American Enterprise Institute - AEI
"Every collectivist project begins with promises of warmth, care, and justice. It ends with scarcity, repression, and power concentrated far from the people it claims to serve."
. . ."Collectivism is not a metaphor. It is a governing philosophy with a long and bloody record. In the twentieth century alone, regimes organized around collectivist principles – whether socialist, communist, or their hybrids. – were responsible for the deaths of at least one hundred million people. That figure is not polemics; it is the consensus of serious historians. Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Castro’s Cuba, Kim’s North Korea, Chávez and Maduro’s Venezuela – the list is not obscure, and the outcomes are not ambiguous.
"When Mamdani speaks of the “warmth” of collectivism, he is not offering a novel moral insight. He is recycling the oldest fantasy of modern politics: that coercive systems can be redeemed by benevolent intent, and that the concentration of power becomes humane if wrapped in moral language.
"The American constitutional order was built in conscious rejection of that idea. It begins with the premise that individuals possess inherent dignity and moral agency, and that power – especially when centralized – requires limits, friction, and accountability. Liberty was never understood as isolation from others, but as the precondition for moral responsibility within a plural society. That framework is not cold. It is sober – and hard-earned.
"Mamdani’s formulation relies on a false dichotomy as crude as Ayn Rand’s, just inverted. Individualism is caricatured as selfish, antisocial, and morally barren. Collectivism is romanticized as humane, solidaristic, and just. Neither caricature survives contact with reality.
"American individualism has never meant atomized isolation. It has always existed within a dense web of mediating institutions: families, religious congregations, unions, charities, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations. Markets operate within this moral ecosystem. They are not a substitute for community; they are a mechanism that allows diverse communities to flourish without coercion. Calling this tradition “rugged individualism” is not analysis. It is a smear.
"By contrast, collectivism does not generate warmth. It centralizes responsibility—and in doing so drains moral life of choice, obligation, and meaning. Care becomes bureaucratic. Solidarity becomes mandatory. Dissent becomes selfishness. The individual is treated not as a moral agent, but as raw material for a collective project.
"This is not abstract theory. It is the lived experience of societies that have subordinated the person to the collective in the name of justice or equality.
"Defenders of Mamdani’s rhetoric will inevitably gesture toward Scandinavia. But the Nordic countries are not collectivist societies in the ideological sense Mamdani invokes. They are market economies with strong property rights, high levels of social trust, robust civil society, and cultural norms that long predate their welfare states. They succeed not because they rejected individualism, but because they rely on it – tempered by social cohesion that cannot be legislated into existence." . . . More warmth here...
