpieces like Zohran Mamdani.
The Left loves Mamdani partly for what he says—free bus fare, no cops, and the endless extension of rent control. But they love him too for his manner and self-presentation. Like Barack Obama, he is a certifiable exotic: African, Muslim, and never too shy to weep when he recalls how mean (white) New Yorkers have been to people of his tribe. He said that his aunt was too scared to wear her hijab on the New York subway because of “Islamophobia,” but neglected to mention the 3000 New Yorkers who would not be riding any subway because they were killed on 9/11 by Muslim fanatics.
Here’s a prediction: Mamdani will, in short order, drive New York into the slough of economic and social immiseration that always follows the institution of socialist policies. The Mamdani candy dispenser will push the city toward bankruptcy. His “eat the rich” attitude will precipitate an aggressive flight of wealthy taxpayers, making the city’s economic prospects even more dire. Crime will soar, and in place of the broken-windows policing, the city will have an abundance of broken windows. As the anomie expands, Mamdani will need to find someone to blame. Whites in general will attract his notice, but Mamdani’s ill-concealed anti-Semitism will soon fix upon the Jews.
As I said, we’ve seen this movie before. It’s discouraging to think that we have to sit through yet another rerun.
Roger Kimballl is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/02/new-york-reruns-what-mamdani-means-for-new-york/
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